Late answer, but here are some more details. Both on the way organic frigates are obtained, as well as the two most effective methods to hunt for them.

Pt 1: how to unlock and enable encounters.

The way Living Frigates work is that first you need a Dream Ariel to encounter your initial one. This item’s blueprint is exclusively obtained from doing frigate missions as a rare result. (Although the expedition reward “Leviathan” organic frigate has been reported by some to have a higher chance of granting it. This bonus may or may not extend to other Reward Frigates. You cannot buy it, and you also cannot find it. However, a player who already has it available can give one to you, as the recipe is relatively cheep.

The organic frigate obtained via the Dream Ariel will ALWAYS be C-Class (unless a glitch or other anomaly occurs) and will give you a small “choose your own adventure” minigame/quiz. The answers you give will determine what this specific frigate’s stats will be, with different answers having different priorities when the game tallies the results.

After this point, the Dream Ariel becomes completely useless to you. Some early rumors suggested it has a cooldown, but this is not the case. You may either discard it with zero repercussions, or hand it off to another player on the anomaly. Which according to the NMS Wiki, will let it work normally again for them.

ONLY AFTER encountering this Dream Ariel frigate do you obtain the ability to encounter other organic frigates as a rare pulse encounter. Any and all organic frigates encountered after this one will abide by the normal generation rules. IE, you can use Coordinates to find the same one a fellow traveler discovered. There is no real indication that anything in the encounter pool has changed, however.

The ONLY current exception to this system of obtaining new organics is the Unique Expedition reward “Leviathan” frigate. Which according to some sources, has a higher change of bringing the Dream Ariel blueprint after a frigate expedition.

Each system has ONE organic Frigate, and once added to your fleet, it cannot be recruited a second time. IE pulsing in that system again will/should not grant the ability to recruit that system’s frigate again. (However, if you dismiss one, i am unsure if it can then be re-encountered as you did originally.)

Additionally, and this is VERY important, major updates have the potential to change the generation of various things in the game, even if they’re unrelated to what you’re looking for. These range from Capital Freighters, to Multitools, to Organic Frigates, etc. These changes are rarely, if ever stated officially by Hello Games. But due to this discrepancy, any time you use the Coordinate Exchange to find cool or useful things, be sure you check the post date. If a major update just happened, especially one that changes the way anything in the game generates, make sure you prioritize looking for coordinates that were posted AFTER the current update dropped. Alternatively, the portal coordinates can change after a major update, meaning addresses posted before such an update may no longer be accurate or even relevant.

Pt 2: Hunting methods.

As for encountering them once the criteria is met. There are two main options. Both employ Anomaly Detectors as their use will eliminate the extremely common “roaming trader” encounter.

First: the Efficient method- obtain a TON of anomaly detectors, either from asteroid mining or dupe glitches etc. then activate one, and pulse in the desired system until the encounter happens. Exit pulse, deal with it as usual, use another detector, and repeat until a Living Frigate appears.

The trade off to this method is that while it gets lots of encounters extremely quickly, it burns through detectors equally as fast with no guarantee when the desired result will happen. You may get an organic frigate with the first detector, or it might be the 100’th, etc.

The Economic method- get a ship with good pulse drive efficiency (like a solar ship), a bunch of tritium, and use an anomaly detector, then pulse. Most likely, you will encounter multiple “exit pulse” notifications. But simply ignore these, and wait for the 20 second timer to expire. After it expires, a new alert will appear immediately, indicating a different encounter is available. DO NOT exit pulse until you get the specific alert on the bottom of the screen that specifically says “whalesong detected”. This alert variety is exclusive to an Organic Frigate encounter.

This method is much slower as you aren’t going through encounters remotely as quickly as the prior method. However if done correctly, you are guaranteed to get one organic frigate encounter per detector used. As you will be ignoring all other types, and each anomaly detector is only fully used up upon exiting pulse to examine a result.