Hello, No Man’s Sky turns 10 in August, and we feel very lucky that we still get the chance to work on it every day. What we love about sci-fi, and about No Man’s Sky, is that it can be a canvas for so many ideas. Our last update introduced Pokemon-style pet battling, which players have put a ton of hours into, but takes place on just a small table… our next update is something much larger….

Something new, huge and foreboding is hanging in the sky above planets. Unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Players are going to need a combined community effort to figure out what is going on. Travellers will boot up to be greeted with a personality test, dividing players into three factions, each will need to co-operate, strategise and compete to counter the Hive of Glass, an existential threat to the universe.

A war effort is being launched from the Nexus, with defenses rapidly being constructed, and a new bulletin page tracking progress. Your contribution to the face-off with the Hive is being logged for all to see in both the Anomaly and the Galactic Atlas (https://galacticatlas.nomanssky.com/). Travellers will want to keep a constant eye on which squad is contributing the most to the war effort. The most effective faction will be memorialised in the Space Anomaly for all time!

Epic space battles are at the core of science fiction, and The Swarm update brings our biggest and most epic space battles to date. The Hive of Glass protects itself by releasing swarms of robotic drones, creating an awesome spectacle of battles with hundreds of ships. The Hive itself is a weapon too, with the iris opening to release the largest weapon we’ve ever seen in No Man’s Sky. A laser capable of destroying freighter fleets and perhaps even something as large as a space station…

While in space there are huge battles, on planet there is investigating and pillaging the remains of crashed drones (using the newly-acquired Gravity Gun we introduced earlier this year). Shot down drones need to be salvaged and researched. There are miniature planetary swarms to defeat, and research efforts to sabotage the swarm’s network. The secrets of the Hive’s origins and weaknesses can be uncovered and shared with your fellow rebels.

As well as saving the universe, there are a host of rewards, including a full suit of armour that has a retro sci-fi feel, a new rifle, huge new  jetpack and much more.

I love that this year we’ve had players collecting trash with a new gravity gun, battling pets in  the Xeno Arena, and now fighting off a high action threat to the universe in The Swarm.

The prospect of all existing Travellers converging on a single area of the universe to take the largest space battles to date, against the back-drop of an ominous, mysterious Death Star like construct, with the ability to destroy space station sized objects… is going to make for some exciting weeks ahead for us and for players. We can’t wait to see how this plays out.

Our journey continues.