Upgrading Living Ships

[Cannon Fodder]

Here are some personal observations I have collected while working on upgrading my Living Ship (your mileage may very).

1. You can not (currently) add slots to your Living Ship, so what you have is all that you get.

2. Upgrades can not be bought, obtained through missions, or found on derelict freighters. You can only get them through RNG pop-up encounters with anomalies while running on your phase drive through a system.

3. The types of RNG pop-ups you are looking for only happen when you are in your Living Ship. If you are running in a conventional ship, your RNG pop-up will not be of the right type (e.g., derelict freighter with/without pirates, ship dropping by to try to sell you stuff, etc).

4. The 'right type' of RNG pop-up will be an anomaly that you can target, shoot, and destroy. Upon destruction, a Living Ship upgrade pops into your inventory. The ones I keep running into look like, and are called, Void Eggs.

5. The Living Ship upgrade you get is random both to type and to class. The classes run as usual from C to S, and the types cover the six 'components' of your Living Ship.

6. You can increase the class of any Living Ship upgrade by spending nanites. It is something like 200, 300, 400 nanites to go from C->B->A->S. Just install the upgrade and the mouse-over will have the 'spend your nanites' option in it.

7. Like conventional ship upgrades, you can overload a type by adding too many upgrades. Each type can support three upgrades PER TAB before overloading. So: If your Living Ship has seven slots, you can max out a ship type: (Base type + 3 upgrades) in one Tab and (3 upgrades) in the second Tab. Also like conventional ship upgrades, there appears to be some "clustering bonus' when you get the upgrades in connecting slots.

8. Some people have suggested the best place to get a Living Ship RNG pop-up to happen is in unclaimed systems - the thought being that with no freighters or space station, the game is biased towards that type of activity. That may or may not be true. I have had the RNG pop-ups happen in claimed systems, too, so the jury is still out.

9. On the other hand, that is how I got my first Living Ship RNG pop-up: I just started jumping into unclaimed red-star systems and running on phase-drive to see if would trigger. It took me 9 systems to find one, but it was there.

10. Each time you jump into a system that has given you a Living Ship RNG pop-up, you will get a Living Ship RNG pop-up: It is a repeatable event. Get the pop-up; destroy the anomaly; collect the upgrade; warp to another system; turn around and warp back to the system with the pop-up event; Repeat for as many upgrades as you want.

11. I figure it takes about 15 seconds running under phase drive for a Living Ship RNG pop-up to happen in an unclaimed system if it is going to happen. I figure it takes about 5 seconds of running under phase drive in a claimed system for it to happen if it is going to happen.

12 In claimed systems, be sure to phase drive into empty space: Not towards anything (planet, space station, freighter, Anomaly, etc). Otherwise the Living Ship RNG pop-up seems to be suppressed.

13. If you want to kick-ass in space combat, be sure to upgrade your Living Ship's photon cannon counterpart. I have six upgrades for mine, all S-class, and that thing never overheats and operates like a automatic with continuous fire. I don't even bother with the phase beam counterpart, the cannon is so much fun.

[Kitsune Dzelda]

Good tips, but I wonder if you heard about the Frieghter Bulkhead method of upgrading them, and if that is still a thing?

[Cannon Fodder]

I did hear about that, but (sob) I had already maxed out my freighter (combination of saving up my bulkhead upgrades and getting REAL lucky on the freighter I swapped my first one for) before I tried for my Living Ship.

So, that is not an option for me - not until NMS allows you to have multiple freighters.

[cheesebUrger]

Sort of related, but is the living ship itself always an S class? Also, does it count for the A-class ship milestone in expeditions?

[ka-pow]

Cannon Fodder eredeti hozzászólása:

I did hear about that, but (sob) I had already maxed out my freighter (combination of saving up my bulkhead upgrades and getting REAL lucky on the freighter I swapped my first one for) before I tried for my Living Ship.

So, that is not an option for me - not until NMS allows you to have multiple freighters.

At same situation I used the save editor to DELETE some slots from the freighter. then collected extra freighter slots in derelicts. Win!

[Azure Fang]

This is all documented in the wiki already, besides #12; that's incorrect.

[Danjonkovich]

I'm convinced my Living Ship is broken. Well, not the ship itself but I have pulsed around for hours (yes hours) and have NEVER encountered one of those egg things for an upgrade module. I've tried various systems of all colours to no avail. I've resorted to begging at the Nexus lol.

