I usually avoid sentinels unless I need pugneum but this last encounter I had was ridiculous. I killed 3-4 of them after stealing some Gravitino balls then of course reinforcements were inbound. I get in my ship and fly off and 10 seconds later an interceptor wa on me. My ship didn’t have a good combat loadout and I couldn’t escape it so I landed. Of course more ground units came so I started running. 7 minutes later they’re still chasing me and I don’t even see them. I was even running underground for at least 30s. A message kept coming up saying to destroy them to get a chance to escape so I waited for them to catch up and destroyed them. More reinforcements arrived in like 15s and spawned right next to me. How the hell could I escape that? So I got back to my ship and started looking for shelter because another interceptor was on my tail. I found one quickly before taking any hits and got in. Well, no timer came up, they were still just there, albeit really far away. I pretty much had to stand outside, wait for them to come into visual range, then run back to the shelter and THEN the search timer started. Oh, and more than once my alert level went up without shooting anything, just running around and hiding. Is this how it normally works? Any better way to approach this so I don’t waste 20 mins of game time?
Edit: more details about the chase
Update: Having a run-in with more sentinels it seems like behavior has changed (again, maybe bugged). Going underground they didn’t follow or attack but also never dispersed. Running into a building without a door (Abandoned Building) doesn’t disperse them but they don’t attack. I was able to shake them once by transitioning from ship to on-foot (a timer starts every time you transition it seems) then jumping into water before the sentinels arrived. I’m sure it also works to pop out of a hole and defeat every wave but I’m not very into that kind of thing.
It’s not a bug, what you describe is how it works.
- You can drop the aggro instantly by docking at a space station.
- If you’re planetside and you take off and boost directly towards the station, and keep boosting, you should be able to get to escape range to pulse to the station, and at that point you’re pretty much home free.
- You might also be able to warp to another system once you’re off-planet, before the sentinels warp in; that drops aggro too.
- You can enter any shelter until you drop aggro; the Sentinels can’t find you indoors.
- If you don’t have a handy shelter and you can’t get off planet/to the station/out of system, you can dig underground with a terrain manipulator and as long as you stay out of sight it should work the same as entering a shelter - the Sentinels can’t find you.
- Going underwater works like going underground or into a shelter.
- You can get the plans for the multitool Cloaking Device alt-fire on the Anomaly. This gives ~45 seconds of invisibility I think, which is more than enough to drop Sentinel aggro at low Wanted levels. At higher levels, use it to augment playing hide-and-seek underground or in shelters.
- If all else fails, run like hell. If you use the “melee boost” (https://www.polygon.com/no-mans-sky/2016/8/11/12440772/melee-boost-jump-how-to-tutorial) and tap your booster once you’re airborne, you’ll outpace the sentinels and you should be able to stay out of sight long enough to drop aggro.
If you don’t have a handy shelter and you can’t get off planet/to the station/out of system, you can dig underground with a terrain manipulator and as long as you stay out of sight it should work the same as entering a shelter - the Sentinels can’t find you.
Except for those damn dogs that will clip through terrain to ram you.
In case it matters this was during an Expedition play.
Feels like I did significantly outrun them for a while. And do I need to be underground while they’re relatively close by? As I mentioned I was running underground for a bit and didn’t see a timer at any time while I was on foot. A long time ago I recall running over a hill could be enough to start the timer but this time it seemed like nothing was working.
For the ship is there a temporary speed boost option? I was using what I thought was boost the whole time and didn’t seem like I was losing the interceptor.
You need to enter the space station, not just run away. Everything ignores you when you’re underground. It only needs to be a couple of meters.
Just want to add in I think sentinels do have some bugs. It’s not consistent but I’ve seen super weird behavior from them for awhile. Going underground not deaggroing them. Escaping to space station, having aggro dropped, but going back to the planet I constantly hear the sound of sentinel interceptors spawning in.
The interceptors aren’t too bad so I just flew around until I found a building I could use as added cover and had to kill all 5 waves.
Use the terrain manipulator to make a diagonal tunnel into the ground. Pop out and shoot the sentinels. Go back down once they are all firing at you. Rinse and repeat through to the last tier. Pick up all the almost free goodies. Make sure to shoot the little healer drones first.
I’m a little disappointed this method is comically easy even with toilet tier weaponry. Makes it so the fun upgrades and combat vehicles are meh to acquire.
That didn’t work for me when I had the same problem. I think they introduced a bug at some point where that’s not always working. I’ve gone as deep as I could go and just left it on for awhile and they never left. I ended up having to kill all the waves.
Thats what I meant - use the tunnel to kill the waves. Sounds like you’re good now though! I’ve had that bug too; that’s how I figured out the tunnel method in the first place. Since sentinels are a bit buggy, I kill them all every time now.
Ah, my bad. I misunderstood!
