This weekend’s No Man’s Sky Community Event #15 brought us by portal to an exotic world with gigantic purple spires rising high into the purple-hewn sky. Upon locating the Anomaly some short distance from the portal, I saw that it had taken the form of a traveller’s grave. Interacting with the grave marker brought forth the following message.

Davene, Generation RL0/A12/W80 is unquestionably dead, yet an echo of their unique signature still exists in this place. More than just a memory, it is as though the essence of them is still here… A static field cradles the grave in long crackling fingers. In the noise, a message: bring materials from this world. Sacrifice them here. Stabilise this anomaly.

This is a rather interesting message, what with the code-like component attached to the name. Davene. It’s a female name that means “beloved”, “little deer” and is the Hebrew form of “David.” The code is mysterious. Was Davene a child? Age 12, weight 80 lbs, perhaps? The “RL” of “RL0” does’t speak to me, unfortunately.

A Google search of the code leads to many things, one near the top being a PDF scan of a document dated 1846 from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, England, entitled Transits as Observed and Computations of Apparent Right Ascension [ PDF ] and on page A12, the tracking information of several celestial bodies is presented. What it might mean, were it even possibly relevant, I cannot say. And maybe it means nothing… It did remind me, to a degree, of the mysteries presented in the Waking Titan ARG leading up to the release of the Atlas Rises update.

What perhaps makes this even more mysterious is a message conveyed during Community Event #13, a few weeks back. Iteration: Mercury on the Anomaly, to whom Hello Games instructed us to speak in setting out on the mission, as part of their Beyond Development Update 6 notes, stated the following.

The voice of the static is…intoxicating. Staring into that rift is like a window into a dream. I see Soleth Prime. I see how I once was. An earlier version. And I feel raw, like the dream is looking directly back at me.

Those who had their eye on No Man’s Sky prior to its release may recall that Soleth Prime is the name of the planet shown in the famed, 2014 E3 preview video leading up to release.

YouTuber Procedural Traveller pointed all of this out in a video he posted a few days back discussing this enigmatic message and its reference to the early planet — the first planet in the No Man’s Sky universe, really — and the possibility that in the future we might be seeing worlds akin to Soleth Prime (or, perhaps, some worlds with the vibes of earlier versions of the game, I might suggest). Speculation, speculation… In the end, time will tell.

Arriving through the portal on Friday night to the event planet, I saw many ships arrayed about the place. I wandered about, visiting a few player-made bases, and then made my way to the Anomaly. Up the sheer cliff bordering the site I found a base someone had constructed that periodically dropped a series of balls down into the Anomaly area, making interacting with it a mild challenge. After the task was done, many of us were making a game of blasting the balls up the cliff face with our multitools. It was a crowded bit of fun rounding out the weekend event.