No Man's Sky patch tests out improvements to its Pokemon-like battling update, like letting creatures poop more often

A new No Man's Sky update has been released to the game's experimental branch that brings some improvements to the Holo-Arena.

No Man's Sky recently received a big new update titled Xeno Arena, which introduces a Palworld-esque creature battling system (I'm sure there's another game with creature battling, but none are coming to mind), and while that may sound weird for a space exploration sim, it's actually a feature that fans had been requesting for years.

In a post on the Steam community page for No Man's Sky, Hello Games detailed what's new in the latest update to the game's developmental branch. These included some new changes to the Holo-Arena, from quality-of-life improvements like "Show level up progress for creatures after a Holo-Arena battle" and "Improved NPC reactions during Holo-Arena matches" and then some bug fixes and balance changes like "an issue that could cause overlapping UI when losing or winning a match at a Holo-Arena" and "NPC Holo-Arena opponents will no longer use a move that would cause their final pet to be knocked out."

Crucially, however, this update also includes a new balance change that allows creatures to poop more frequently, as the patch notes read: "Fixed an issue that prevented creatures from depositing faecium after being fed," effectively making this the laxative update.

Xeno Arena was certainly unexpected, but for the most part, people seem to really like it, which is a bit of a saving grace for fans of the genre when Pokemon Champions made a poor first impression on fans.

No Man's Sky updates like Xeno Arena take "2-3x" longer on Switch 2 and Steam Deck because Hello Games has to beat "impossible memory constraints," engineer says