With the release of patch Voyagers, a new type of ship was introduced in the No Man’s Sky universe called a Corvette. This kind of ship you get to build yourself, can be walked around in, and many other things as well.
Thankfully, it’s easy to get a base Corvette. Anything beyond that is going to take some time or cost a lot of money to acquire. You can go around gathering different parts and even trade in some of those parts to barter for ones you would rather have instead.
The first thing you need to do is head over to almost any station. It needs to be a working station. As you are about to find out, stations are not so empty anymore when you land in them. They now have a few more landing pads for larger ships to land on. As Corvettes are quite massive ships.
In any station I've been in, right after you land on the left-hand side are these four portals. Each one takes you to one of the four landing areas for a Corvette. It doesn’t matter which one you head into until you have one already docked in the station. Then you will just need to head into the one where your ship is parked at depending on if it’s slot one through four.
You will then see a Corvette Workshop that you can interact with. Since you don’t have one, you must purchase all the base modules to get started. It ended up costing around 10 million units to get everything to be able to have a basic Corvette. You will need to purchase two landing gears, two thrusters, one reactor, one weapon, a habitation, a cockpit, and an accessway.
Once you have everything that you need, you head back into the main menu for the Corvette Workshop. This time, you get to click on Create New Corvette. It’s now time to create your first ship.
On the PC, by pressing Z, you get to open up the modules page. You first need to place down some landing gears. Follow that up with at least one habitation module. The habitation modules will be the walkable spaces of the ship. You can put them side by side or end to end. If you end up placing them on top of each other, you will need to buy and place some stairs to go between the floors.
The nice thing is that the building system has quite a lot of freedom for you to make as ugly or “unique” looking a ship as you like. Like many seem to be going with a flat-out giant Cube. Others of us are trying to go for the ugliest ship in the universe award, if only such an award existed.
After playing around with the system a bit, you will realize you can rotate with the mouse wheel. Also, at any time you try and escape out of the building menu, you are given an option to craft the ship or save as a design you can come back to working on later.
While there were quite a few days, one bugs like ship parts going missing if you delete them. Issues with certain parts connecting to others, even though they should have fit. Among other issues. Those have since been fixed.
The big thing this system feels like it was lacking at the time of writing this is the display of detailed information. Most of the deceptions of ship parts are all the same. With no clue of what adding a part might do once you are about to place it on the ship itself. With other parts seeming to have zero effects and seeming to just be there for looks, despite their names implying they do something more.
This can also be quite annoying when trying to work out if you are just using C-class parts or if anyone would want higher-tier parts.
I have worked out the following tier for a few of the different class modules you can acquire.
Class C: Ambassador and Centro
Class B: Thunderbird and Titan
Class A: Ceto, Medusa, and Zenith
Class S: I have yet to find any.
Once you have built the outside of the ship. You can fully exit the Corvette Workshop. Next up is decorating the inside. The cool part is you don’t even need to be in a station to do this. You can work on your ship anywhere you like.
The only requirements are having the right materials and being inside your ship. From there, you can pull up the Corvette Configuration design window by pressing X on the PC. There are then lots of options to pick from, such as tables to a working mission board, and other services on the ship itself.
Before doing any of that. It can just be fun looking at the interior with nothing added. There is quite an insane amount of detail on the walls, ceiling, and floor. The cool thing is that some of the furnishings you add go on the wall and will change the appearance of that section of wall. You can even add in windows and other stuff as well.
Farming Corvette Parts
Next up, you will want to know how to acquire more parts to make even bigger and cooler-looking Corvettes without spending hundreds of millions of credits on just some basic stuff. It’s time to head down to a planet and do some farming.
The first thing you need to do is find a planet that has salvageable scrap. You can find that information out just by scanning different planets. You may or may not have one in the current solar system you are in.
Once on a planet that has some, you are scanning for Salvage Containers. They will contain a couple of different strange strange-looking missiles or other odd things. These you will have to uncover using a terrain manipulator.
You then need to swap over to a mining laser and remove the couple of protective casings on the outer shell of the object. These protective casings will mostly contain ferrite dust. They, however, can sometimes have some random ship parts as well.
After that, you are just left with a salvage container that will have your main reward. Funny enough, I ended up getting a Cetro-Class Reactor from the protective casings. Meanwhile, only getting a heavy booster from the core.
I have lucked out a few times and even found decent clusters of Salvage Containers all within like 500 units of each other. Other times, not even one on the scanner anywhere around.
It did not take too long before I had found so many parts inventories that space started to become an issue with everything else I had. Thankfully, anything you don’t want, you can either sell for decent units or include it in a barter trade for something you do want.
Bartering For Parts
The barter system seems a bit greedy. You need to give up a lot more in value than what you are getting. It is at least a way of getting “advanced modules” from the Corvette Workshop at any working station.
You usually must give up something of around equal value. Along with some junk items, to have a decent chance at a barter being accepted. Otherwise, as you can see, I had such a low chance of even getting a class B module that the barter failed.
The Ship Redesign
The nice thing about the Corvette ship system is you can go back in anytime and just redo your current ship. There is no need to make another one unless you want to. I ended up adding a lot to my former ship.
You just delete and move the ship parts you need around. Then just continue adding and expanding as needed. My ship is not the most elegant-looking one out there. It’s my own, and I would not have it any other way.
Once you are done redesigning the outside of the ship with all your newly found parts. You might just discover there is a lot of internal space that needs some decorating.
The one thing I feel they nailed quite well is that science fiction look of the inside of a spaceship. I ended up turning the second floor of my ship into a little sleeping quarters. It’s a shame you can’t really sleep in the bed.
Don’t forget to slap on a new coat of paint while you are at it. I’m really hoping that in the future we get a lot more color choices than what the system has started with. With the crazy color scheme the overall game has. I’m a little shocked at how natural so many of the options are.
Other Features
Between being able to set up autopilot for a planet in a solar system. You can even exit the ship itself. Although I'd recommend making sure it’s not moving when doing so. Having that back hatch that you can open in space is quite cool.
It’s even possible to have friends on your ship as well. Making playing with others a lot better in this game as they slowly work on those kinds of features.
Sometimes it’s just nice to stop the ship somewhere and get out of your seat. You don’t even need to have autopilot on either for doing that. You can then have a nice view out of any windows you have installed on your ship.
Final Thoughts
I do hope they end up adding a lot more to this future in the long run. I'd love bigger interior spaces, among so many other things. There's nothing like seeing one of these massive ships landing after you call it to pick you up. Seeing that back hatch open and knowing you can just walk right inside and be protected from the elements of the current planet you are on.
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about No Man’s Sky.
