No Man’s Sky: How to Solve the Number Puzzles Inside Factories

Puzzles – No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky has many different gameplay elements swirling around its universe. Among those are puzzles that players will need to solve in order to unlock certain terminals and gain certain rewards inside of Factories. Most of the encounters with Factory terminals play out exactly like your exchanges with the aliens. You read what few words you can understand, take into account the clues your character provides, and make an educated guess based on your previous dealings with the particular race whose language you’re dealing with.

Other interactions, though, actually involve number puzzles. If you’re not good with numbers or patterns, allow us to help you out with these. So far, throughout our ridiculous amount of time with No Man’s Sky, we’ve only encountered two different puzzles which we’ll walk you through below:

Puzzle 1: Rotating Numbers

This puzzle has a series of numbers and needs you to predict the next number based on the pattern you can suss out:

1702 – 7021 – 0217 – ??

If you look closely, you’ll see that the first digit in each number is moved to the end when you advance to the next number. So by that pattern, the answer would be 2170, moving the 0 from the third number to the end and keeping the number rotating.

Puzzle 2: Increasing Multiplication

The second puzzle revolves around another series of numbers for which you must figure out the pattern. Only this time, it isn’t a pattern that has to do with number placement, but rather, you have to figure out the operation being formed on them:

2 – 6 – 24 – 120 – ??

There are two things being done to these numbers. The first is that they’re being multiplied, the second is that they’re being multiplied by different numbers. To solve this you look at the relation between a number and the number before it. If you look at 6 and 2, you see that 6 is three times 2. If you look at 24 and 6 you see that 24 is four times 6. See the pattern yet? Going from left to right, the numbers are being multiplied by an increasing multiplier- 2 x 3, 6 x 4, 24 x 5, etc. If you you follow that pattern, then you know you have to multiply 120 by six if you want your solution: 720.

So far these are the only two puzzle types we’ve seen in No Man’s Sky. If we happen to stumble across any others, we’ll be sure to update this guide for you. In the meantime, if you need help with anything else in the game, be sure to check out our wiki guide.