No Man’s Sky’s Next update comes with some new cosmic horrors, as well as some new, risky ways to make money: Eggs.
While doing some spelunking on my new home planet, I discovered an item called “Humming Eggs”. When I saw them, I immediately left the cave to craft some ammo. A lot of my friends are also playing No Man’s Sky, and they’d told me stories of encountering some weird eggs, shooting at them, and then being attacked by a bunch of biological horrors.
After I geared up I went back into the cave and opened an egg. I was surprised to find that it simply dropped an albumen pearl, a rare item worth around 9500 credits depending on the system (each star system has a slightly different economy).
There are actually two kinds of spooky eggs in No Man’s Sky now. Humming Eggs can be found pretty reliably in caves and drop albumen pearls. “Whispering Eggs” are the ones to watch out for, not just for the creepy monsters that will attack you, but because they drop an extremely valuable item: A larval core.
Larval cores sell for about 90,000 credits, depending on the system you’re in. If you want to get a new ship, farming larval cores is the way to go.
Whispering Eggs appear most often on toxic, nuclear or dead planets — you know, the ones where you wouldn’t bat an eye at a monster burrowing up from underground to attack you. Whispering Eggs cluster around abandoned bases, though on dead planets they can be found just hanging out in the wild.
The obvious issue with grabbing larval cores from eggs is not dying. After encountering a huge nest of Whispering Eggs, I gave it my best try. I opened the egg by shooting at it, and then ate shit right away as some monsters chomped me to death. This video demonstrates what happened to me pretty well.
I did this a couple of time before getting frustrated and turning to my friends — and the internet — for help.
The common consensus seems to be that if you encounter a base surrounded by eggs, open a few at a time with your mining beam, grab the core, and then use your jetpack to jump onto the roof of the base. If there are any infected plants up there, watch out, because those will sap a chunk of your health.
Once you’re ready and your jetpack has recharged, you can destroy another egg from the roof, jump down, grab it, and jump back up. Eventually the swarm will disperse if the monsters can’t see you, and these guys aren’t actually too smart.
You should also keep an eye out for sentinels; as I discovered, they don’t take too kindly to you grabbing these larval cores and will try to shoot you to death.
Kingpiin over on the No Man’s Sky subreddit demonstrates pulling of this trick the right way.
Good luck and happy hunting, fellow travellers. Hope you have better luck than me.
Comments
6 responses to “Mining Eggs In No Man’s Sky Is Spooky But Worth It”
A friend and I started farming these guys last night. An even easier way to do it is to trigger them on one side of the building, then pick up the eggs on the other side. It takes them a while to get around to chase you. At one point we managed to clean up 20 or so eggs before they came around.
I found you can use the terrain manipulator on the ground underneath the whispering eggs you encounter on dead planets to indirectly destroy them for a larval core without spawning a swarm.
This doesn’t work on the clusters of eggs you find around abandoned buildings though – those just float when you destroy the ground underneath.
You can also use the same technique to quickly take out groups of poisonous plants. It seems to kill all the poisonous plants within a small radius of the one you target … even if the others were several metres away.
I’ve seen a couple of ways to go about this. My way is to dig a big shaft directly under the cluster of eggs and then shoot them from below so they fall into the pit I’m in. The trick seems to be to make a deep narrow shaft that the creatures won’t fall into or spawn into. Mine usually look like an upside down funnel.
Another way I’ve heard of is to actually build a tiny room out of wooden panels around the eggs since the creatures don’t spawn on the eggs themselves they should be trapped outside the room. I imagine the pain with this is you’d actually have to set up a base computer to do it.
You can also burrow for them under ground. So mark them with you scanner, dig a tunnel towards them, destroying the ground below them, they are suspended in the air. When you kill the egg, the loot drops to your feet.
oops, like miak said above, d’oh!
Eh, not really. I was talking about the single eggs you can find scattered about on certain planets. Those ones don’t float so digging them up will get you a free core without spawning anything.
(Though it occurs to me I never actually tried using my mining laser and went straight for the manipulator instead … so its possible those don’t spawn things anyway. I’ll have to test it out next time I find some.)