No Man's Sky NEXT Full Patch Notes

INTRODUCING NEXT (UPDATE 1.5)

Update 1.5, NEXT, introduces a full multiplayer experience, near-unlimited base building, command of freighter armadas, a graphical overhaul and more.

This update marks the two year anniversary of No Man's Sky, and a lot has changed. Please see Atlas Rises, Pathfinder, and Foundation for previous major updates.

This is an important next step on our journey.

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Multiplayer

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• Team up with a small group of friends and explore the universe together, or be joined by random travellers.



• Help friends to stay alive, or prey on others to survive.



• Fight as a pirate or a wingman in epic space battles with friends and enemies.



• Group up to build communal bases, farms, and racetracks, and share your creations with all players online.



• Explore the galaxy at your own pace, or progress together from the very start of the game and all the way through the story.



• Progress together through the tutorial and story, or explore freely.



• Invite your friends aboard your Freighter and take on challenging multiplayer missions from the Galactic Commission Station on your bridge.



• Communicate with other players vocally using a headset, and / or converse using text chat on PC.



• While wandering the galaxy solo, continue to experience chance encounters with strange floating orbs.


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Community Engagement

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In-Game Community Content

• Soon after the release of No Man's Sky NEXT, Hello Games has planned its first season of weekly content and community events.



• This will be free for all players, with no microtransactions. Take part in these community missions to unlock new rewards and customisations.



• Players will also be able to interact with Xbox One Mixer streamers by helping or hindering their gameplay.


Galactic Atlas Website

• NEXT marks the launch of a new website dedicated to the community, which we're calling the Galactic Atlas.



• The site features points of interest in the No Man's Sky Euclid Galaxy, and will grow in functionality and expand over time, in part through your feedback.



• Key Regional Hubs are marked, with discovery statistics and community events appearing soon.


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Base Building

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• Bases can now be built anywhere on any planet, high in mountains or underwater.



• Hundreds of new base parts have been added to unlock more creative possibilities.



• Teleporters can now be built anywhere on the planet surface, and the teleporter menu has been reworked for ease of use.



• Base complexity and size limits have been dramatically increased.



• Players can own multiple bases, spread across regions, planets or star systems.



• Sculpt the terrain around your base with the improved terrain manipulator.


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Third Person

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• The game is fully playable in third or first person, both on-foot and in ship.



• Ship controls in both views now allow for true low flight mode across the surface of planets.



• Communicate with other players using expressive gestures available from the quick menu.


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Character Customisation

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• Construct an Appearance Customiser in your base or freighter to personalise your appearance.



• Play as a Gek, Vy'keen, Korvax or Traveller / Anomaly.


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Freighter Enhancements

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• Assemble and upgrade a fleet of frigates, each specialised to excel in combat, exploration, trade, industry, or support. Command your frigates from the bridge of your freighter to complete real-time fleet missions.



• Call on your fleet for assistance in space battles, or deploy them to help you explore a specific system.



• Improved freighter base building allows for a truly custom capital ship.


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Crafting and Resources

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• All core substances and resources have been reworked and rebalanced to increase consistency and realism.



• Planetary resources have been expanded, with unique substances and items to find and refine based on the planet's biome and weather, as well as stellar classification.



• Deployable tech can be picked up and carried in your inventory.



• Crafting is deeper with the addition of buildable refiners. Convert raw substances into more valuable materials for constructing advanced products and base parts.



• Experiment with refiner recipes to discover all the possibilities!


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Procedural Tech

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• Discover unique procedurally generated technology to upgrade your Exosuit, Multi-Tool and Starships.


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Analysis Visor Enhancements

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• Quickly locate terrain resources and buried products with the improved analysis visor.



• Set short-term goals by tagging the markers of points of interest.



• Pinpoint your exact location on a planet with visible latitude and longitude coordinates.


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Missions and Structure

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• The opening section of the game has been overhauled, introducing new story elements and an early taste of advanced gameplay features, as well as a new mission chain for players with bases.



• Envoys in Space Stations offer rewards and tributes to high-ranking members of their Guilds



• Mission types have been expanded, with photography, feeding, freighter attack and defence, archaeology, and specialised hunting missions now available.


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Graphical Enhancements

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• Dramatically improved visuals bring more life than ever to planetary landscapes.



• Experience a greater sense of planetary scale with massively improved draw distance.



