In mid-July, Hello Games released the No Man’s Sky Worlds Part I (v5.0) update, one of the most impactful updates the game has seen in the eight years since its launch. The Guildford, UK gamemaker brought a number of new rendering and terrain technologies from it’s upcoming title Light No Fire back into No Man’s Sky, giving it a dramatic visual boost with incredibly realistic water and clouds, as well as a number of new / refreshed biomes. Digital Foundry recently called this move “phenomenal,” and “unprecedented.”
Since its release, I have been greatly enjoying exploring the newly upgraded universe that the Worlds update brings and, along the way, have taken photos and videos of some of the more fascinating worlds I’ve encountered. To convey some of the new vistas that can be seen in the game for those who may have stepped away from the game for a while — or just the curious — I have put together a chill sort of video (well, I did get sucked into a vortex at one point…) of myself wandering about some of these refreshed worlds, around 30 in all.
What will No Man’s Sky Worlds Part II bring, I wonder?
Digital Foundry Praises Hello Games for “No Man’s Sky Worlds” Update
Easily my favorite go-to for no-nonsense, highly-technical game analysis is Digital Foundry. DF brings news and deep-dive looks at modern (and retro) games using custom capture and analysis tools to deliver unique insight into the titles gamers know and love. As a tech-minded gamer and developer, I feel they are without peer.
In response to Hello Games’ recent release of the No Man’s Sky Worlds Part I update (v5.0), Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Alex Battaglia discussed in a recent video just how monumental and untraditional the release of this massive update — eight years after the game’s launch — really is.
Here, I wanted simply to share the video and some of what was said about just what Hello Games has done, here.
Ok, so this kind of came out of nowhere and, what can I say, I think it’s pretty terrific. No Man’s Sky received a massive update this week and it looks like — the argument seems to be from Hello Games — that, it’s like, “Ok we’ve developed this fantastic new rendering technology for our brand new game that’s coming up [Light No Fire] but what we’ve actually done is to kind-of inject it into our old game, and it’s been transformed in the process.”
…and I think what’s fantastic about this particular update is that they didn’t really need to do it. All eyes are on the next game, right? But, they’ve turned what they’ve invested time-wise into this new game into an update for No Man’s Sky — and it’s just phenomenal. I just can’t quite get my head around it. Is this unprecedented?
Richard Leadbetter, Technology Editor at Digital Foundry
For myself and many others it seems, the Worlds Part I update has truly been transformative as far as the look and feel of wandering through the No Man’s Sky universe.
A Few Words About “The Wipeout Ship” in No Man’s Sky
Back in February, Hello Games released No Man’s Sky Omega (v4.5) which brought the Omega Expedition as well as a variety of new elements to the game, including the ability to defeat and claim a pirate dreadnaught, a new mechanism for starting expeditions from within an existing savegame, a rework of the Atlas Path mission, and the Atlas Sceptre staff Multi-Tool. But, of all the new gameplay elements, what stood out the most to me was the addition of a sleek new starship, rather different in appearance than others in the game.
Known as the Starborn Runner, this addition really brought a smile to my face, and to those of many other oldschool gamers out there. Featuring “a localized vector field allowing it to hover above solid planes,” this new ship is very clearly a nod from Hello Games to the Wipeout series ( or wipE′out″ ), so similar is it in visual and mechanical design to the ships in that acclaimed anti-gravity racing series.
For those unfamiliar with the franchise, some history. Wipeout is a futuristic racing game developed by Psygnosis and released in 1995 as an original Playstation launch title. Set in the year 2052, the game sees players compete in races across various futuristic tracks and settings, piloting anti-gravity ships that are armed with various weapons to help eliminate the competition. Accompanying the gameplay is a pumping electronica soundtrack featuring music from well known artists in the scene at the time. A number of sequels followed on various platforms, such as Wipeout 2097, Wipeout 64, Wipeout 3, Wipeout Fusion, Wipeout Pulse, etc. Wipeout 2097 (a.k.a. Wipeout XL) was particularly popular, being considered one of the best games ever released for the Playstation.
I have long been an ardent fan of the series, the original impressing me to such a degree that after witnessing it for the first time on a friend’s Playstation back in 1996, I went out the very next day and purchased my own Playstation console along with the game. I have certainly put hundreds of hours into various installments in the series on a variety of platforms, including several Playstation models, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, and PC. The white-knuckle racing action on some absolutely insanely architected tracks (framed by exotic alien landscapes in the distance) — with heavy electronica beats pounding all the while — makes for a pretty frenetic and unique experience, I assure you.
