No Man's Sky's big 4.0 update is out now with some very lengthy patch notes
Running outer space.
No Man's Sky's big new 4.0 update - now officially titled Waypoint - is finally out in the wild. But while developer Hello Games broke from tradition for this latest releases, revealing some of its additions ahead of launch, the studio has now shared some extremely lengthy patch notes, discussing its contents in considerably more granular detail.
The top-level stuff we already knew about; as Hello Games boss Sean Murray told Eurogamer earlier this week, Waypoint - which arrives alongside a new Switch port for No Man's Sky - is less about big new additions and more about major quality of life improvements.
To that end, Hello Games had previously teased a bunch of rejigging and streamlining intended to turn No Man's Sky's last six years of updates "into a more cohesive whole", as well as a new, less grindy Relaxed mode, a Survival mode revamp, plus extensive options for custom games.
No Man's Sky's newly released patch notes, though, break those core new features down considerably further. Inventories, for instance, have now jettisoned the somewhat redundant general storage tab and kept inventories designed specifically for equipped technology upgrades and cargo. Both have been substantially expanded, and now feature extremely useful filters to make it easier to find stuff.
It's worth noting that limits have been put on the number of tech upgrades of a single type the inventory will support, but excess tech can now be bundled into packages and transferred over for use in your other ships, weapons, and so on.
In fact, nearly all menu elements have been reshuffled and redesigned to make information easier to locate, with re-organised areas for milestone progress, the item catalogue, and guide, plus helpful new features such as a crafting tree visualiser and refiner/cooking recipes being saved once discovered through experimentation. It's now even possible to see all the lore you've previously unlocked relating to No Man's Sky's various plot lines, should you have lost track over several hundred hours of play time.
Elsewhere, the game now features a proper autosave system which will constantly record progress throughout play (manual saves are still available should you want to wind back for any reason), and an extensive range of difficulty options let players independently tweak the parameters of any session on the fly - perhaps disabling hostile encounters or increasing resource payouts to reduce the grind.
Additionally, Waypoint brings a wealth of visual upgrades impacting the likes of ancient alien structures, beacons, holograms, teleporters, the Space Anomaly, and even Atlas encounters. There're also rare asteroids to be discovered, new personal trade rockets that let players fire unwanted goods into space to sell without needing to be near a Galactic Trade Network point, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 support on PC, and a load more. Full (and even more lengthy) patch notes can be found on Hello Games' website.
As for Switch, players on Nintendo's platform can pick up a selection of nifty exclusive rewards from the Space Anomaly - namely two ships decked out in the console's iconic blue/red colour scheme combo - by connecting to No Man’s Sky's servers before 7th November 2022.