Use your favourite features in-game with our Desktop AppHello Games has marked ten years of No Man's Sky with Cosmos, its Update 7.0, and while the update touches everything from space-station management to a new community expedition, its real gift is to explorers. Here's what Cosmos adds for anyone who plays No Man's Sky to see what's out there.
For the full breakdown visit the official website!
The centrepiece for explorers is a new interactive star system map. Rather than drifting between planets and hoping to stumble on something, you can pull up a map of your current system and see exactly what's in it: celestial bodies, deep-space points of interest, and unidentified signals worth investigating.
Mark any planet or POI and your starship's navigation will guide you straight to it, turning deep space into somewhere you can plot a course through.
image: Hello Games
Cosmos scatters new alien-built outposts across inhabited systems, giving you fresh reasons to head out into the black. These remote buildings let you process rare minerals, trade with a resident quartermaster, and sign up for deep-space contracts, so each one doubles as both a destination and a source of onward objectives to chase.
image: Hello Games
The most atmospheric addition is the derelict hulk: a colossal shipwreck drifting in the depths of space. These are exploration set-pieces, a dangerous maze of rusted chambers and narrow chokepoints that you pick your way through on foot via spacewalk.
There's treasure inside, with valuable technologies and cargo waiting to be stripped from the wreck, but there's tension to match. Disturb the wrong thing and you risk compromising the hulk's structural integrity, so plundering one is a careful, nervy affair rather than a smash-and-grab.
image: Hello Games
If exploring deep space leaves you wanting to stay out there, Cosmos now lets you. Deploy a deep-space base computer and you can claim a volume of open space as your own, then build a free-floating orbital habitat, or a full-blown celestial city if you're feeling ambitious.
This is the base-building side of the update, but for explorers it means you're no longer tethered to a planet's surface; you can put down roots wherever the map takes you.
image: Hello Games
There's plenty more in Cosmos outside the exploration remit. You can prove yourself to the local authorities to become director of a space station, then style its interior, expand it with new rooms, and decorate the exterior to welcome or ward off passing Travellers. A new Alliances system lets you band together with other players to co-ordinate exploration and compete over territory, with the biggest and most active alliances climbing public leaderboards.
To mark the occasion, the Our Journey Continues expedition walks you through key moments from the game's ten-year history, rewarding a set of framed commemorative artwork and a majestic diplodocus companion, resurrected and remastered from the game's pre-release footage.
image: Hello Games
