No Mans Sky Living Ship Guide: Void Egg and Starbirth Quest Steps

Living Ships are the strangest prizes in No Man's Sky. They're organic, part starship and part creature, and no pilot will ever sell you one. The only way to get your first is to grow it, one body part at a time, across roughly four to six real days. The quest is called Starbirth, it runs on real-world timers, and the actual hard part is just keeping track of weird crafting mats while you wait. Here's the whole path, from the 3,200 Quicksilver egg all the way to hatch day.

Obtaining a Void Egg

The one vendor that sells it

Everything starts on the Space Anomaly. Summon it from anywhere in space, dock, and head to the back area where the Quicksilver Synthesis Companion runs the counter. The Void Egg costs 3,200 Quicksilver, and that's the only source in the game. There's also a decorative fake egg that turns up on infested planets, but that one's junk for this purpose, so make sure you bought the real thing.

The egg just sits dormant in your inventory at first. Nothing happens until you do one specific thing with it, so don't panic when the purchase seems anticlimactic.

Funding 3,200 Quicksilver

Quicksilver trickles in rather than flowing. Nexus missions on the Anomaly pay a few hundred per day - the wiki's math works out to about 400 daily plus a weekend community mission worth 1,800. Run those for around four days from zero and you've got your egg money. It's slow, but it's steady.

Peek at the current expedition rewards before you grind, though. Past expeditions (1 and 6) flat-out awarded Void Eggs as milestone prizes, and old expeditions get re-run now and then. Free egg beats four days of Nexus chores.

Two things to sort out before the timers start

The last leg of this quest runs through a portal, and portals need glyphs. Specifically the first 12 of the 16. If you're missing them, find a Traveller NPC on a space station, pay the 100 nanites to learn their grave location, and touch each grave for one glyph. Knock that out now, while organs are maturing anyway. Hunting glyphs at the finish line is the classic way to stall a quest that's already slow.

The portal address also points into Euclid, the starting galaxy, so ideally run Starbirth before you jump somewhere else. Portals can't cross galaxies.

Kicking off Starbirth

Egg in inventory, fly into space, and pulse. Sooner or later you'll get a space encounter with a strange alien starship, and blue star systems seem to trigger it fastest. Drop out of pulse, answer the communicator, and watch a living ship drift past your cockpit. The egg turns into an Active Void Egg and Starbirth officially begins.

Following Starbirth Signals

The rhythm of every phase

Each phase plays out the same way, which is nice once you've seen one. The egg sings, you pulse in space until the strange ship hails you again, and it marks a star system. Warp there, find the right planet (the egg's description tells you the biome you're hunting), and the mission marker walks you to a Korvax plaque using the Target Sweep scanner on your analysis visor. The plaque wants a crafted organic component. Hand it over and you get a fragile organ that matures on a real-time timer before the next phase unlocks.

No manual coordinate math either. Since the Expeditions update the scanner just sweeps and narrows, so you're never squinting at latitude numbers.

The whole quest at a glance

| Phase | Egg becomes | What you're hunting | Component to craft | Maturing time | |---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | Active Void Egg | haunted terrain, bizarre colours | Consciousness Bridge | 18 - 25.5 hours | | 2 | Stirring Void Egg | extreme barren (dust, fire, ice) | Pulsating Core | 19 - 25 hours | | 3 | Awakened Void Egg | lush paradise, lots of water | Impossible Membrane | 20 - 24 hours | | 4 | Cracking Void Egg | exotic, shifting planet | Seeds of Glass | 18 - 26 hours | | 5 | final state | portal world in Euclid | three Traveller souls | none |

Four of the five phases end in waiting, which is why the whole thing eats the better part of a week.

Waiting without losing your mind

The timers follow the real clock, not hours played, so organs keep maturing while the game is closed. Actual playtime is only a few hours spread across the week. Start the egg the day you decide you want the ship and just live your life in between. (Impatient? The wiki notes you can nudge your system clock forward a day to skip a timer. Works, most of the time.)

Hang onto anything with a weird name, too. Hexite especially is a pain to replace if you bin it - guild envoys and outlaw stations occasionally stock it, but "occasionally" is doing some heavy lifting there. And if you're on Survival, keep fragile organs out of your exosuit when you can, because dying dumps your whole inventory and that includes your half-grown brain-in-a-jar.

