Hello Games has shipped Cosmos, update 7.0 for No Man's Sky, and it is the studio's answer to a complaint players have had since 2016: space itself was the least interesting place in a game about space. Ten years and dozens of free updates later, the fix is finally here, and it is enormous.
The update is live now across PS5, PS4, Steam, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Mac, Switch and Switch 2, free for everyone who already owns the game. Here is what actually changed.
You can run a space station now
The headline feature is station directorship. Prove yourself to a system's local authorities and you can take over its space station outright - not rent a room in it, run it. That means customising the exterior with monumental decoration modules, redesigning the interior layout, adding ancillary rooms, and managing the whole thing from a dedicated construction area.
Directors can also found galactic alliances, with custom names and banners, and invite other players in. You can belong to up to three at once, hop between allied systems via teleporter, and see your alliance ranked on activity leaderboards displayed at the station core. It is the closest No Man's Sky has come to persistent player-run factions.
Space is finally full of things
Every system now has an interactive star map showing celestial bodies and points of interest, and the space between planets has been populated with places to actually go: asteroid belts, ice fields, derelict hulks, debris fields, orbital platforms and infested outposts. The stars themselves are reachable - Hello Games describes them as "bright, spectacular, but ultimately lethal," which is an invitation if ever there was one.
Deep-space outposts are alien-managed stations that process rare minerals. You trade with quartermasters for maps and salvage, pick up delivery contracts from dedicated terminals, and occasionally find one overrun by a biological hazard, which is where the rare pathogen samples are.
Shipbreaking
The single most cinematic addition is salvaging colossal derelict hulks. These are volatile - hull integrity can fail while you are inside working - and stripping them for technology and cargo requires the right kit. Corvette-class ships get a Tractor Beam upgrade for hauling physical cargo, and the Gravitino Coil has been improved for extraction.
Spacewalks for everyone
Previously a niche mechanic, exiting your ship in open space is now available to every pilot from the Quick Menu, at any point in space. Movement has six degrees of freedom including roll. Cold protection technology drains while you are out there unless you are near a heat hazard, and explosions now knock you back, which is exactly the sort of detail that turns a traversal feature into a hazard.
Building in the void
Deep-space base computers let you build free-floating bases anywhere in space, and large asteroids double as natural platforms for star bases. There are new corridor parts and hundreds of decorative station components to go with it. The community screenshots of orbital truck stops and space diners have already started.
The anniversary expedition
Running alongside the update is Our Journey Continues, a roughly six-week expedition built as a retrospective. Each of its 40-plus milestones corresponds to a previous update from the last decade, with narrated developer notes from Sean Murray filed permanently into the Collected Knowledge catalogue - facts and anecdotes about how the game got here.
The rewards are pointedly archival: framed commemorative artwork from major updates, a golden Rasamama S36 starship, a Starbound v0.27 Multi-Tool rebuilt from original concept art, a Vintage Sentinel Interceptor reconstructed from pre-release footage, and a Diplodocus companion retextured and reanimated from pre-release content. There is also an astronaut cockpit bobblehead, because of course there is.
Twitch Drops run September 10-14 with base parts, ships, Multi-Tools, creatures, fireworks and appearance modifications - claimable even if you do not own the game yet.
Under the hood
Cosmos is also a technical pass. Hello Games rewrote the texture block compression encoder to cut artifacting, significantly improved terrain tessellation, reworked asteroid generation with better draw distances, and upgraded cloud rendering from orbit. There is volumetric fog, spotlight support on transparent objects, improved water and gas giant rendering, and better HDR handling.
On the performance side: Intel XeSS 3, NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 with 5x/6x Frame Generation, foveated rendering on PCVR using eye tracking, bindless textures on Xbox to cut CPU rendering load, roughly 13% smaller mesh data, 6-9% faster console load times from file handling changes, reduced multiplayer latency, and a batch of memory leak and out-of-memory crash fixes.
Ten years on from one of the roughest launches in modern memory, the pattern holds: Hello Games ships another one for free, and the thing everyone said was missing gets filled in.
