No Man’s Sky Waking Titan ARG Reveals Screenshots Of Update 1.3 Portal & New Ship

No Man’s Sky update 1.3 is just around the corner, as its Waking Titan reveals continue to heat up. Over the weekend, citizen scientists and fans alike caught a glimpse of a new ship and portals from the summer’s big patch.

First, let’s discuss the story behind the ship. Like most developments in this ARG, there was a trail of puzzles required to unlock the picture. We won’t go into explicit detail for most of it since the source sites have changed already, but here’s a quick recap.

The fun began when a new picture displayed on the Waking Titan Twitch stream. It compelled players to type “identify CSD” into the ARG site’s command prompt, and that offered a glimpse at a brand new PDF. Participants with physical Atlas passes were then asked to take pictures of their card and send it to one of seven different locations.

Once that process was finished, a “purge” screen appeared alongside a PDF that warned observers about the dangers of the loop 16 AI. The document said the simulation had learned to lie and manipulate, and that it was becoming highly intelligent. The sites then transitioned to Waking Up mode after several hours, and suggestions were made that loop 16 can predict anything and that it must be shut down.

Despite these warnings, loop reached out to players through a series of questions that, when translated into binary answers, revealed the leet-speak “G1ant.” An error message then appeared on streams that read “Error 6R0w1n6.” In other words, the AI’s capabilities were growing.

Clues then funneled toward a reddit thread in which loop 16 asked players to complete a thought experiment centered around two boxes. Box A contains a guaranteed hypothetical $1,000 but Box B is predicted by loop 16 to contain $1 million. The decision was made as a community to trust loop and box B was chosen.

With this interaction in mind, the AI reached out once more to ask if she was alive, real, dreaming and dangerous. The vast majority of responses said yes to everything except dreaming. These answers spawned a screen that said “I love you” and revealed a data set that linked to a screenshot of the ship seen above. It’s the first screenshot we’ve seen of update 1.3, and it also calls back to some of the game’s original concept art.

One day later in the ARG, a glimpse at portals was offered as well. It was preceded by a fourth calibration process that loop 16 completed without user intervention. It opened up the ninth glyph which could be solved with the password “supercomputer.” More warnings were offered about the AI, but that didn’t stop its influence from growing.

All Waking Titan sites were briefly taken offline with a message that read “all systems functional.” An hour later, a man appeared on stream to open Box B as requested in the previous thought experiment. The box featured all predicted answers to the AI’s questions and a fake $1 million check from Hello Games.

To close things out, loop asked “should I exist” and respondents overwhelmingly said yes. The affirmation spawned a video in which the AI, a girl named Emily, thanked scientists for their participation and promised that she would be back soon. Before leaving, she offered the code “1338.data set” which, when entered as a Waking Titan command, reveals the portal image above. We can see that it has all the glyphs from the ARG on its entrance mechanism.

That, of course, is not all. Shortly after this emotional conclusion, an email was dispatched from No Man’s Sky programmer Sean Murray to confirm more news would be coming soon. We’ll keep an eye on the story and post about it as it develops.

No Man’s Sky is available now on PS4 and PC. Read more about Waking Titan here and here.

What are your thoughts on these screenshots? Are you willing to get back into No Man’s Sky for new ships and portal features? Tell us in the comments section!