Growing Ship Components

Every blueprint gets handed to you exactly when you need it, so there's nothing to buy ahead of time. Still, the common materials are worth stockpiling early. Here's the full shopping list.

| Component | Recipe | The tricky ingredient | |---|---|---| | Consciousness Bridge | 250 Hexite, 80 Pugneum, 1 Korvax Casing | Hexite, from a marked crashed freighter | | Pulsating Core | 250 Liquid Sun, 100 Gold, 80 Mordite | Liquid Sun, mined with the Solar Ray | | Impossible Membrane | 100 Chromatic Metal, 1 Hypnotic Eye, 150 Living Water | the Eye and the Water both have set spots | | Seeds of Glass | 100 Magnetised Ferrite, 100 Fragmented Qualia | Qualia, harvested from living creatures |

Phase 1: Consciousness Bridge

The plaque on the haunted-looking planet teaches you the Consciousness Bridge blueprint and points you at a nearby crashed freighter. Its canisters hold the Hexite you need, so scoop up everything glowing in the wreck. Pugneum drops from destroyed Sentinels if you don't have a stack sitting around, and a Korvax Casing is a cheap tradeable that most decent terminals carry.

Craft the bridge, feed it to the plaque, and you get a Fragile Neural Stem. Timer starts, roughly 18 to 25 and a half hours.

Phase 2: Pulsating Core

Next egg state sends you to a harsh barren world, the dust-and-ice kind. This plaque hands over two blueprints: the Pulsating Core itself, and the Solar Ray for your multitool. Build the Solar Ray into a free slot and shoot it at ordinary metal deposits. The metal comes out as Liquid Sun, 250 chunks of it.

Gold you can buy at any market or blast out of asteroids, and Mordite comes from dead fauna. Grim, but there it is. Hand in the core and collect your Fragile Heart, then wait 19 to 25 hours.

Phase 3: Impossible Membrane

The egg now wants a paradise planet, sometimes in an abandoned system. The plaque marks an underwater Abandoned Building for the Hypnotic Eye - swim down, grab it, try not to stare back into it. For Living Water, return to space and pulse between planets. A Child of Helios, basically a giant glowing jellyfish, will appear. Interact with it and you receive exactly 150 Living Water, which is exactly what the recipe needs. Clean design, that.

Chromatic Metal refines out of copper or any chromatic metal ore you've got lying around. Deliver the membrane, pocket your Fragile Shell, and wait 20 to 24 hours. (Small exploit if you want it: don't craft the membrane right away and you can keep pulsing into more Children of Helios, stacking 150 at a time. Extra membranes are only useful for extra living ships later.)

Phase 4: Seeds of Glass

The cracking egg leads to an exotic, shifting world, usually a Hydro Garden type. Follow the sweep to a Boundary Failure, that tall humming anomaly machine. It gives you the Seeds of Glass blueprint plus the Animus Beam, and yes, the beam harvests Fragmented Qualia from living creatures. Gently zapping docile wildlife for parts, 100 of them. A calm lush planet with slow animals makes this fast, and a busy predator planet makes it miserable, so choose your hunting ground.

Magnetised Ferrite is just refined ferrite dust, nothing exotic. Turn in the seeds, take your Growing Singularity, and sit through the final 18-to-26-hour timer.

Solving the Portal Stage

The song is an address

Once the singularity matures, the egg starts repeating a poem:

The Hunter, The Reflection, The Hunter, The Spiral of Reality, The Star Over Water, The Ascending Orb, The Obscured Companion, The Hunter, The Lowly Insect, The Anomaly, The Sailor, The Ocean King.

Those are portal glyph names, twelve of them, and it's the same address for every player. Dial it into any charged portal and you land in the Ischel-Althu system on planet Axentha Sigma, in Euclid. This is why you needed the first 12 glyphs - the address never touches the last four.

Getting there

No portal on hand? Space station cartographers sell alien artifact charts that lead to monoliths, and a monolith can point you at that planet's portal. Charged glyphs stay charged, so a portal you've used before costs nothing. Any uncharged ones will ask for a common material, things like carbon, cobalt, or copper, before they'll activate.

Dial the twelve glyphs, step through, and you're across the galaxy.

Souls for the chamber

On the far side, the quest marks an Abandoned Building. The terminal inside hands you a Soul Chamber that wants three Traveller souls. Graves get marked one at a time with rough locations, so sweep, dig up each grave, collect the soul. After the third one the chamber becomes an Archived Soul, and the ship-growing part of this whole saga is done.

