No Man's Sky Main Story Walkthrough: Every Artemis Path Mission in Order

Part of the Beginner's series:

• Beginner's Guide Hub: Start here.
• Awakenings Walkthrough: The opening mission in full detail.
• Story, Atlas Path & Endings Explained: What the story is actually about.

Quick Answer

• The Artemis Path runs in a fixed order: Awakenings → Alone Amidst the Stars → Ghosts in the Machine → A Leap in the Dark → The First Traveller → Patterns in Time → 16 / 16 → The Purge, ending in the reset mission New Beginnings.
• Expect 30 to 40 hours at a normal pace. A focused run that ignores everything else can do it in half that.
• No walkthrough can tell you which planet to fly to. Story objectives point at procedurally chosen locations in your save, so the honest help is knowing what each mission gates on.
• The two hard walls are Ghosts in the Machine (needs a base, an Overseer and hired specialists) and The First Traveller (needs all 16 glyphs and a stack of charging elements).
• Glyphs come from Traveller graves: talk to a Traveller at a space station, ask where they came from, fly to the marked grave, scan it. One glyph each, sixteen times.
• The Atlas Path is a separate questline that runs alongside this one. Finish it before the last Artemis missions if you care about the story landing properly.
• The Purge does not delete your save. You keep your ships, tools, units and unlocks; your bases and freighter stay behind in the old galaxy and remain reachable.

Overview

No Man's Sky is not a game with a campaign in the usual sense, but it does have a spine, and the Artemis Path is it. Follow it and the game will teach you warping, portals, base building, alien languages and the endgame in roughly the order you need them. Ignore it and you will drift, which is a perfectly good way to play but tends to leave players wondering what they are supposed to be doing.

The reason this page exists is that the usual walkthrough format does not fit this game. A mission will tell you to find a Traveller grave, and the grave is on a planet the game picked for your save out of a procedurally generated galaxy. There is no map to draw. What can be written down is the structure: what each mission wants, what it silently requires you to already have, roughly how long it takes, and the specific places where people get stuck for hours and conclude the game is broken.

That is what follows. If you want the plot rather than the checklist, the story and endings guide covers what it all means without the logistics.

Before You Start: How Story Missions Behave

Four things about the mission system that nobody tells you and everybody learns the hard way.

Only one story mission is active at a time, and it waits. The Artemis Path does not expire, fail or time out. You can put it down for fifty hours and pick it up exactly where it was. Many players do precisely that.

Objective markers regenerate. If a marker seems to point at nothing, or you flew away mid-mission, opening the log and re-selecting the mission usually re-places the marker. This resolves the great majority of "my quest is bugged" cases.

Missions gate on progress, not on skill. Nothing here is hard to fight. What stops people is not having a base, or a hyperdrive upgrade, or sixteen glyphs. The gates are logistical.

Track the mission you want. With several questlines running, the game happily shows you the wrong marker. Open the log, select Artemis Path, set it as the tracked mission. Half of all "where do I go" confusion is a tracking problem.

The Missions in Order

1. Awakenings

What it is: the opening tutorial chain, from waking up beside a broken ship to your first hyperspace jump.

Roughly: two to four hours.

Gates on: nothing. It hands you everything.

This one has its own page, because it is where new players spend their most frustrating hours. The Awakenings walkthrough covers it stage by stage, including the three places people reliably stall: finding Di-hydrogen, the Portable Refiner step, and the first base computer.

The mission ends the moment you warp. That warp is the handover to the Artemis Path proper.

2. Alone Amidst the Stars

What it is: the story finding its footing. You start picking up a distress transmission from another Traveller, Artemis, and the game walks you through the communication and survey tools you will use for the rest of the campaign.

Roughly: two to three hours.

Gates on: having warped at least once, and a working hyperdrive with fuel for a few more jumps. Keep Antimatter and Antimatter Housing components in mind; this is where running dry starts to hurt.

This is the first mission that sends you to procedurally chosen structures. Follow the marker, do not overthink it, and if the marker vanishes, re-select the mission in the log.

3. Ghosts in the Machine

What it is: the base-building mission, and the first genuine wall.

Roughly: three to six hours, more if you fight it.

Gates on: a claimed base with a Base Computer, and then hiring specialists to staff it: the Overseer first, then further specialists in sequence. Each hire triggers a small chain of construction tasks.

This is where a lot of runs stop dead, for two reasons.

