No Man's Sky: Beacon
Hello,
Our latest update is called No Man’s Sky BEACON, releasing today on June 4th, and it’s a big one! Not only that but we are releasing a Nintendo Switch 2 version ready for launch of the new console tomorrow on June 5th.
BEACON UPDATE
Players can become town mayor and take ownership of multiple settlements. You can construct buildings and upgrade each one, with new building types like jukebox bars where you can choose the music, merchants where you can build custom starships or even ponds you can chill and fish at.
One of the coolest additions in BEACON is the arrival of the robotic Autophage settlements. The most recent race introduced to No Man’s Sky, these large towns are built in their own image, an identifiable robotic style, all metal and mechanics. Unique Autophage building parts can be constructed in your own base and add a very hard sci-fi style to your dwellings and constructions.
For the ambitious Traveller, multiple settlements can now be owned and managed by one Overseer, so for instance you won’t need to abandon your existing charges to bring these new robotic citizens under your wing.
Settlement visitors will also notice a complete level up of building details across all settlement types, including weathered building materials, upgraded settlement buildings and new settlement utilities.
Each inhabitant can be conversed with, with their own abilities and attributes to manage. As town mayor you’ll be enlisted to welcome new settlers, resolve disputes, and make choices to create prosperity.
A well managed settlement can make their owners rich in resources, but they need to be protected. Travellers can hire a squadron of wingmen, who will now defend towns when they come under attack from roving pirates.
Away from the huge settlement makeover, BEACON offers many more quality of life improvements which the community will love, such as the ability to change or even disable the voice communicator of your exosuit, and improved base part snapping to name just a few.
We introduced Cross-Save for No Man’s Sky at the end of last year to a limited few to ensure it was robust and that people’s thousand hour saves weren’t in jeopardy. Ever since we’ve slowly been opening up to more and more players and, with BEACON, I’m happy to announce that we are opening up Cross-Save fully to the entire player base. Now everyone can continue their travels no matter what platform they are playing on.
The full patch notes for BEACON are available here.
NINTENDO SWITCH 2 EDITION
Today we’re pleased to announce that No Man’s Sky is a launch title for Switch 2 and existing Switch owners can upgrade for free!
For the last year we’ve had this secret room with some Switch 2 dev-kits from Nintendo. New platforms are always exciting and our small team has loved pushing the new hardware to its limits.
When we undertook the challenge of getting No Man’s Sky onto Switch 1, it was a bit of a technical miracle. We were right at the edge of what was possible. Our Switch 2 Edition is a huge leap forward from there.
The extra power has allowed us to add full Multiplayer to the Switch 2 edition (which was missing from Switch 1). We also support cross-save and cross-play from Day One, so players can continue seamlessly across all their devices.
We’ve massively pushed the density and level of detail out. We’re rendering significantly more than before, at a higher resolution and improved framerate.
The Switch 1 version of No Man’s Sky was already pushing boundaries, it was maybe the only game to support FSR2 (AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 2) on Switch. With Switch 2 we have added high-res textures support and increased the pixel density in both TV and handheld mode.
The resolution of the UI has been increased, we support touch screen, gyro controls, cross-save, just so many little touches that make No Man’s Sky feel at home on Switch 2.
From day one, new players are benefiting from 9 years of updates, just tons of huge additions. We’ve been working on this for a year, but releasing on June 5th, our Switch 2 Edition is just another free update for existing players.
It’s been fun to see Travellers exploring the universe in search of alien remains since we released the RELICS update last month, creating ever-wilder creature permutations and turning their bases into mini-museums. BEACON is the third update of the year and there’s plenty more planned. I’m so proud of the small team for continuing to pour such passion into this game we love so much.
Our journey continues.
Sean
P.S. If you feel so inclined, please take a moment to wishlist our next game, Light No Fire, here.