No Man’s Sky Leviathan Expedition Bug Shows No Reward for Players

No Man's Sky Leviathan Expedition Bug Shows No Reward for Players

No Man’s Sky Expedition 7: Leviathan rewards some players for an extremely grueling journey through the stars… with a bug. Namely, the space whale frigate that constitutes the event’s biggest prize just isn’t showing up. Affected players include me. The person writing this article right now. Over here.

Let’s get the good news out of the way first: developer Hello Games already appears to know about the issue. More than that, the team went and rolled out a fix! But only you play on Steam and if you opt into the Experimental Branch. The Expedition reward bug should be fixed in No Man’s Sky proper sometime in the foreseeable future — both for PC players at large and for console cowpokes.

If you’re not familiar with “Experimental Branches,” this is just a term developers use for an opt-in special version of their games. It’s when the creators feel fairly confident that a patch won’t break things even worse, but aren’t sure yet, and need some brave players to try it out and report bugs. In other words: an open beta for updates to a game that is already out.

No Man’s Sky has one such branch. You just likely wouldn’t know about it unless you moseyed on over to the Steam Discussions page for the game. Listed among the notes over there is the promise “Fixed an issue that could prevent players from collecting the final reward from an expedition while there were uncomplete optional milestones.” In fact, Hello Games dropped this info as early as yesterday. Anyone not receiving their rewards from the Expedition because they have zero Milestones complete — despite obviously doing all the missions — has been able to install the update for at least 24 hours. Assuming you’re on Steam of course.

I’m only mentioning this now because A) I just beat Expedition 7 myself, B) the bug seems at least common enough that I was affected by it, and C) people who reach the end of Leviathan might be rightly worried if they get the same glitch. This Expedition is pretty hard, you see. No Man’s Sky isn’t often known for its massive challenge. Yet the Leviathan update kicks you into Survival Mode by default. It’s also a roguelike mode — meaning you restart your entire save each time you die. Getting to the end of all that and not getting any rewards is quite scary!

That’s why I’m here with this little PSA. If your “Expedition #7: Leviathan” rewards page says zero phases complete, even though you know that’s bunk, now you know why! The game thinks the optional objectives are… well, mandatory.

The deeper problem with that is that (as I’m writing this article) nobody has completed the optional Expedition objectives. They’re community goals. Goals that can only be reached as No Man’s Sky players all over the world complete optional objectives by turning in special items to Polo, a story NPC who features prominently in Expedition 7. I suppose that, while I wait for my space whale frigate to finally become available, I could always go back and grind Somnal Dust to try and help the No Man’s Sky player base unlock things that way…

Author: Deann Hawkins