Currently, No Man’s Sky features five unique sentient species, although players are only able to increase their reputation with three of them: the Gek, the Korvax, and the Vy’keen. Explorers may also run into the Travelers species across space stations and trading posts, with Artemis and Apollo being the most recognized due to their appearance in the Artemis Path quest line. The fifth and final race is known as the Anomaly, which is the default appearance for players first beginning the game and is unseen outside of the player. While Travelers and the Anomaly are interesting for the No Man’s Sky universe, we’ll be focusing on building a good reputation with the three main races and learning the languages of their people.
Each race has their own language and unique culture, therefore befriending them is slightly different in terms of resources they request and which curiosities will help advance a relationship. Conversations with these sentient species is often quite basic, and players will find themselves having similar interactions across different planets and trading posts. However, conversing with each individual will quickly allow explorers to learn words from a language, and increase their reputation (if you have the right resources that is). Once a word is learnt, players will be able to understand what is said during a conversation, making it easier to react accordingly to certain situations. Building a sufficient dictionary of the three languages does take a significant amount of time and exploration, but it’s still worth requesting dialect help with each NPC player to move this along.
Especially near the beginning of the game, learning the language of the Gek is the easiest out of the three main factions. This amphibious species is a mercantile race, and once players learn more of their language, their translated titles are often references to trading terms such as SalesGek or Resource Analyst. To learn words in their language, players can offer 10 units to a Gek for dialect help or they can “seek help with language” when they come across a plaque in a Gek-inhabited system. The Korvax will request 10 copper when players ask for dialect help while the Vy’keen will seek 20 Mordite.
Finding Alien Ruins is the most fruitful way to learn the language since they typically feature three knowledge stones nearby, which will each grant a new word to the player. However, these can be difficult to locate since they require upgrades to be found through scans, and in the early stages, players will only stumble across them by chance. Individual knowledge stones can be found across planets more commonly, and they will come up as an Alien Artifact when looking through the Analysis Visor. Following the Atlas Path story mission and visiting each Interface is another quick way to learn several words at once by running over the lights.
Although learning the languages of these species allows players to better understand what’s happening in the game, increasing reputation unlocks more difficult secondary tasks found at Mission Boards and comes with a whole host of benefits. Players can unlock shield recharge, healing, and even request repairs from another race once the player reaches a certain rank. Each faction has a different name for their various rank with the highest being ‘Partner’ for the Gek, ‘Traveller of the Atlas’ for the Korvax, and ‘Templar’ for the Vy’keen. Offering a relic to an NPC increases the reputation with their race, although these three main species all request different items for collection. The Korvax usually want the Korvax Casing or the Korvax Convergence Cube, the Gek Relic will increase reputation with the Gek, and the Vy’keen Dagger is highly valued by the Vy’keen – pretty simple stuff really. Each of the artifacts can be bought from some merchants, although the prices are quite high, around the 90,000 unit mark. It’s more economical to search for the relics when exploring different planets since they can be found within damaged containers, and can be rewarded from a positive interaction with a monolith. Occasionally, when interacting with one of the three main species, a barter option will appear, which will grant the player a curiosity.
After a couple of interactions with each of these races, players will find learning the language and increasing the rank quite repetitive. Even between the different factions, the main difference lies in the resources they request and the gifts players are able to offer. To ease the monotony, accepting tasks from the Mission Board will increase reputation while providing players a choice of what type of task they’d like to complete. These can range from killing creatures to hunting pirates, finding a missing person, or taking photos in a particular location. Holding a high rank with any sentient species will allow tougher variants to appear when interacting with the Mission Board, and can reward a +2 standing when completed. Although these missions take longer to complete than gifting a relic for reputation, they encourage exploration of planets, and allow players to play the game their own way, whether that’s by participating in space battles or befriending the local fauna.
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According to SteamDB.