No Man's Sky NEXT is double the size of the original game - all the changes and patch notes here

If you're in any doubt as to the amount of work Hello Games has put into No Man's Sky NEXT, today's update is almost 10GB in size.

That doesn't sound like much in this era, but it's over twice the size of the original game with its Atlas Rises, Pathfinder and Foundation updates applied.

No Man's Sky arrives two years after the troubled release of the original game. It brings with it massive improvements including headline changes such as multiplayer for 4 people, a graphical overhaul, a third person view and almost endless building. But it also includes hundreds of smaller improvements and tweaks.

Oh, and it also arrives on the Xbox One fore the first time.

Here they all are in the epic patch notes below:

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