• Deep improvements to planetary terrain generation create more varied alien environments, featuring higher mountains and more navigable cave systems.



• Planet surfaces now look more interesting and representative from orbit.



• The universe is more diverse than ever with colour palette variety, dense forests and large trees, and abandoned and empty systems.



• New dynamic tessellation enables detailed terrain height maps without sacrificing performance. Tessellation will be rolling out in parity to all platforms that can support it very soon.



• Hazardous storms look more dramatic with new biome-specific particle effects.



• Significantly more detail added to ship, NPC, and building textures.



• Planetary rings of asteroids and improved space visuals make space more beautiful than ever.



• Explore vast oceans of visually improved bodies of water with new continental terrain shapes.



• Dynamic volumetric clouds create more realistic planetary atmospheres. Increased quality clouds will be rolling out in parity to all platforms very soon.


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UI Overhaul

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• The HUD has been remixed to both improve readability and reduce intrusion on the gameplay area.



• The visual location of messages is better prioritised to help emphasise critical information.



• Quality of life improvements make the build menu and the quick menu more efficient.



• Inventory stacks can now be split for a more streamlined experience.



• Players with freighters can summon any of their personal starship fleet at any time.



• Maintenance and repair interactions have had a visual and functional overhaul. Repairs now take place 'in-world', and can be carried out in incremental stages.



• Players interested in salvage can repair damaged ships + Multi-Tools by gathering the right components and fixing damaged slots.


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Space Station Marketplace

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• Purchase all your space exploration needs in the huge new Space Station Marketplace.



• Exploration, Fauna and Flora



• Find and excavate buried ruins with the Terrain Manipulator to unearth locked ancient treasures.



• Use the Terrain Manipulator to locate buried technology modules and turn the salvaged components into new base parts with the Blueprint Analyser.



• Some creature types will herd together, grazing and fleeing from danger as a group.



• Creatures now respond more enthusiastically to being fed, recognising you as a friend and alerting nearby creatures to the food source.



• Creature movements now appear more natural and intelligent, with improved AI and entirely revamped animations.



• Sentinel behaviours and animations have been improved. Players can stand their ground in combat, or take advantage of the time between reinforcement waves to escape and find a place to avoid Drone scans and searches.



• Find Navigation Data and use it in the overhauled Signal Booster to locate planetary structures.



• Survive the threat of new hazardous flora and fauna. Be careful if you touch the eggs...


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Audio

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• Creature voices are now more diverse, and NPC vocals have been updated to match their new set of animations.



• New foley for the player character is audible throughout the game.



• Ship sounds and combat audio have been improved.



• The game soundtrack is expanded with several new music tracks composed by Paul Weir.


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Patch Notes

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Third Person

• Third person camera for walking, jetpacking, swimming and in-ship flight

• New player models

• Completely reworked animation system

• New animations for players, as well as NPCs and creatures

• System and animations for gestures

• Character customisation

• Player character turns to look at points of interest

• New get in / out of vehicle effect

• Interactions show the player character where appropriate

• Warping in ship is in third person

• Resized various deployable tech to better fit third person mode

Missions

• Real time missions

• Scheduled missions

• Multiplayer missions

• Completely overhauled tutorial

• New mission types - photography, feeding, freighter combat, archaeology, and specialised hunting missions

• Guild envoy missions

Bases

• Bases can be built anywhere

• Players can own multiple bases

• Hundreds of new base parts

• Increased base complexity / size limits

• Joint base building

• Improved teleporting and selection between teleport destinations

• Improved terrain editor modes and options to be more intuitive

• Toned down saturation intensity of palette choices for colouring base building parts

• Base terrain editing now stops when you hit the limit rather than overwriting old edits

• Bases can now be deleted

• Improved system for placing base building parts

• Increased base building radius and made it expandable

• Disabled base auto uploading, and added manual controls

• Enabled downloading more than one external base from other players

Freighters

• Frigate fleets feature - including missions, upgrade system, system combat and exploration assistance