[Azure Fang]

Danjonkovich eredeti hozzászólása:

I'm convinced my Living Ship is broken. Well, not the ship itself but I have pulsed around for hours (yes hours) and have NEVER encountered one of those egg things for an upgrade module. I've tried various systems of all colours to no avail. I've resorted to begging at the Nexus lol.

Pulsing around uncharted systems (those with no space station) have the highest chance. Additionally, there's an appearance rate falloff per load. The general method is to warp to an uncharted system, pulse until you've had two encounters, save, reload, lather, rinse, repeat.

[Cannon Fodder]

Please note: I have NEVER had to save/reload to keep generating the Living Ship RNG pop-up events once I had found a system that gave me one.

I just warped in, ran for 15 sec on pulse drive to get it to occur, warped out (to somewhere), warped back in, ran for 15 sec on pulse drive to get it to occur, ...

I have almost 20 separate upgrades installed on my ship, all gotten from this one system, in this exact same way.

[Danjonkovich]

Azure Fang eredeti hozzászólása:

Danjonkovich eredeti hozzászólása:

I'm convinced my Living Ship is broken. Well, not the ship itself but I have pulsed around for hours (yes hours) and have NEVER encountered one of those egg things for an upgrade module. I've tried various systems of all colours to no avail. I've resorted to begging at the Nexus lol.

Pulsing around uncharted systems (those with no space station) have the highest chance. Additionally, there's an appearance rate falloff per load. The general method is to warp to an uncharted system, pulse until you've had two encounters, save, reload, lather, rinse, repeat.

Cannon Fodder eredeti hozzászólása:

Please note: I have NEVER had to save/reload to keep generating the Living Ship RNG pop-up events once I had found a system that gave me one.

I just warped in, ran for 15 sec on pulse drive to get it to occur, warped out (to somewhere), warped back in, ran for 15 sec on pulse drive to get it to occur, ...

I have almost 20 separate upgrades installed on my ship, all gotten from this one system, in this exact same way.

Lol. Now I'm even more convinced it's broken. Fancy sharing the coordinates of that system so I can give it a try?

[DevOps]

I found a pair of systems that each yield a void egg encounter after 6 seconds of pulsing. They're 148 light years apart, and I just bounce back and forth between them getting an upgrade after each warp. I Install/upgrade the ones I want and sell the rest at a space station for nanites.

The two systems are
- Mefattn-Kihgo XIII (0924:007B:011D:00D9)
- Ojalans XVIII
The portal address of Mefattn-Kihgo translates as
sun-sun-rocket-spiral-triangle-teepee-spiral-bird-tree-bird-faces-balloon

Once you get to Mefattn-Kihgo, it can take a few minutes to find Ojalans on the galactic map, but once you find it and warp to it the path between the two systems will be displayed so it becomes much easier to find your way back. On one of these systems you can get a second egg after pulsing another minute or so, but I don't remember which one because its quicker to just warp to the other system.

[nicklogan]

DevOps eredeti hozzászólása:

Once you get to Mefattn-Kihgo, it can take a few minutes to find Ojalans on the galactic map, but once you find it and warp to it the path between the two systems will be displayed so it becomes much easier to find your way back. On one of these systems you can get a second egg after pulsing another minute or so, but I don't remember which one because its quicker to just warp to the other system.

Fantastic tip, thanks a lot. I had been stuck searching after finding two modules, returning to those systems wasn't working but these two worked great.

[Danjonkovich]

DevOps eredeti hozzászólása:

I found a pair of systems that each yield a void egg encounter after 6 seconds of pulsing. They're 148 light years apart, and I just bounce back and forth between them getting an upgrade after each warp. I Install/upgrade the ones I want and sell the rest at a space station for nanites.

The two systems are
- Mefattn-Kihgo XIII (0924:007B:011D:00D9)
- Ojalans XVIII
The portal address of Mefattn-Kihgo translates as
sun-sun-rocket-spiral-triangle-teepee-spiral-bird-tree-bird-faces-balloon

Once you get to Mefattn-Kihgo, it can take a few minutes to find Ojalans on the galactic map, but once you find it and warp to it the path between the two systems will be displayed so it becomes much easier to find your way back. On one of these systems you can get a second egg after pulsing another minute or so, but I don't remember which one because its quicker to just warp to the other system.

Thanks so so much

[zOldBulldog]

I suggest using a youtube guide. Last night I found one, followed the address to the destination planet and started doing the pulse runs. About 2 hours later I had fully upgraded everything (note: I already had tons of nanites to upgrade even the C class modules you get to S, that sped things up quite a bit)