The first is that people claim a base somewhere convenient for the mission and then hate living there. Do not do that. This base is likely to be your home for a long time, so spend twenty minutes picking a site you actually want. Our best base locations guide covers what makes a site good. You can build elsewhere later, but the momentum of the mission tends to keep you where you started.

The second is the specialist chain itself. Each hire wants a room built and materials gathered, and the material requests scale up fast. Before starting, bank a healthy stock of Ferrite Dust, Pure Ferrite, Carbon, Condensed Carbon and Chromatic Metal. The crafting and refining basics guide covers turning raw stock into the processed versions this mission keeps asking for.

You will need the terminals for the specialists themselves, which means base part blueprints. If your build menu is thin, the base blueprints and unlocks guide explains how Salvaged Data buys the rest.

4. A Leap in the Dark

What it is: the story turns from survival to the Atlas. Expect Space Anomaly visits, conversations with Priest Entity Nada and Specialist Polo, and the first serious hints about what Travellers are.

Roughly: two to four hours.

Gates on: hyperdrive range, mostly. Several steps want you to jump to specific system types, and a base-model hyperdrive with no upgrades will make this tedious. Install at least a couple of hyperdrive modules before starting.

This mission is where the Atlas Path becomes relevant. If you have been ignoring the red Atlas Interfaces on your galaxy map, this is the moment to reconsider. See the ordering note further down.

5. The First Traveller

What it is: the glyph mission, and the biggest single gate in the game.

Roughly: five to fifteen hours, almost entirely spent collecting glyphs.

Gates on: all sixteen portal glyphs, plus a large stack of charging elements.

Here is the loop, and it is worth reading before you start rather than discovering it one grave at a time:

1. Go to a space station and look for a Traveller: the hooded NPCs with glowing visors who stand apart from the station crowd.
2. Talk to them and choose the option asking where they came from.
3. They mark a Traveller grave on a planet somewhere in the system's vicinity.
4. Fly there, land, and scan the grave.
5. That is one glyph. Repeat fifteen more times.

Travellers do not appear in every station. The efficient method is to hop stations rather than wait: warp, dock, sweep the station, warp again. Systems with higher populations tend to have more NPC traffic. Expect several stations with none at all. That is normal, not a bug.

Then the portal itself. Charging a portal's glyph pads consumes elements in three categories, and the game will not tell you how much to bring until you are standing there. Carry a deep stack of each before you go:

Take far more than you think you need. Running out halfway through charging a portal and having to fly off to mine Cobalt is the single most annoying interruption in the campaign. The full mechanics of portals, including how addresses work once you have the glyphs, are in the portals and glyphs guide.

6. Patterns in Time

What it is: the story tightening. The Atlas, Artemis and the nature of the simulation stop being background and become the plot.

Roughly: two to four hours.

Gates on: the glyphs you just earned, and general mobility. By this point the game assumes you can warp where you like.

7. 16 / 16

What it is: the penultimate chapter, and the one that pays off the number the game has been repeating at you since your first monolith.

Roughly: one to three hours.

Gates on: story progress only.

If you have been putting off the Autophage, this is your last comfortable window. The Autophage questline answers questions this stretch raises, and finishing it first makes the ending land considerably harder.

8. The Purge

What it is: the endgame. A run toward the galactic core with the game itself coming apart around you.

Roughly: three to six hours, depending on your hyperdrive.

Gates on: hyperdrive range above all. Each leg is a warp, and a poorly upgraded drive turns this into a grind. If you have not already, read the galaxy centre and black holes guide. Black holes cut the distance dramatically and are the difference between an evening and a weekend.

The Purge is heavily scripted and does not need step-by-step help. It needs fuel. Stock Antimatter and warp cell components before you begin, because the mission's rhythm is warp, cutscene, warp, and stopping to mine breaks it badly.

9. New Beginnings

What it is: the reset. Reaching the core presents the choice the story has been building toward, and taking it moves you to the next galaxy.

What it is not: a save wipe. This is the single most persistent misconception about No Man's Sky's ending.

• Travels with you: ships, multi-tools, exocraft, units, nanites, quicksilver, inventory, recipes and milestones.
• Stays behind, but reachable: bases and your freighter. They remain in the old galaxy and you can teleport back to them from any space station.
• Breaks on arrival: installed technology in your active ship, exosuit and multi-tool needs repairing. Anything packed in a cargo slot survives intact.

Repair materials are the thing to prepare. Land in a new galaxy with a stack of Chromatic Metal and you will be flying again in ten minutes rather than mining on foot with a broken scanner.

