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No Man’s Sky Experimental Organic ‘Living Ships’ are a Massive Hit

Last Updated September 23, 2020 1:35 PM
Thomas Bardwell
Last Updated September 23, 2020 1:35 PM
  • Yesterday, Hello Games released a new experimental build of No Man’s Sky.
  • Players are coming across in-game oddities including living ships and random space encounters.
  • A full update should land soon.

Are organic ships heading to No Man’s Sky? It sure seems that way based on discoveries made by players in the latest experimental branch.

Late yesterday, Hello Games published a new test build of the game on Steam. The developer generally pushes out these builds ahead of a fully-fledged update to allow players to hunt down any glaring bugs.

No Man’s Sky Experimental Branch

Hello Games released an extensive set of notes  detailing bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and performance updates. Yet, players are stumbling across in-game oddities not mentioned in the notes.

Among them are what appear to be hybrids of starships and living beings. The No Man’s Sky Subreddit is awash with reports  of players coming across these space vessels that resemble living organisms , most notably squids and whales . Players are successfully boarding and flying the ships.

No Man's Sky Players Are Darting Across Space in Living Starships
Source: Reddit 

Aboard these vessels, players can customize them using technology such as pulsing hearts, neural assemblies, and grafted eyes. Their purpose resembles those of traditional No Man’s Sky ships (shields, hyper drives for interstellar travel, pulse drives, weaponry, etc.), but they take on a more biological flavor.

The Mysterious Void Egg

Players are finding these ships after embarking a new quest centered on a mysterious Void Egg.

This ties into multiple tweets from No Man’s Sky creator, Sean Murray, consisting of egg images and emojis. Most recently, Murray tweeted a diagram of a non-descript organism  that bears an uncanny resemblance to the new ships found in-game.

No Man's Sky Players Are Darting Across Space in Living Starships
Source: Twitter 

Murray’s cryptic messages left most stumped but didn’t stop the community from mining the source code for clues. Many settled on the egg being central to a significant story update.

No Man's Sky Players Are Darting Across Space in Living Starships
Source: Reddit 

Alongside players are reporting random encounters and events. Towering organisms resembling jellyfish traveling through space. The ruins of massive monoliths floating amid asteroid clusters . Organisms with spindly, branch-like arms darting out from a circular core marked in-game as ‘Stellar Intelligence.’

Source: Reddit 

The ships and encounters suggest No Man’s Sky’s next update will focus on space, a portion of the game that hasn’t benefited from as much attention from Hello Games in recent times.

As for when we can expect the update to arrive, anywhere from a few days to a week going by past experimental-branch-to-full-release cycles.