MAJOR No Man's Sky update for 24 July 2018

Via No Mans Sky website:

Multiplayer

• Team up with a small group of friends and explore the universe together, or be joined by random travellers.
• Help friends to stay alive, or prey on others to survive.
• Fight as a pirate or a wingman in epic space battles with friends and enemies.
• Group up to build communal bases, farms, and racetracks, and share your creations with all players online.
• Explore the galaxy at your own pace, or progress together from the very start of the game and all the way through the story.
• Progress together through the tutorial and story, or explore freely.
• Invite your friends aboard your Freighter and take on challenging multiplayer missions from the Galactic Commission Station on your bridge.
• Communicate with other players vocally using a headset, and / or converse using text chat on PC.
• While wandering the galaxy solo, continue to experience chance encounters with strange floating orbs.

Community Engagement

In-Game Community Content

• Soon after the release of No Man's Sky NEXT, Hello Games has planned its first season of weekly content and community events.
• This will be free for all players, with no microtransactions. Take part in these community missions to unlock new rewards and customisations.
• Players will also be able to interact with Xbox One Mixer streamers by helping or hindering their gameplay.

Galactic Atlas Website

• NEXT marks the launch of a new website dedicated to the community, which we’re calling the Galactic Atlas.
• The site features points of interest in the No Man’s Sky Euclid Galaxy, and will grow in functionality and expand over time, in part through your feedback.
• Key Regional Hubs are marked, with discovery statistics and community events appearing soon.

Base Building

• Bases can now be built anywhere on any planet, high in mountains or underwater.
• Hundreds of new base parts have been added to unlock more creative possibilities.
• Teleporters can now be built anywhere on the planet surface, and the teleporter menu has been reworked for ease of use.
• Base complexity and size limits have been dramatically increased.
• Players can own multiple bases, spread across regions, planets or star systems.
• Sculpt the terrain around your base with the improved terrain manipulator.

Third Person

• The game is fully playable in third or first person, both on-foot and in ship.
• Ship controls in both views now allow for true low flight mode across the surface of planets.
• Communicate with other players using expressive gestures available from the quick menu.

Character Customisation

• Construct an Appearance Customiser in your base or freighter to personalise your appearance.
• Play as a Gek, Vy’keen, Korvax or Traveller / Anomaly.

Freighter Enhancements

• Assemble and upgrade a fleet of frigates, each specialised to excel in combat, exploration, trade, industry, or support. Command your frigates from the bridge of your freighter to complete real-time fleet missions.
• Call on your fleet for assistance in space battles, or deploy them to help you explore a specific system.
• Improved freighter base building allows for a truly custom capital ship.

Crafting and Resources

• All core substances and resources have been reworked and rebalanced to increase consistency and realism.
• Planetary resources have been expanded, with unique substances and items to find and refine based on the planet’s biome and weather, as well as stellar classification.
• Deployable tech can be picked up and carried in your inventory.
• Crafting is deeper with the addition of buildable refiners. Convert raw substances into more valuable materials for constructing advanced products and base parts.
• Experiment with refiner recipes to discover all the possibilities!

Procedural Tech

• Discover unique procedurally generated technology to upgrade your Exosuit, Multi-Tool and Starships.

Analysis Visor Enhancements

• Quickly locate terrain resources and buried products with the improved analysis visor.
• Set short-term goals by tagging the markers of points of interest.
• Pinpoint your exact location on a planet with visible latitude and longitude coordinates.

Missions and Structure

• The opening section of the game has been overhauled, introducing new story elements and an early taste of advanced gameplay features, as well as a new mission chain for players with bases.
• Envoys in Space Stations offer rewards and tributes to high-ranking members of their Guilds
• Mission types have been expanded, with photography, feeding, freighter attack and defence, archaeology, and specialised hunting missions now available.

Graphical Enhancements

• Dramatically improved visuals bring more life than ever to planetary landscapes.
• Experience a greater sense of planetary scale with massively improved draw distance.
• Deep improvements to planetary terrain generation create more varied alien environments, featuring higher mountains and more navigable cave systems.
• Planet surfaces now look more interesting and representative from orbit.
• The universe is more diverse than ever with colour palette variety, dense forests and large trees, and abandoned and empty systems.
• New dynamic tessellation enables detailed terrain height maps without sacrificing performance. Tessellation will be rolling out in parity to all platforms that can support it very soon.
• Hazardous storms look more dramatic with new biome-specific particle effects.
• Significantly more detail added to ship, NPC, and building textures.
• Planetary rings of asteroids and improved space visuals make space more beautiful than ever.
• Explore vast oceans of visually improved bodies of water with new continental terrain shapes.
• Dynamic volumetric clouds create more realistic planetary atmospheres. Increased quality clouds will be rolling out in parity to all platforms very soon.

UI Overhaul

• The HUD has been remixed to both improve readability and reduce intrusion on the gameplay area.
• The visual location of messages is better prioritised to help emphasise critical information.
• Quality of life improvements make the build menu and the quick menu more efficient.
• Inventory stacks can now be split for a more streamlined experience.
• Players with freighters can summon any of their personal starship fleet at any time.
• Maintenance and repair interactions have had a visual and functional overhaul. Repairs now take place ‘in-world’, and can be carried out in incremental stages.
• Players interested in salvage can repair damaged ships + Multi-Tools by gathering the right components and fixing damaged slots.

Space Station Marketplace

• Purchase all your space exploration needs in the huge new Space Station Marketplace.
• Exploration, Fauna and Flora
• Find and excavate buried ruins with the Terrain Manipulator to unearth locked ancient treasures.
• Use the Terrain Manipulator to locate buried technology modules and turn the salvaged components into new base parts with the Blueprint Analyser.
• Some creature types will herd together, grazing and fleeing from danger as a group.
• Creatures now respond more enthusiastically to being fed, recognising you as a friend and alerting nearby creatures to the food source.
• Creature movements now appear more natural and intelligent, with improved AI and entirely revamped animations.
• Sentinel behaviours and animations have been improved. Players can stand their ground in combat, or take advantage of the time between reinforcement waves to escape and find a place to avoid Drone scans and searches.
• Find Navigation Data and use it in the overhauled Signal Booster to locate planetary structures.
• Survive the threat of new hazardous flora and fauna. Be careful if you touch the eggs...

Audio

• Creature voices are now more diverse, and NPC vocals have been updated to match their new set of animations.
• New foley for the player character is audible throughout the game.
• Ship sounds and combat audio have been improved.
• The game soundtrack is expanded with several new music tracks composed by Paul Weir.

Patch Notes

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