Here's another weird No Man's Sky planet, littered with sentient metallic orbs

I'm on a bit of a roll in my exploration of No Man's Sky's new content. On Friday I found a planet covered in hexagons, and spent some time exploring it. Today, I found a second hex planet (which I decided to make my homeworld), and shortly after, I stumbled on something else: a planet littered with weird metallic orbs. Most look like they've been dropped and are resting on (or partially in) the planet's surface, some are broken in pieces, and some hover, glow, and slowly spin.

Take a look below.

There are no alien creatures on this weird planet, just like the hex planet. The intact fallen orbs (they look kind of like the rollermines from Half-Life 2) can be harvested for Detrium, provided you use the mining laser mounted on the Colossus exocraft. The shattered pieces can be mined with a standard laser.

As for the hovering orbs? They're glowing and spinning, and try as I might I couldn't destroy one. I tried mining lasers, grenades, my ship's lasers, and even smashing straight into them at high speeds. Nothing seemed to have any effect.

It's worth noting that scanning one of these orbs tells me its age is 'Millennia' and that its root structure is 'Sentient' so maybe I shouldn't be trying to destroy it anyway. Nice orb. Friendly orb.

I explored the planet a bit, hoping to find interactive terminals similar to the ones present on both the hex planets I've visited. As it turns out, they're not similar, they're exactly the same. Same shape and same messages as the hex planet, as far as I can tell.

If you're looking for some of these new planets yourself, both of the hex planets I discovered were described as 'Airless' when I scanned them (also, they're covered with hexes, which is hard to miss unless you're really far away). The rollermine planet (as I'm calling it) shows up in scans as a 'Dead Planet'. So, if your scans turn up one of those, you might want to land and take a look.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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