No Man’s Sky Foundations update: additions and changes
After announcing the update last week, Hello Games has pushed out the No Man’s Sky Foundations update across their platforms. Here is what you need to know.
It’s called “Foundations” because you can now build a home base in No Man’s Sky, giving you a place and planet you can always come back to when you’ve had enough of exploring the quintillion-planet universe. But the update also comes with so much more.
To summarize the major components of the update, No Man’s Sky can now be played in three different modes.
Normal is what the game has been. Survival is a more challenging version of the main game, featuring less resources, harder enemies, and more punishing environments. Creative mode allows players to just focus on building the home base of their dreams. You have access to unlimited resources and no building costs.
Base building is available in all three game modes. Even if you are busy exploring the galaxy, you can easily warp back to your home base by visiting any space station. Previously, one of the doors in space stations required a Level 1 Atlas Pass to open and within would be an extra exosuit inventory slot you could purchase. That door is now unlocked, and contains a portal inside which will transport you back to your home base.
Additionally, players will now be able to purchase their own freighter ship, which seems to function as a huge mobile home base. Freighters can be summoned to wherever you are in the galaxy and its interiors can be customized in much the same way as home bases can. Players can use freighters to stockpile goods and cargo.
While Hello Games has repeatedly stated that freighters can only be acquired “at great expense,” it turns out they are not unreasonably priced. I came across a freighter with 13 slots of inventory for just over seven million units.
While those are the two big updates to the game, other minor additions and changes have also been included. These changes bring elements of depth and complexity to the game that were sorely lacking before.
New elements have been added (hint: try destroying a sentinel), and elements that were once easily mineable now require advanced minor lasers to penetrate. Some new elements, like Temerium, even require Haz-Mat gauntlets to collect. Players can also build mining bots that help mine elements for them. Iron is no longer a useless but annoyingly ubiquitous substance. You’ll need it to charge your pulse drive, which used to run on Thanium9.
Scanning a planet from space no longer marks a single point of interest, but also gives you a breakdown of elements available on the planet without you ever having to land on it. For the entire list of changes, check out the Foundations update page on the No Man’s Sky official website.
With the new update, however, comes some new bugs. My previous save was more or less wiped out when I loaded it up. Whereas I ended my last session on a toxic planet chock full of valuable albumen pearls, I returned to the galaxy on the space station instead. All the planets and moons that I had previously explored had been re-rendered into something completely different (a.k.a. no more pearls).
Additionally, all technology I come across pops up as “new” even though I have already learned it. Some of the “newly discovered” technology are abilities I have already built and are using regularly. Aside from being annoying, this makes it hard for me to discern between tech that is actually new from the update and tech that I already know.
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Outside of that, however, this update has galvanized me to sink some more purposeful time into No Man’s Sky. I want to own and customize a freighter. I want to build a beautiful, sleek, tasteful home base where I grow my own garden of exotic new plants. This update will prove to be a step in the right direction for Hello Games, and will bring players back into the fold.