No Man's Sky Screenshot
Image: Hello Games

Last month, No Man's Sky celebrated its tenth anniversary. Hello Games' once-maligned (unfairly so, in my opinion) space exploration sandbox was once a quiet, solitary experience. Now it's a bustling, lively universe packed with human players, alien NPCs, and so, so much to do. But despite the celebrations, the studio asked people to be patient, as the next big update for the game–one of the biggest yet–needed just a little bit longer in the solar furnace. Today, the Cosmos update launches. A colossal free expansion that aims to make space every bit as interesting as those planets you've been exploring.

As ever, there's a huge page full of patch notes for this update, but if you'll allow me to summarize: Space is now nearly as populated as planets, with outposts and industrial structures to be found around each system, as well as space stations. All of the above can now fall under player control, with stations being repurposed and redecorated by players, while outposts and smaller structures can be designed from scratch. Space-walking is now more involved, and there's more work to be done in or around spacecraft.

Those modular space structures can also be found abandoned, with the wreckage of giant vessels and stations able to be found around the universe, looted, cut up for parts, and otherwise explored. Shipbreaking is potentially lucrative, but also carries risks, as each part stripped off a creaking hull increases the chance of you blowing your silly spacefaring self up. There are also asteroid fields that provide valuable resources, but are also home to pirates and other space jerks.

There's also an overhauled star-map screen, making navigating those systems a bit easier. Plus a whole page full of developer commentary, with spoken notes and anecdotes about the game's development. They've even crammed in a couple of bits from those early prototype days, from the trailers that got everyone so fired up (and disappointed), including a rideable alien diplodocus pet and the original, chunky, delta-wing ship design they first demoed the game with.

And lastly, suns are now a real, physical presence. If you feel like your sunscreen is sufficient (we recommend at least SPF 1,000,000,000), you can try flying into the fiery nuclear furnace at the heart of a system. You probably shouldn't, though. There's still so much more to the full patch notes, including some technical stuff like Foveated Rendering coming to the VR version, letting those with eye-tracking headsets (like the upcoming Steam Frame) have it save detailed rendering only for what you're actually looking at... But we'll leave the full deep dive for you to do on your own time.

To celebrate the launch of this massive update, No Man's Sky is once again going cheap, down to 60% off its £50/$60 base price. There's also a very steep discount available on the Hello Games Bundle, including everything the studio has made up to this point, including the excellent motorcycle platformer series Joe Danger and the clever puzzle adventure The Last Campfire. There's more to this studio than just giant space sandboxes. They're also doing a giant fantasy sandbox - NMS's swords & sorcery successor, Light No Fire, is still deep in development after all.