No Man's Sky - The Easiest Way to Collect Dreadnought AI Fragments in the Interceptor Update (2024)

This guide will provide the simplest steps that I have personally found that will get you to fighting as many sentinel freighters as fast as possible to acquire Dreadnought AI Fragments. These will allow you to instantly locate a crashed sentinel ship in any nearby Dissonant system.

Preparation

All credit goes to Lynn the Siren !

Before you take on the sentinels in any capacity, it’s highly recommended you have the following if you want things to go as smoothly as possible:

• A powerful fighter, equipped with tech upgrades that boosts the ship’s damage with your weapon of choice, as well maneuverability and shields.
• Plenty of sodium or starship shield batteries, as well as components needed to fix ship parts; Regardless of if your shield goes down during battle, extended periods of time where you receive damage will break ship (or for that matter, exosuit or exocraft) parts on normal or harder difficulty levels.

With those things in hand, you should be ready to have a relatively easy-going experience farming dreadnought AI fragments.

Step 1: Go to (Almost) Any System

In order for this trick to work, you will need to be in a system that has a space station; It doesn’t need to be a dissonant system, just any old one that has a space station. You know, the gigantic hunks of polygon that float in the middle of nowhere, these things:

Step 2: Attack the Space Station

Now, normally most sane players never attack a space station. This is because it will instantaneously raise your sentinel wanted level to 4. But in this case, since we want to encounter a Sentinel Freighter, this is the easiest way to provoke them. You do not lose any species standing by attacking a space station either, so this outlined method is completely safe in that regard.

Please Note: This method of sentinel aggro activation will NOT work if you are in a pirate system, abandoned system, or uninhabited system. Pirate and abandoned systems do not elicit a sentinel response when the space station is attacked, and uninhabited systems have no space station to shoot.

Step 3: Fly to an Isolated Location

While not entirely necessary, I highly recommend that you boost away from the space station or any surrounding AI freighter groups. If you attack them or the space station again it will refresh the amount of sentinels engaged in the fight during any alert level, which can obviously be a pain and add unnecessary time to this farming method for the AI fragments. Do not warp away or use your pulse engine, as you may inadvertently lose the sentinels you are trying to farm.

Step 4: So Anyway, You Started Blasting

At this point it should be pretty straightforward what you need to do. Just start fighting off the waves of these things until you get to alert level 5:

Step 5: Destroy the Sentinel Freighter

This is it. You’ve fought off all the waves and reached alert level 5 for the Sentinel forces. At this point, the game should inform you that you’ve brought on the attention of a Sentinel Freighter:

All you need to do now is destroy it, and try not to waste any time fighting off the ships it spawns. It will do so indefinitely until it’s eliminated. In order to destroy it, it’s very simple; You can shoot anywhere on the freighter to deal damage and do so until it’s eliminated. If you want to be harassed less while doing so, you can also take out the laser cannons mounted on its sides.

Step 6: Carefully Use the Dreadnought AI Fragment

After you have looted the Dreadnought AI Fragment, ensure you are NOT nearby a star that you have previously discovered a crashed sentinel ship (assuming you haven’t added it to your collection because you didn’t like it). The AI fragment will provide coordinates to the nearest dissonance spike located within any viable system, regardless of if you’ve been there or not.

Step 7: Sentinel Ship Located

You’ve used the AI fragment! You now have coordinates to the nearest crashed sentinel ship. Go there and see what awaits, be it treasure or scrap!

Step 8: Repeat as Desired

You can repeat this process as many times as desired if you’re collecting an entire fleet of sentinel ships, or if you’re simply grabbing them for scrapping.

However, if you’re not just hunting them for scrap, you can also simply use the same Dreadnought AI Fragment infinitely if you wish, if you’re hunting the perfect ship. Here are the steps to do so:

• Make a MANUAL save using a save beacon on any planet.
• Use the Dreadnought AI Fragment, preferably in a place you will not discover a previously seen ship.
• Warp to the location where the ship was pinged, and get out to inspect it like you normally would and all that jazz. Maybe even repair it and fly it around to see its flying form. If the ship is not to your taste, reload the manual save.
• Repeat as desired. If you are starting to get the same ships in the same places, reload your manual save to reacquire your AI fragment and then warp very far away (at least 1,000+ lightyears) in order to go to a new star cluster where Dissonant systems are sure to be. Make a new manual save on a planet nearby, and then go about the same steps listed above.

Step Optional: Echo Locator Farming

Echo Locators are one of the other methods of acquiring sentinel starships, however they’re a bit more time consuming. But they can also net you the two new multitools by revealing harmonic camps, if you’re looking for those as well.

As far as I know, they only have one source. Dissonance Resonators; The tripod machines with tall spinning purple sticks on top that infuse lean into the planet: They do not have a random drop chance for locators per resonator. Instead, each one essentially acts as a fancily animated loot container. You can walk up to one closely to see if it has an Inverted Mirror or an Echo Locator as its drop. These Dissonance Resonators are seeded based on planet region, so the same resonator will drop the same loot every time.

You can abuse this by making bases near ones you find that drop Echo Locators in order to mark them and warp to them whenever you want. Be aware though, that after destroying a Dissonance Resonator it will take 12 real life hours for it to respawn. Alternatively you can also just wander around the planet and harvest Dissonance Resonators at your leisure, but the chances of a resonator being seeded to have a locator are pretty low to begin with.