Easily harvest No Man's Sky's whispering eggs with this one weird trick discovered by a player

If you've done some exploring in No Man's Sky you've no doubt encountered a clutch of 'whispering eggs'. If, too, you've attempted to pocket one, you've certainly met their protectors: an angry swarm of biological horrors, scary aliens that immediately burrow up from underground and attack you. The eggs (larval cores) you collect while dodging or fighting these protective creatures are worth quite a lot of scratch on the galactic market. But what's the best way to farm those eggs while staying alive? 

One player found a novel solution: just stand on top of one of the eggs. The swarm will appear as usual, but as long as you're perched on an egg, they won't actually attack you. I've tried it, and it works. See below:

Until now, my personal strategy was to open one or two egg sacs with my mining laser and quickly collect the cores, then rocket to the roof of the abandoned building these eggs are always scattered around. There I wait to recover health from the pounding I've just gotten from the angry alien moms, dropping back down if one of the clutches is briefly unprotected to nab another core. If it's simply too crowded, I'll wait until the swarm gives up and burrows back into the ground, which usually takes about 30 seconds. It's time-consuming and not exactly fun, but the payoff is worth it.

Other players have tried other schemes: claiming the area as a base and building walls to keep the swarms at bay, or using the terrain tool to burrow a narrow tunnel (too small for the horrors to enter) under the clutch, then mining the eggs from below.

But a player named IcedLance on Reddit posted a much simpler and more elegant solution. Use your jetpack to land on top of one of the eggs, and then begin mining the others. For some reason, the horrors won't attack you when you're standing on one of their eggs. They'll swarm, they'll snarl, but they won't be able to attack you if you're perched on one of their babies.

Is it a cheap trick? Maybe. Is it an exploit. Sure. Will it be patched out? Possibly. In the meantime, forget the walls and tunnels and hiding on the rooftops. Stand on an egg and profit.

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.