KEY POINTS

  • Living Ships are hatched via the Starbirth quest
  • Players need a Void Egg to hatch their Living Ship
  • Void Eggs are bought from the Quicksilver merchant 

Living Ships, as implied by their names, are organic starships that offer players some new and interesting ways to travel. Unlike their mechanical counterparts, Living Ships have more tech slots than usual, but they have low shields.

Most Living Ship upgrades focus on increasing damage output and Hyperdrive efficiency, making them somewhat of a hybrid class between fighters and explorers.

Getting a Living Ship is slightly more complicated than a regular starship or freighter acquisition. Here’s a short guide detailing all of the necessary steps.

Where to Get Living Ships

Players need to push through the game’s early stages and reach the Space Anomaly, typically encountered after installing a Hyperdrive onto their first starship.

Enter the Anomaly and purchase a Void Egg from the Quicksilver Synthesis Companion. This will start the Starbirth quest, asking the player take care of the egg until it hatches into a mature ship.

Quicksilver can only be obtained from daily and weekly Quicksilver missions, random Pulse Engine events and Space Anomaly missions from Nada.

Living Ships are biological, space-faring lifeforms that can be hatched and piloted by players - No Man's Sky
Living Ships are biological, space-faring lifeforms that can be hatched and piloted by players Hello Games

The quest will take players to several locations where they have to collect Living Ship parts. These parts need to be incubated to mature, which can take up to 24 hours to complete. The parts are as follows:

  • Heart Node
  • Neural Stem
  • Hardened Shell
  • Singularity Core
  • Soul Chamber

Among the five parts, the Soul Chamber is the only one that doesn’t need to be incubated. Expect to wait up to four days for each of the remaining parts to fully mature.

After all of the mature versions of these parts are collected, players will need to perform Biogenesis at the location of a procedurally-generated bioship in their current star system. Go to the coordinates and claim the newly-hatched Living Ship.

The stats of the Living Ship are completely random, which means it can be exploited by reloading save files from the point just after claiming the Archived Soul. After stepping through the portal, head to another system via teleporter. Then, board a starship to re-prompt the Biogenesis process. This will generate a new Living Ship based on whatever models are available in the star system.