No Man's Sky Cosmos is Hello Games' latest update, and it's making enormous changes to space itself after 10 years.
Cosmos is out for free today, September 9, hot on the heels of the big 10th anniversary blowout.
"No Man’s Sky is often referred to as 'a Space Game', it’s a huge part of our game, but we’ve never really updated space since release," Hello Games says of the update.
Space has certainly changed now. Cosmos is headlined by space station ownership, which Hello Games says "must be our most requested feature since launch."
"Finally players can buy the space station for themselves! Build and decorate it both inside and externally, and some wild creativity is possible. You can create your own themed Station as your own clubhouse and have friends come and visit."
To help build your space station, you might want to pay a visit to "space hulks," which are basically big clusters of resources floating in space. With help from a gravity gun and "a new tractor beam fitted to your ship," you can strip these hulks for materials. The kicker is that too much structural damage to a hulk will cause it to melt down and explode, so you'll need to prioritize and work quickly.
These space hulks also show off "our new volumetric lighting tech," says Hello Games boss Sean Murray.
Luckily, you can enlist the help of new player alliances for the job. "As an alliance, you can work together to build a networked empire of different stations and rise the new leaderboards to compete for the largest, richest or most prominent alliance," Hello Games says.
That network will be easier to navigate thanks to a new star map that reveals points of interest, including "whole new strands of missions and exploration," whenever you warp to a system.
New points of interest introduced in Cosmos include outposts where you can trade with aliens, bio-wrecks to be "cleared out and reclaimed," asteroid belts with rare crystals, and orbital bases that "can be built ANYWHERE in space." You can even put a star base on a "rare" large asteroid if you want.
And you know what, screw it, while we're at it, go to the sun. "Finally players can try to undertake a perilous journey to reach the center of their own star system!" says Hello Games.
This is all bookended by a new Expedition that packs 10 years of No Man's Sky updates – a whopping 40 of 'em – into a playable museum. "It’s been a real joy to revisit some of those moments for us," the studio adds.
"This has been a wild undertaking for our team," Murray says in a Cosmos deep dive video. "So many things that we never thought we'd do. Having alliances of tens of thousands of players, real communities working together, claiming space stations. It's pretty cool, but it's been a lot of work."
A typically enthusiastic Murray says Cosmos "creates foundations for the future," making good on his threat to release free No Man's Sky content forever.
10 years of No Man's Sky: How Hello Games and Sean Murray keep getting away with it.
