Now in its ninth year, the overwhelmingly expansive sci-fi survival sim No Man’s Sky is transforming yet again. Another massive overhaul to the look and feel of its planets and solar systems has arrived in the form of the new Worlds Part II update. It’s the latest evolution of the game thanks to Hello Games’ ongoing work on its upcoming open-world survival RPG, Light No Fire.
“Across the universe we’re adding billions of new solar systems and trillions of new planets, and introducing new biomes and terrains without changing what people already love about the game,” Hello Games director Sean Murray wrote in Worlds Part II’s announcement on Wednesday. “It’s now so far beyond what we ever thought was possible when we started out.”
The update makes terrain more detailed and varied with bigger mountains and more striking features. Oceans can be “several kilometers deep” now as well, and a new lighting system lets water reflect clouds, stars, physical objects and ships, while creatures will create more convincing ripples. In fact, ocean spaces seem like a particularly notable part of the update, with Murray promising new creatures lurking deeper beneath the sea than ever before in the game.
“The team is extremely busy on Light No Fire,” he wrote. “Each time we push our engine to new places though we have this urge to share it with the community, with No Man’s Sky. Gas giants are truly epic, ten times bigger than our biggest planet. It’s truly end-game stuff to explore them with huge storms that rage across the surface.”
The latest changes are essentially the second half of the Worlds Part I update launched last year, which upgraded the nearly decade-old game to make it catch it up to modern tech and look new again. The new update will similarly include a giant patch of tweaks to the underlying game, as well as another new questline and new expeditions to some of the new types of planets, showing off all of the changes.
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