No Man's Sky developer Hello Games has published the complete release notes for the game's day-one patch, and it contains more than just bug fixes.

The 1.03 update—which goes live August 8 for reviewers and those with early copies—makes fundamental changes to how the game plays. Most notably, there are now three set "paths" through which players explore the procedurally generated universe of No Man's Sky, each of which will have a "significant impact on what you see later in the game." The story has been rewritten to accommodate the change and allow for multiple endings.

The universe and planet generation criteria have also been changed; there's a deeper trading system; and new combat mechanics that include critical hit systems in space fights. Plus, lone explorers now have a greater chance of running into other players thanks to a tweaked player "collision" system that lets you scan for areas visited by other players. A full list of changes is posted below.

Those that have started the game already—most notably one intrepid player who paid a whopping £1,000 (about $1,300) for an early copy on eBay and began posting his experiences on Reddit—will find that the update doesn't apply to existing save files, while Hello Games is also wiping early player data from its servers. Essentially, those who picked up an early copy, by legitimate means or otherwise, will have to start again.

While Hello Games hasn't explicitly said it, it's likely that at least a few of the changes in the day-one patch are a result of leaks from early copies hitting retail. Not only were several gameplay videos posted online, but Reddit user Daymeeuhn also claimed to have reached the centre of the galaxy (the ultimate goal in the game) in around 30 hours using a cheeky exploit. Thanks to resource management tweaks, that exploit will not work following the patch.

The patch is the first of many for No Man's Sky, with Hello Games promising that future updates will "continue to be free." The ability to build bases and own giant space freighters, temporal antialiasing, and offloading rendering to the cloud are due in the next update.

"We're under a pretty intense spotlight right now," wrote Hello Games' Sean Murray in the patch notes, "and hopefully it's easy to imagine how hard it would be to switch off from that, or how deeply we care about people's first impression of the game. In fact most of us were back here the day after we went gold, working on this update."

Continued Murray: "This universe we've built is a pretty large canvas, we've got a lot of ideas. This is the type of game we want to be."

No Man's Sky 1.03 update notes