Should You Do the Atlas Path First?

Yes, if you care about the story.

The Atlas Path is a separate, shorter questline you start by accepting the Atlas's offer at any Atlas Interface, the red monoliths marked on your galaxy map. It runs on its own track and can be active at the same time as the Artemis Path.

Two reasons to finish it before the Artemis Path's final missions:

Narrative. The Artemis Path's ending assumes you know what the Atlas is and what it has been asking of you. Arriving at The Purge without that context makes the finale read as noise.

Practical. Completing the Atlas Path marks black holes on your galaxy map, and black holes are the fastest way to cross the distance The Purge demands. Doing it in the other order means making the core run the slow way.

The Atlas Path itself is a pilgrimage between Interfaces, culminating in crafting a chain of ten Atlas Seeds, each one requiring the previous as an ingredient, ending in the Heart of the Sun. Once you have it, the final Interface asks whether you want to birth a new star. There is no wrong answer and no missable reward.

How Long the Whole Thing Takes

The spread is almost entirely down to glyphs. A player who happens to find Travellers in their first few stations sails through The First Traveller; a player with bad luck can spend ten hours station-hopping. Nothing you do changes the odds much, so treat it as background work: collect glyphs opportunistically from the moment you first hear the word, long before the mission asks.

For a broader answer on total playtime including everything else, see how long No Man's Sky takes to beat.

Where People Actually Get Stuck

"The marker points at nothing." Open the log, deselect the mission, re-select it. This regenerates the objective marker and fixes the overwhelming majority of cases.

"I cannot find a Traveller anywhere." They are station NPCs and they are genuinely uncommon. Warp to a different system, dock, walk the full station including the upper walkways, warp again. Do not stand and wait for one to spawn.

"The specialist wants materials I have never heard of." They are all refined versions of common stock. Chromatic Metal comes from Copper, Cadmium, Emeril or Indium; Condensed Carbon from Carbon; Pure Ferrite from Ferrite Dust. A refiner converts all of it.

"I ran out of portal charging elements." Bring a stack of Sodium, Carbon and Di-hydrogen far larger than seems sensible. This is the one place in the campaign where over-preparing genuinely saves an hour.

"I finished the story and nothing happened." That is correct. The game continues in the new galaxy with the story marked complete. There is no credits roll that closes the game: the campaign is a milestone, not a finish line.

FAQ

Do I have to do the story at all?

No. Nothing in No Man's Sky requires it. But the Artemis Path is the only structure the game offers, and it teaches portals, base building and warping in roughly the right order. Most players who bounce off the game early bounced off the drift, not the difficulty.

Can I miss anything permanently?

No. Story missions do not expire, cannot be failed, and wait indefinitely. Every reward remains obtainable. There is no point of no return, including at the ending.

Do I lose my base when I finish the story?

No. Your bases and freighter stay in the galaxy you left and remain reachable through the space station teleporter network. What you lose is convenience, not property.

What order should I do the Artemis Path, Atlas Path and Autophage in?

Start the Artemis Path automatically, pick up the Atlas Path when you first see an Interface, and start the Autophage whenever you find a Mechanical Warrior. Finish the Atlas Path and the Autophage questline before the last two Artemis missions. The endgame assumes both.

Is there a point where the story gets easier?

After The First Traveller. Glyph hunting is the longest unstructured stretch in the campaign, and everything after it is comparatively quick and heavily scripted.

Can I play the story in multiplayer?

Yes, though mission progress is per player rather than shared, so you and a friend on the same mission each need to complete each step. Story instances work fine in a shared session. See the co-op guide for how sessions behave.

Key Takeaways

• The order is fixed: Awakenings, Alone Amidst the Stars, Ghosts in the Machine, A Leap in the Dark, The First Traveller, Patterns in Time, 16 / 16, The Purge.
• Collect glyphs from Traveller graves from your very first hours, not when the mission demands them. It is the single biggest time sink in the campaign.
• Ghosts in the Machine is a base-building mission in disguise. Pick a home you actually like and bank refined materials before you start.
• Upgrade the hyperdrive before A Leap in the Dark and again before The Purge. Warp range sets the pace of the entire back half.
• Finish the Atlas Path first. It marks black holes on your map and makes the ending mean something.
• Re-selecting a mission in the log regenerates its marker, and that fixes nearly every "bugged quest" report.
• The ending is a galaxy change, not a save wipe. Carry repair materials through and you will barely notice the transition.