No Man’s Sky changed a great deal this morning, getting new modes and a ton of gameplay tweaks thanks to update 1.1, the largest one yet.


With this patch, No Man’s Sky is now broken up into three modes: Normal (the original No Man’s Sky), Creative (base-building mode), and Survival (which the developers describe as “a much more challenging endurance experience”). The folks behind No Man’s Sky say that patch 1.1, which they’re calling the Foundation Update, is “the first of many free updates.”

The patch notes are lengthy—you can read them all here—and include a ton of changes ranging from UI tweaks to “improved distribution of plant life.” My personal favorite: “Increased the number of different NPC character models generated per system.” No word on whether players can now see one another.


Patch 1.1 comes three months after the launch of No Man’s Sky, which has become a controversial game in part thanks to its creators’ lengthy silence. Shortly after release, players discovered that No Man’s Sky didn’t have some of the features director Sean Murray had talked about in the years leading up to launch. Players got angry. As a result, Murray and his team bunkered up, saying essentially nothing about the game and its features until now.

“If you could have lived our lives over the last months, you’d know how meaningful this is,” Murray wrote on Twitter this morning.