Every few days in No Man’s Sky areas on the Discord, Reddit, or Facebook, I see some nonplussed Traveller with a screenshot of a lonely, unclaimed base computer sitting in the middle of a clearing, saying, “look what I just found – an unclaimed base in the middle of nowhere! What is this?”

These are unclaimed base computers in the wild, and they have a bit of a backstory.

When No Man’s Sky launched on August 9th, 2016 there were no player bases in the game; you had a starship — and that was it. Three and a half months later, on November 26th, what would be the first major update to the game, Foundation v1.1, dropped without warning. It brought a number of significant enhancements, basebuilding and freighters chief among them. But the game’s early basebuilding component was considerably different than what we have now.

Players loading into the game after the Foundation update saw worlds pretty much as they were before (this was not a “universe reset” update), but strewn about each world here and there Habitable Bases could be found. These were single Cylindrical Room base parts (a part that’s still in the game today) surrounded by a disc of perfectly flat terrain. Upon finding one, you could walk inside, interact with a terminal within, and claim the base. Once claimed, you could begin building out from that single starter room. It’s worth mentioning that only the prefab base parts or “Large Structures” as they are classified today were available as base parts; the Timber, Stone, and Alloy Structures were added later in the game (two different iterations of them over the years, actually).

While these Habitable Bases could be found spread across every world in the game, they could be hard to find. The quickest way to find one was to deploy a Signal Booster and, with some Navigation Data in your inventory, scan for a Habitable Base. This would identify a base on the HUD, which you could travel to and claim. (A short video from the time of Foundation‘s release illustrates the process.) Some players, myself included, wanted to find a base with a nice view, so would instead fly above the surface, visually searching for a base in a particularly nice spot — you could only have one base at a time, after all. This could take quite a while. I recall typically spending about five to ten minutes flying around before finding a base, though sometimes it took much longer, and it took some real searching to find that perfect, scenic location — hours usually.

All of this changed with the release of No Man’s Sky NEXT v1.5 in July of 2018. NEXT was one of the game’s very biggest updates, triggering a universe reset that re-generated each world within a set of predetermined biomes. NEXT completely altered terrain generation and brought with it a great many new features, mechanics, and parts. Among them was the ability for players to have multiple bases and to build those bases most anywhere on a world that they choose. Just deploy a new-fangled Base Computer and you were in business. Gone were the Habitable Bases of old.

Well, not gone exactly…but transformed.

When a player loaded into an existing save for the first time after the NEXT update, their base was gone. Not gone utterly into the abyss but stored, archived. Those who wanted to restore their archived base within the updated game could take advantage of a new secondary mission entitled “Home Base Restoration” which would locate a random Base Computer in the wild for the player, somewhere on the current world. (A short video from the time of NEXT‘s release illustrates the process.) In NEXT, those Cylindrical Room starter bases scattered about the planet turned into Base Computers, which were new tech, while maintaining that flat disc of terrain on which they sat.

The enigmatic Base Computer in the wild was born.

While NEXT allowed players to set down a Base Computer most anywhere and start building a new base, older bases from earlier versions of the game could not be restored just anywhere; they needed that perfectly flat disc of terrain upon which to be restored, and so they could only be restored at these Base Computers in the wild. Other methods of finding such a Base Computer to restore an old base were using a Signal Booster which, at the time, had an option to locate Habitable Bases or just wandering a world until coming across one; any Base Computer in the wild could be used to restore an archived base.

Players of the current game who seek to find one of these Base Computers in the wild can walk or fly around a world and try to eyeball one (though they are very hard to spot, given how small the Base Computer component is) or by going to any space station cartographer and buying a stack of Commercial Cartographic Data which mentions “inhabited outposts.” Be warned that the latter approach may take some time; I see 15 tries commonly mentioned in comment threads on the matter as the number of tries it might take to land a Base Computer. Maybe you’d have better luck fishing…

So, there you have it — the story of the enigmatic Base Computer in the wild. I have verified that Base Computers in the wild can be found on every type of world in the game, including the new worlds that arrived in No Man’s Sky Worlds Part II (even oceanic worlds and gas giants).

My gallery of Base Computers in the wild shows some of the settings in which I’ve stumbled upon these oddities in my travels.