• Overhauled base building inside player freighters

• Reworked and added procedural textures to freighter bridge hologram planet

• Redesigned path from freighter hangar to bridge

• Improved speed of airlock doors opening on freighters

Crafting and Resources

• Reworked and rebalanced all core substances and resources

• Deployable tech can now be picked up

• Added refiner based crafting system

• Added Craftable ammunition

• Improved damage falloff on mining beam

UI / UX

• Additional markers visible in analysis visor

• Points of interest can be tagged from analysis visor

• Latitude / longitude displayed on analysis visor

• Improved HUD layout

• HUD lines dynamically hidden with the corresponding UI elements

• Improved notification layout

• Improved build menu

• Improved quick menu

• Inventory stack splitting

• New repair interface

• All player owned ships can now be summoned

• Added system for repairing damaged inventory slots

• Backpack showing in your inventory will now match customised character backpack

• Backpack bars display hazard protection and life support

• In-ship map now highlights enemies

• Improved docking indicators when flying

• Completely reworked shop UI

• Nanites no longer take up inventory slots

• Scanning ships shows their slot count

• Save slots are now sorted by timestamp

• Galaxy map can show multiple markers for each system

• Added dynamic suit protection inventory icon

• Inventory full notifications now take into account cargo slots

• Fixed camera voxel to star voxel in Galactic map

• Can pin base building recipes on the HUD

• Added danger icons to tentacle plants

• Improved tech and product pinning, with more detailed guides to obtaining the build requirements

• Improved compass

• Improved HUD marker icons for objects of interest

• Added multiplayer text chat on PC

Graphics and Planet Generation

• Improved fog and increased draw distance

• New terrain generation system for improved navigability and more varied earth-like and alien landscapes

• Reduced situations where cave props can be spawned above ground

• Improved particle systems fading out over distance

• Added support for extremely large biome props

• Improved and increased variety of clouds and cloud shadows seen from space

• Improved planet surface rendering from space

• Improved terrain lods and visuals when flying in from space

• Improved colour selection during planet generation

• Improved sky and fog colour selection

• Tightened triplanar texture blend areas

• New colour mapping system to create more varied and atmospheric visuals

• Improved tree density

• Tree size variation

• Added empty systems, with no current inhabitants

• Added abandoned systems, with derelict space stations

• Improved storm visuals

• Improved textures for ship, NPCs, and buildings

• Added planetary ring system

• Increased asteroids density in space

• Improved space visuals

• Added support for larger bodies of water

• Character shadows for first person gameplay

• Adjusted TAA settings to reduce shadow blurring on terrain

• Added particle effect when flying above water

• Splash particle effects

• Inventory and pause menu now uses depth of field to blur in-game camera

• Balanced intensity of lights in the Atlas station

• Updated model of hologram backpack in suit upgrade chamber

• Improved water surface and foam shaders

• Improved water reflections to better match terrain

• Improved imposter visuals and lighting to better match nearby objects

• Switched object and terrain fading to use Blue Noise to give smoother transitions

• Improved compression on some textures generated in-game

• Improved terrain texture blending and selection

• Improved sand and cave colour selection

• Improved beach blending and visuals

• Brightened cave interiors, especially at night

• Improved storm effect fading as you enter buildings

• Added gun model for ships

• New high quality tree models and textures

• Fixed an issue with landing pad UVs

• Improved drone, quad and walker models

• New drone texture effects

• Added more varied underwater and underground objects

• Improved appearance of Gravitino Balls

• Major improvements to biome object placement

• Improved crystal placement

• Improved marker distances for gameplay props

• Added terrain objects which cannot be destroyed by player ships

• Improved colours, brightness, saturation of creature textures

• Tweaked rock textures

• Improved scale of underground objects

• Tweaked poison blob particle effects

• Improved cave biome glowing plant lights

• Optimised cave biome prop performance

• Improved bushes and underwater plants

• Improved asteroid texture balance

• Improved abandoned slimey diffuse colours

• Improved under-foot dust effects

• Improved heavy air in caves

• Improved scale of gameplay plants

• Improved toxic grass diffuse texture

• Tweaked mountain fragments on certain biomes

• Improved vertex displacement on flags to make them wave nicer

• Improved smoke and damage effects on ships and distress beacons

• Modified frequency of wordstones, crates, underground props and damaged machinery

• Improved rare gem collection effect

• Improved ship trail effects

• New engine effect for ships

Space Stations and Buildings

• Overhauled space station interior

• New space station marketplace

• New style for stairs in space station

• Redesigned look of teleporter in space station

• Added variation to building interior layouts and props

• Added a small ramp to the drop pod for easier access

• Improved building frequency

• Added LOD system for base building parts to increase draw distances and complexities

