The Interceptor Ship is the newest type of ship added to No Man’s Sky. As their name suggests, these ships are powered by Sentinel technology, and therefore acquiring one will often lead players into fighting through waves and waves of sentinels.
In this guide, we will be talking about the different ways to get an interceptor ship in No Man’s Sky and share some tips on how to locate the corrupted planets and avoid as much conflict as possible.
Before we go through the different methods of locating an interceptor ship, we will have to figure out how to find planets with Corrupted Sentinels.
Heads up: To prevent encountering issues where other players take over your target ship, it’s best to disable the Multiplayer option in the settings.
How to find Corrupted Sentinel planets
Corrupted sentinels are key to finding interceptor ships, and they can only be found on certain planets that have purple crystals on them. These planets are present only in dissonant systems.
In order for you to easily find these systems and planets, you will need to have the following:
- Scanner Room for your freighter
- Interstellar Scanner for your freighter
- Economy Scanner for your starship
- Conflict Scanner for your starship (optional)
Once you have these components installed, you will be able to easily locate the target star system in your Galaxy map. What you want to look for is a “Dissonant” system, whereas it usually says “Water” for other systems. After finding the right system, head into your freighter’s scanner room so that you can scan all of the planets and find the one with the Corrupted Sentinels quickly.
At this point, you have three methods to choose from when looking for your interceptor ship:
Method #1: Fight the Sentinels
This method works on a system that is not pirate controlled. Look for a sentinel and attack it to raise the alarm. Continue fighting the waves of sentinels until you eliminate everyone after reaching alert level 5. Doing so will allow you to automatically scan for a Dissonance Spike.
Make your way towards this spike and you will find your Interceptor ship. Afterwards, you will have to fix the ship by taking out its Hyaline Brain and using it to get the location of a Harmonic Brain to replace it. Then, you have the option to claim the ship as your own.
If you would like to find another ship other than the one you just found, you can restart the process again by looking for another wave of sentinels to fight. In case you end up getting led to the same Interceptor ship, you will have to repair the ship first and move it to at least 25 meters from its spot as this will remove the ship’s signal marker.
Method #2: Use Echo Locators
Echo Locators are items that drop from Dissonance Resonators or the tall machines that that mine the crystals from the ground. The locators can be used to scan a planet for a Harmonic Camp where you can scan for Interceptor ships. The Dissonance Resonators are usually guarded by sentinels, but there is a way to prevent them from attacking you.
This method only works if you start looking for Dissonance Resonators in Dissonant systems that are pirate controlled. Corrupted Sentinels in a pirate controlled system tend to remain unalerted even if you attack the resonators, which makes this method the safest one to go for (this might get patched in a future update).
Once you find the right planet in the right system, you will then have to look for a resonator. Don’t get off your starship and once you find one, you can simply use your ship’s blasters to destroy the resonator. You can then land and grab the Echo Locator without getting mobbed by the sentinels. Repeat the process if you want to get more Echo Locators.
For the next step, you then have to use the Echo Locator, but before using it, make sure that you are in a system that has a planet with Corrupted Sentinels that is neither an Exotic planet nor any of the Dead planets like Empty, Forsaken, Lifeless, etc. If the planet that you are on is neither of those mentioned, you can then use the locator to scan for a Harmonic Camp; otherwise, you will end up with an error as these kinds of planets do not generate any camps or ships.
After successfully using the Echo Locator, follow the marker to arrive at the Harmonic Camp. Then, locate the terminal and you will need to solve the glyphs puzzle. In this puzzle, you simply need to solve the equations and you will get three numbers. Each of these numbers correspond to a glyph, i.e. if you get the number 6, pick the glyph that is 6 of 16. Input the right glyphs in the boxes in no particular order and you will be able to scan for a Dissonance Spike.
It is recommended to set up a save beacon near the Harmonic terminal in case you don’t like the ship that you find. Same as before, you will have to move the ship from its location first before doing another scan for a Dissonance Spike to force the scan to look for another crash site.
Method #3: Destroy Sentinel Capital Ships
Similar to the first method, you will have to trigger a fight against sentinels in space and raise the alert level to 5. This can be done by attacking a neutral frigate or attacking a space station and flying off some distance away. Raise the alert level to 5 to summon the Sentinel Capital ship which you will need to destroy to end the attack and find the location of the Interceptor ship. This ship may be located in a different star system so you might have to perform some jumps to reach it.
You can do any of the methods listed above depending the resources and firepower that you have, just make sure that you have a slot or two available in your freighter where you can park your new ship.
Check out this video by Beeblebum showing how to locate Interceptor ships in No Man’s Sky: