Hello Games released today a new update for No Man’s Sky, dubbed Origins.

It features billions of new planets, volcanoes, weather systems, NPCs, and much more.

The changes are so extensive, the patch notes read as if Origins is a brand new game.

If Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky can be defined by anything, it’s undoubtedly the developer’s dogged work to ensure we don’t remember 2016’s disastrous launch. Hitting that rock bottom was a catalyst pivotal to No Man’s Sky’s well-documented redemption arc.

No Man’s Sky Has An Epic Update

Today’s new update, dubbed Origins, is no different.

Origins is no run of the mill update; it’s colossal, much in keeping with the Beyond and Next updates, but bigger, more ambitious, targeting some of the game’s core fundamentals and dramatically expanding them.

Origins appends billions of new planets to No Man’s Sky’s existing 18 quintillion worlds, vastly deepens the diversity of planetary flora and fauna, adds volcanoes, sand-worms, more complex weather systems, biomes, alien structures, lore, meteors, gravitational anomalies, insects, wild robots, planetary NPC encounters, myriad quality of life improvements, and much, much more.

Origins’ Patch Notes Are No Joke

As they so often do when it comes to No Man’s Sky, the patch notes are extensive. They aren’t fashioned into a lengthy read for the illusion of quantity; there’s just so much Hello Games has changed, enhanced, and introduced. They read as if Origins is a brand new game.

Previous updates, of which there’s been no less than five in 2020 alone, focused on giving players activities and interactions, while Origins appears to target the very sandbox that underpins No Man’s Sky. It’s a universal facelift that will take dozens of hours, if not more, to experience in any meaningful sense.

Veteran players may notice remnants of the launch build, ghost ships upon which Hello Games has stacked so many new features and things to do they’ve become unrecognizable. In many ways, No Man’s Sky 3.0, as Hello Games is describing Origins, is arguably one of the most significant changes to date.

It’s an update that appears to channel No Man’s Sky roots as a limitless, open-ended sandbox ripe for exploration, re-infusing the game with that sense of excitement at the prospect of what might be stumbled upon in the next solar system.