A small percentage of readers will immediately remember those last, sad lines of lamentation spoken by the Rockbiter from the film The NeverEnding Story (1984). Based on the 1979 German novel by Michael Ende, The NeverEnding Story is set in Fantasia, a world of imagination filled with strange creatures big and small, and one of the first we meet is the gigantic Rockbiter who travels on a stone tricycle and is a true rock aficionado with a discerning palette.
A delicious looking limestone rock. Nice bouquet, must be a real vintage year. . . . Mmmm. That was limestone, with a dash of quartz. Very tasty. Where I come from in the North, we used to have exquisite gourmet rocks, only now…now they’re all gone.
The NeverEnding Story, which I saw in the theater as a kid and have watched hundreds of times since, is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I was immediately impressed by what a superb job u/Antisocial_Gek has done in recreating him in the No Man’s Sky universe — complete with glowing eyes, blinking and alive! Upon seeing the builder’s post, I had to visit this Euclid base myself, and have put together a small “walk through” video of my own.
Hats off, u/Antisocial_Gek, on a job well done and for providing me and a few others out there a very nice walk down nostalgia lane.
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Touring Bases in VR and Talking “No Man’s Sky” as Guest on “NMS Wonders” Show
A few months back, Mehalaway of the YouTube channel VR Spaceman reached out to me asking if I would be interested in appearing as a guest on his weekly live VR show, No Man’s Sky Wonders, to walk through several of my recent base builds and just chat on about the game we all know and love so well. That sounded like a pretty good time to me!
On his channel, Mehalawy explores any and all space games that support VR across a variety of platforms and headset configurations. His weekly live show, NMS Wonders, he hosts and records from his perspective in PSVR2. As he describes,
This is a live talk show about No Mans Sky game In virtual reality, every Saturday We will tour some of the most wonderful bases in NMS while interviewing the base builder and listen to their NMS story, all this in virtual reality for a new & fresh experience.
On the show in questions, we were joined by co-hosts Kim and Max (@SparkleRain and @Maxamus88 on Discord) and toured three of my bases: The Lighthouse in the NMSCord Hub, Chimney Rock Overlook, and Blade Peak Chalet. Along the way, we had a nice, wide-ranging chat about life, the game, and even a dip into the topic of retro computing… It was a blast!
The motivation for me to finally sit down and write a post sharing this YouTube base(s) tour was that on the NMS Discord in the @nmscord-hub channel, my base The Lighthouse, which was visited in the video, was recently a featured base for the community. This brought many visitors to the base and quite a few comments sent my way. It’s always fun to have visitors!
A quick shout out to my fellow American Interlopers out there exploring the universe, travelling from system to system, galaxy to galaxy, here on the 4th of July, American Independence Day. To mark the occasion I’ve indulged in a modest fireworks display from my lighthouse base perched upon a craggy islet on planet Distira in the NMSCord Hub system (Euclid galaxy).
So, grab your space apron, get out in the yard, and fire up the Nutrient Processor for a good old-fashioned Hexungulatis barbecue. Have a great Fourth!
On June 1st, Hello Games released the Mac version of No Man’s Sky through Steam, which was first announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference last year. And, this is a release I had been quite eagerly awaiting.
For most of the past (nearly) seven years, I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky on the gaming PC which I built for that very purpose. I started out on PS4 and after two or three weeks I wanted to maximize the experience — 60+ FPS, higher resolution, mods — and built a high-end Windows PC to play it on. That PC, which has recently seen a notable parts upgrade, is still my main cockpit, but I do everything else on the Mac.
As soon as Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late ’90s and it was announced that his NeXTSTEP operating system (along with its UNIX underpinnings) would become the foundation of a forthcoming, new Mac OS, I jumped to the Mac and haven’t looked back.
As a full-stack web developer, I do most of my work (which is now nearly 100% remote) at home on my desktop Mac Studio (M1 Max), with an employer-issued MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) occasionally coming into the mix. For personal use around the house and on travel, I have a MacBook Air (M2).
I was using an M1-based MacBook Air when the forthcoming Mac version of No Man’s Sky was announced by Apple at WWDC 2022. Hearing this good news, I upgraded to the new M2-based Air and spec’ed it up in order to play NMS as well as it could, on the go. This was the Mac I would be exploring the universe on.
The 13-inch MacBook Air in question has an Apple M2 SoC running at 3.49GHz and featuring 8 CPU cores (4 performance, 4 efficiency), 10 GPU cores, 24GB of LPDDR5-6400 shared RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage (which on these Macs is about twice as fast as a PC NVMe unit).
