No Man’s Sky NEXT Patch Notes Are Live

No Man’s Sky’s biggest update since the game’s release is now live, adding a ton of new features, overhauls, and even full multiplayer support with three of your friends. There’s a laundry list of new changes that have come to the game, so let’s dive in and take a look at all the changes.

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

As you can see, that’s a laundry list of changes and overhauls. You can also check out the original patch notes blog to see more in-depth information on the patch and what it brings to the table. No Man’s Sky NEXT is now available on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.