The Viral Heart is one of those rare items that confuses many players. To find it, head to an Infested Outpost, which was introduced in the Cosmos update. The point is that you may need to search the exterior structure of the Outpost.
Hello Games (developer) notes that the Infested Outpost contains rare biological samples. Moreover, you need the Gravitino Coil to process the viral mass surrounding it.
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Where to Find a Viral Heart in No Man’s Sky?
As I mentioned, the NMS Viral Heart can be found in the Infested Outpost in Deep Space.
To reach the Infested Outposts, check the new deep-space activities and points of interest around the Cosmos. I personally use the Star System Map for finding deep space locations. It works really well, and I can find some of the locations with the help of it.
Another source for Viral Heart in No Man’s Sky is Bio-Salvage Contracts that task you with retrieving the item from an Infested Outpost. However, this happened just once for me, and I got one from this type of contract.
Find and Identify NMS Viral Heart
Once you arrive in the outpost, follow these steps:
- Spacewalk around the infested outpost
- Open your Analysis Visor (scanner)
- Search for the Viral Heart marker
- Look for the biological masses floating around the structure
- Use the Gravitino Coil to remove the material covering the Viral Heart.
Note: While searching through communities, I found that some players report they found the Viral Heart outside or slightly away from the main structure, inside a large biological mass. If you just search the central tunnel, you may miss it.
How to Collect the NMS Viral Heart
Use the Gravitino Coil to pull away the biological mass until you expose the Viral Heart. Once you have exposed the item, use the Gravitino Coil to move the physical object toward your Corvette.
The Corvette needs the Tractor Beam, which collects the physical salvage thrown toward it with the Gravitino Coil and stores it in the ship’s hold.
The Use of the Viral Heart No Man’s Sky
The Viral Heart is required to craft a Deep-Space Base Computer. This will be used for creating orbital bases.
The full recipe for building a Base Computer is:
- 1 Viral Heart
- 1 Reactor Core
- 1 Condensed Stellar Ice
Viral Heart & Pathogen Sac Bug
The Cosmos update had a funny bug in which the Viral Heart and Pathogen Sac used each other’s icons. Fortunately, Hello Games fixed this bug with the Cosmos 7.01 update.
Viral Heart Mission Not Completing
It seems that there is a bug in some of the Salvage Contracts that causes the missions to fail even after collecting the Viral Heart.
As of the time of writing, Hello Games has not listed a specific issue for this bug.