Exploration, Fauna and Flora

• New underground ruins building type

• Buried technology modules and blueprint analysis

• Overhauled signal booster and navigation data input

• Procedurally generated technology

• Procedurally generated products

• Improved creature pathfinding

• Improved creature response to feeding

• Herd behaviour for creatures

• Improved scales and maximum sizes of creatures

• Improved sentinel drone behaviour, proximity indicator and escape gameplay

• Improved matching of creature body parts to their role

• Coprite improvements

• New hazardous fauna

• New hazardous flora

• Improved scan ranges for biome specific plants

• Added new armoured drone type

• Must use the terrain editor to mine resource deposits

• Improved Colossus speed and fuel tanks / consumption

• Different ship classes use different amounts of launch fuel

• New name generation system for planets / ships / weapons / creatures

• Increased variety in creature descriptions

• Nada + Polo's tasks are now tracked in the Mission Log

• Fancier descriptions for planetary weather conditions

• Changed starting Exosuit inventory size

• Increased the number of Exosuit cargo slots available to purchase

• Increased crafted item stack size in the Exosuit to 5

Controls and Combat

• Climbing traversal more challenging and rewarding

• Added ability to slide down cliffs

• Player movement is more dynamic

• Air resistance simulation for jetpack navigation

• Multi-tool manual holstering / unholstering

• Ship weapons can be used against ground targets

• Splash damage added to ship weapons when used against ground targets

• Improved low level flight, with destruction of terrain objects with which you collide

• Fixed jitter on physics debris pieces

• Stopped player colliding with tiny rocks on scorched biomes

• Crit points on sentinel drones and quads

• Combat scope module for the Multi-Tool

• Personal forcefield module for the Multi-Tool

• New grenade types

• Improved weapon alternative mode, also with better HUD display

• Sentinel drones can repair quads and walkers in battle

• Improved sentinel quadruped behaviour, pouncing, evade

• Improved walker behaviour with different attack modes

• Extra armour plating added to sentinels arriving in combat

• Fixed placement of off-planet markers and improved pulse drive flight towards marked destinations

Audio

• Updated creature vocals

• New third person foley for player and NPCs

• Additional loading music and a new track when starting normal mode

• Revised ship engine sounds

• Added low flying ship sounds

• Revised underwater sounds

• Improved combat audio and overhauled Quad and Walker audio

• New NPC vocals

• New Frigate audio

Stability / Balancing / Fixes

• Fixed a number of issues with atmospherics and water rendering on the horizon

• Fixed text clipping issues in some languages

• Fixed certain cases where opening the settings menu silently changed resolution

• Fixes for several uncommon out of memory crashes

• Fixed transition between lighting when flying to space

• Fixed and improved a number of situations for flattening terrain around buildings

• Fixed cases where terrain tiles could be missing or slow to appear while flying around or into planet

• Fixed crashed freighters having underground treasure too low to mine down to

• Prevented dead planets ever having atmospheres

• Prevented some story-critical buildings being placed underwater

• Fixed lighting issues with double sided leaf shaders

• Fixed repetitive tiling textures on some foliage leaves

• Fixed issues with loading some particularly large saves

• Fix for superconductive lock bug

• Voice chat quality and reliability improvements

• Fixed scan events for players who have managed to go off-grid

• Fix for edited terrain regions repeatedly regenerating themselves unnecessarily

• Fixed rocks showing up as the wrong colour on frozen biomes

• Fix occasional hang in asynchronous IO

• Fixes for non-instance LODs

• Added geometry streaming system

• Made numerous memory savings to improve overall stability

• Made the damaged machinery turn off the sparks and smoke effect when you have finished the interaction

• Rebalanced AI ship damage

• Balanced ship to ground target damage

• High performance(1440p) and High Quality(2160p) rendering modes added for Xbox One X

• Made numerous grass and foliage rendering optimisations

• Optimised per-frame renderer memory usage

• Optimised various engine components using async compute

• Various optimisations

• Various miscellaneous bug fixes

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greatgeek said:

There was pre-launch footage of players seemingly running into others and seeing character models. The orbs are possibly seen by players choosing to play "solo" (without PvP).

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5taquitos said:

That's my reading as well. Orbs are relegated to Solo play.

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