No Man's Sky: The Foundation Update

Today I realised this game has got me bad, something about it really clicks with me. I admit it's been a few weeks since I've played but coming back to it, everything feels fresh, crisp and new. The recent update has added features and removed some of the rough edges (figuratively and literally thanks to some anti-aliasing tweaks) .

The new quick bar and a few small UI changes make quite a difference, particularly for space combat which suddenly  feels more satisfying, I still have control sensitivity turned down but single handedly taking down 6 pirates while weaving through the new and improved asteroid fields was a thrill.

Terrain and structure generation has also been tweaked; it could be pure luck but my first new planet blew my mind and reminded me why I fell in love with the game originally. A rather nippy snow covered planet, with electric pink scars where bare ground showed through, forests of spindly trees with a few withered trunks and rare splendid firs glistening either from ice or their own pearlescent foliage. Orbs of Heridium and Nickel hung in the air, the crisp sunlight giving them a more ethereal appearance than usual. I then followed some of the largest and most expansive snakes of rock I had seen on any planet, down towards a small circular plateau where an abandoned base lay nestled between the rock formations. Around the base were flashes of neon as white snow gave way to bright pink caves filled with a disco of bio-luminescence. The sky was criss-crossed by trade routes as a space station hung just above the horizon, all watched over by the great eye of a black hole. This was to become my home planet and my first base.

Yup the first big new addition to this update is base building. It was rumoured a while back and now it's here we can understand it more. You won't be tied down to one planet and you wont lose your home in the vast cosmos, space stations now have teleporters that lead you right back home. Stations are also now visited by a number of specialists that you can recruit to your base, which helps the stations feel a little more lived in.




(Tip, early on it might help to find a Korvax station, but you'll need a Gek building specialist first.)

Building is actually more intuitive than I expected with holographic templates that snap into place and build instantly if you have the right materials (more on that in a bit). Setting up you base requires you to first find an abandoned hub building and recruit a building specialist, this specialist and any future recruits you meet will then give you a few quests to get things going. I haven't been able to find out how many of these quests there are yet but a dose of structured content is welcome and might be just what a few players were looking for.

Eventually your base will become very useful, creating tradeable resources, new tech and upgrades and offering extra storage space, you'll even learn how to place nav beacons, building scanners (now named signal boosters and thankfully no longer requiring bypass chips!) and deployable save points, oh and you'll be able to leave message pods behind for other players to discover, all of these structures can be placed wherever you need them.

The second big headline feature is that you can now dock on and purchase freighters ( the cheapest I've seen was 4mil credits - hopefully crashed freighters are added in the near future). Basically an extra inventory with super large slots for those looking to stockpile or trade resources. It's a shame that saving a freighter from pirates doesn't net you a discount but it does give you a chance to claim a reward from the Captain.

One other big addition won't grab any headlines but still brings a lot of new life to the game, new resources! Whole new elements to procure, often specific to particular biomes or even requiring new advanced tech to retrieve. These materials are tied into the all the new crafting recipes needed for base building, there's now more reason than ever to go out, gather and explore. It's even a little easier finding what you need as major elements on a planet can be detected from space and the planetside scanner has been upgraded too. To get started with your base you'll need Iron and then some fancy new Spadonium, extracted from cactus on a barren planet.

If this isn't intriguing enough there are also two new game modes, a creative mode to focus on base building without needing to track down resources and a rather brutal survival mode, for anyone that complained there was no challenge in the game previously.

Whatever you think of Hello Games and their lack of communication running up to this update, it's obvious their time has been well spent, doubly so when you read the patch notes and realise this is only the foundation of things to come. This might not be enough to appease those that cried/asked politely for refunds just yet, but if you're one of the folks that fell in love with the concept only to find you stopped playing for lack of content, then there is more than enough reason for you to return.

Full patch notes can be found HERE,