Latest No Man’s Sky expansion lets you captain it up like Picard
The Endurance update caps off six years of the same from Hello Games.
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A new No Man’s Sky update called Endurance has now gone live, bringing more of a Star Trek vibe to tootling around the stars. As with every other expansion for the game since its launch six (!) years ago, Endurance is free. It’s a name that Hello itself acknowledges is “fitting” for the journey the developer and players have been on since launch.
This one leans into the true Trekkie fantasy (or mine anyway) of being your own captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The Foundation update previously introduced the ability to captain your own freighter, but the Endurance update takes another pass and overhauls the whole experience of being in charge of a capital ship.
The update introduces NPC specialist crewmembers to your ship (yes!), a new bridge on the command deck with instant access to warping and teleportation (yes!!), external windows to watch the stars float by (yes!!!) and then exterior space walkways so you can walk around the outside of your giganto-ship and admire the view (yes yes yes!!!). I mean, as spaceship fantasies go, this is a good one.
In terms of the NPC crew: “Freighters now bustle with specialist crew members walking around your base. Engineers, biologists and technicians display their thoughts as they patrol the base, and your hired frigate captains and squadron pilots visit your capital ship between their deep-space excursions.”
You can also now do much more with the interior of the ship itself, with new themed areas for growing food and manufacturing, as well as new technology that will let you scan and analyse planets from space without having to set foot on them.
The update also makes changes to what Hello calls the “space atmospherics”, which is to say that asteroids are now more varied and numerous than ever before, and now thousands can appear on-screen at once. As well as this there are “Interstellar-style black holes, nebulae” and more to admire from your new fancy windows.
There’s a new expedition, which focuses on a capital ship voyage, and some new combat focused Nexus missions to boot.
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“Endurance coincides with No Man’s Sky’s 6 year anniversary and it remains amazing to us to see players still clocking up a bewildering number of hours in the game all these years later,” writes Hello Games co-founder and CEO Sean Murray. “We are eternally grateful for the support.”
Thefull patch notesare as follows:
Capital Ships
Freighter Base Components
Organic ships and frigates
Base building
Visual improvements and space atmospherics
Asteroids
Missions
Quality of life
Polestar expedition
Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as “[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.”
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