No Man’s Sky (2016) has been on a roll lately with its continuous updates ever since its big ‘Beyond’ refresh in Summer 2019, which brought along with it VR support for PS4 and PC versions of the game. Now, developers Hello Games have released its ‘Living Ship’ update, which brings the first new starship since ‘Atlas Rises’, it’s 1.3 update released in 2017.
Hello Games founder Sean Murray says in a Steam blog post that the update presents a new series of missions that takes players through the ancient Korvax experiments that led to the birth of the ship-like interstellar beings. Starting today, players will be able to incubate, grow, and fly their own living ship by visiting the Space Anomaly and following “the call of the Void Egg.”
Here’s Murray’s description of the new living ships:
These beautiful, organic, slightly psychedelic ships are uniquely grown (and, as with everything in the No Man’s Sky universe, procedurally-generated).They can’t be upgraded in the same way as a traditional ship: each one is individually hatched, with a unique set of internal organs that determines its abilities. If you want a fast hyperdrive, you’ll need to nurture the right sort of life within your ship…
As much attention has been given to the interior of the ships as the exterior. Void ships house you within strange, organic cockpits, requiring players to fly their ship by grasping vein-covered tendrils. It looks and feels suitably unsettling to fly in VR!
The Living Ship update also includes new discoverables such as “new space encounters to the off-planet experience,” the studio says, as well as “[s]trange new lifeforms and mysterious objects [awaiting] between the planets, bringing more variety and unique experiences to space travel.”
Furthermore, Murray reveals that this January has seen more players than any previous year. In-keeping with its more regular updates, Murray also calls this update “hopefully the first of many in 2020.”
The Living Ship update comes hot on the heels of the ‘Bytebeat’ update in December and the ‘Synthesis’ update in November, which brought with it VR creature riding, VR photo taking, and a number of quality of life updates.