Two rules that save headaches

Leave through the same portal you entered. The quest will not progress if you wander off through regular space instead. And before you board your ship afterward, drop a manual save, because boarding is what triggers the hatch decision. You'll want that save for reasons covered next.

Claiming and Upgrading the Ship

The Fallen Host

Board your ship and a transmission offers a choice: hatch the egg or ignore it. Choose to hatch and a Fallen Host bio-ship gets marked as a crash site somewhere in your current system. That's your ride.

Now the trick everyone uses. Appearance is locked at hatch time, and every system rolls from its own ship pool. So before accepting anything, pop Photo Mode from the quick menu to eyeball the crashed ship without leaving your cockpit, since landing and exiting would overwrite your manual save. Don't love the look? Reload the save, teleport to a different system, board your ship, and take the fresh offer there. A few reloads is normal for picky pilots. Some hunters even chase portal coordinates for documented ship models and reroll until the quest marker lands on one.

Happy with the body? Land and start Biogenesis. That feeds your five finished organs back into the wreck: the Mature Neural Stem as the brain, the Mature Heart Node as the heart, the Hardened Shell as the shell, the Singularity Core as the core, and the Archived Soul as, well, the soul. Then claim it like any crashed ship, except this one's completely free.

One documented bug to dodge: keep all five organs somewhere the game can reach when you collect - your exosuit, your active starship's cargo, or a freighter with a Matter Beam installed. If it can't find them at that exact moment, you get a plain mechanical wreck instead, which is a genuinely brutal prize after a week of gardening organs.

What actually hatches

The ship is always S-class with a fixed 36+30 layout: 36 Storage Sac cargo slots and 30 Organ Chamber tech slots. Core stats roll inside the S-class band:

| Stat | S-class range | |---|---| | Damage bonus | 50 - 75% | | Shield bonus | 15 - 38% | | Hyperdrive bonus | 75 - 95% | | Agility bonus | 10 - 15% |

Maneuverability is the weak spot. These things corner like a bus, more or less, so don't expect fighter handling.

The perks are real, though. A living ship warps into red, green, and blue systems with no Cadmium, Emeril, or Indium drive installed (purple systems still demand an Atlantid Drive). Its organs recharge on cheap basics like oxygen, silver, and chromatic metal instead of launch fuel and warp cells. Base launch cost is 25% on Normal difficulty, and it only drops from there once you upgrade the brain. The catches: exactly two weapon types ever (Spewing Vents, the photon cannon stand-in, and Grafted Eyes, the phase beam stand-in), no normal upgrade modules bolt on, and the ship can't be scrapped, only traded away.

Growing it further

The organs map to regular tech. Neural Assembly is your launch thrusters, Pulsing Heart is the pulse engine, Singularity Cortex is the hyperdrive, and Scream Suppressor is the shield. Upgrades come from Psychonic Eggs, which hatch into random organic modules. Any module can be grown up to S-class with nanites, and an S-class Neural Assembly upgrade cuts launch cost another 20% and starts recharging itself. Stack a few and the "never fuel it again" reputation kicks in.

Spawning Sacs add inventory slots, and utility drops show up too - the Wormhole Brain is an economy scanner and conflict scanner merged into one item, for example.

So where do eggs and sacs come from? Two places. Shoot the living ship space encounter when one appears while you're pulsing, and it drops them. Or run frigate expeditions that include an Organic Frigate in the fleet. Getting your first organic frigate is its own little side quest: regular frigate expeditions occasionally bring back the Dream Aerial blueprint, you craft it, pulse in space, and a space-whale frigate shows up to join you. After that, every expedition it joins has a chance to come home carrying eggs.

Want more than one?

Starbirth only runs once per save. Afterward, each additional Void Egg (another 3,200 Quicksilver) starts a short version: pulse until a living ship hails you, agree to hatch, and a Fallen Host gets marked. That one costs 10,000 nanites to claim instead of being free. The encounter seems to trigger faster when you're already flying a living ship, funny enough.

There's even a squadron route for the truly obsessed: trade a living ship to an NPC pilot, then recruit that pilot into your squadron. A four-ship living squadron runs about 12,800 Quicksilver and 40,000 nanites all told. Your call on whether that's worth it.

Bottom line: the first ship costs 3,200 Quicksilver and about a week of patience, and it's the only guaranteed S-class starship in the game. Buy the egg today and let it grow while you're off doing other things - the timers don't care whether you're logged in.