Ever since the NEXT update, Hello Games has steadily been releasing new updates for No Man’s Sky to improve the game in various ways. Now they’ve released a brand new patch, which is an experimental one, and offers some visual improvements and also improves the game’s initial loading times by 30%.
The patch also brings a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements, not to mention several visual improvements, such as improved appearance of the HUD marker on players’ ships, visually improved exotic biomes, and also better looking clouds in 1440p and 4K resolutions.
As we mentioned earlier, this is an experimental update, which means that it won’t be automatically downloaded. Instead, you’ll have to choose to download it yourself through Steam’s Betas library setting. Hopefully, the team at Hello Games continues to regularly release such patches for the game to keep improving it.
Also, as you may have figured out, this seems to be exclusive to the PC version of No Man’s Sky, since you voluntarily have to download it from Steam. We’re assuming once Hello Games are satisfied with how it’s doing in its experimental phase, they will roll it out on the PS4 ands Xbox One as well. If you want to know the full list of changes that the new patch brings, you can check out the entire patch notes below. Also, be sure to check out our No Man’s Sky NEXT review.
Patch notes:
- Fixed an issue that prevented planets from being added to the Discovery timeline when exiting certain ship models
- Fixed an issue that prevented players from using the Pulse Engine to escape between waves of Sentinel space fighters
- Fixed an issue that could cause base NPC workers to become unresponsive after moving / deleting your base
- Substantially increased the length of time fuel lasts in the hydroponic trays
- Prevented an occasional crash on Xbox One X in scenes with a high node count
- Fixed a crash related to creatures
- Fixed a crash related to terrain generation
- Fix for an issue with PC shader compilation when the game is first booted which would occasionally result in a crash
- Various performance improvements
- Various improvements to load times (approximately 5-10% improvement to warp times, 30% improvement to initial game load)
- Fixed an issue that incorrectly limited the number of storage containers that could be built on the freighter
- Fixed an issue that could prevent construction in the freighter base
- Fixed an issue that could cause the ‘Nearby buildings’ scan on the signal booster to fail
- Fixed an issue that prevented exploration-focussed frigates from charging their scanners
- Fixed an issue that prevented damaged frigates from being completely repaired
- Fixed an issue that could cause the lobby not to display all available games on PS4
- Marked icons are now automatically cleared on arrival at the marked target
- Fixed a number of cases where the HUD would prompt to mark icons that did not need marking
- Improved target locking for ship PvP
- Improved the appearance of HUD markers on player ships
- Fixed a number of visual issues around using the Analyser Visor in very specific circumstances
- Improved the mapping of the Steam Controller
- Removed an obsolete building product from the blueprint analyser
- Combat music now triggers when fighting biological horrors
- Slightly increased the damage dealt by biological horrors
- Fixed an issue that could cause expedition rewards to artificially increase after save/loading
- Fixed an issue where the Personal Forcefield could be deployed on 0% charge
- Fixed an issue where the Mining Beam and other weapon effects displayed the wrong colour in multiplayer
- Fixed an issue where the screen on the Multi-Tool would display the wrong ammo count for the Blaze Javelin
- Fixed an issue where the Multi-Tool was invisible in Photo Mode
- Fixed an issue where the Personal Forcefield would remain in-world forever when cycling Alt Weapon modes
- Fixed an issue where meleeing while sprinting could cause an animation glitch
- Improved the appearance of clouds in 4K/1440p modes
- Visual improvements made to some exotic biomes
- Visual improvements made to the space station technology merchants
- Increased the visibility of underground toxic hazards
- Visual improvements to buried technology modules