When the Mac version appeared on Steam, I installed it (for free, having already purchased the Windows version), fired it up, and was very impressed by just how well it ran.
On the 13-inch MacBook Air, I am playing at the default resolution of 1470×956 and after tweaking around a little bit on the settings — most remaining at Ultra, including the hugely impactful Planet Quality setting — I am seeing framerates usually pinned at 60fps. Apple’s Metal 3 3D API and its new MetalFX upscaling framework (something like a cross between AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS) helps with this; I’m using it on the Quality setting and am using Metal’s highest quality temporal anti-aliasing mode. The MacBook Air’s display runs at 60Hz max, so it’s hard to say how high above 60fps the game could be rendering on this M2. There are occasional dips into the mid 40s, mainly around complex bases. The overall visual quality is superb.
The quick-and-dirty chart, below, shows the performance of the M2 MacBook Air described here as compared to various systems I’ve used of late, including the aforementioned gaming PC in its original and upgraded configuration, by way of Geekbench 5 CPU and GPU compute benchmarks.
I still do most of my NMS exploring on the more powerful gaming PC with its large, 144Hz display, but it’s great to be able to have a full, no compromise excursion into the No Man’s Sky universe whenever I want, wherever I want. And with cross-save support between the Windows and macOS versions via the Steam Cloud, I can pick up right where I left off. In fact, I completed the last milestones of Expedition 10 Singularity at 25,000 feet on my flight from Boston back to DC this past weekend. Good times!
A Tweet of Two Apples: “No Man’s Sky” to Land on Mac and Apple AR/VR Headset
When something new is about to land in the world of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games’ chief Sean Murray, tweets a teaser emoji to start people speculating wildly. On Monday morning he posted a simple red apple emoji, which started the hype-train rolling and then several hours later, followed with another tweet — this time a green apple emoji, which switched the train into overdrive. Given that I have been keeping my eyes wide open for any more news of the long-known, impending Mac port of No Man’s Sky, I am quite certain that this is Sean’s indication that the Mac version of NMS is imminent. And the timing makes perfect sense, what with Apple’s yearly World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) being set to kick off with Monday’s (June 5th) keynote event.
A year ago, at WWDC 2022, Apple highlighted the coming Mac port of the game as a platform utilizing it’s new Metal 3 3D API, which offers close-to-the-metal performance, along with a feature known as MetalFX Scaling which is something of a mix between AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) and Nvidia’s DLSS. Apple featured No Man’s Sky as a sort of poster child for this tech during that keynote. They indicated that the game would be landing by year’s end (which it didn’t) and later that day in a press release indicated that not only a Mac version but also an iPad version of the game was forthcoming.
At 2022’s end, No Man’s Sky had not landed on any Apple hardware, though Apple did again shine the spotlight on No Man’s Sky in their January M2 Silicon event. Some speculated that Hello Games decided to coincide the release of the Mac version with the PS5 update to support the new PSVR2 in February, but that didn’t happen either, though the No Man’s Sky Fractal (v4.1) update that brought said support also delivered a nice array of other things for players, including the Utopia Expedition.
Interestingly, on May 5th a new development branch of No Man’s Skyappeared on SteamDB (for the first time ever) named “bejryy”. On the NMS Discord, it was soon discovered that a Caesar cypher decodes this string to “Orwell.” The original Macintosh was announced in January 1984 by way of the highly famous “1984 commercial,” depicting the Orwellian dystopia presented in the book 1984. It seems likely this branch is or pertains to the imminent Mac release.
Now, one of the main expected announcements out of WWDC 2023 is Apple’s long-rumored AR/VR headset (possibly to be called the “Reality Pro”), which the company is taking very seriously. It is rumored to be a standalone unit (that can also connect to a Mac and serve as its display) which will feature not one but two Apple M2 SoCs, which would give it the considerable computing and graphics power needed to drive its expected two 4K micro-OLED displays (at up to 3,000 pixels per inch) to deliver an 8K headset gaming experience. The headset is reportedly the most complicated product that the Cupertino-based giant has ever engineered.
Recently, a kind Traveller “gave me a ride” to the Budullangr galaxy. I had traveled there several years back by…a different means, but was not fond of the bleak harshness of the place way back when, so I got out pretty fast. A lot has changed in the game since then, so I wanted to give it another look and am now enjoying exploring the galaxy and it’s strange worlds.
A couple of weeks in, I randomly spotted a star system with an Atlas Interface on the Galactic Map, and so I warped in. I began exploring the various planets in the system and found some of them to be rather unique. The first I set down on was a rather unusual, blinding neon green rocky world; the next was a Sporal Planet with weather described as “Lost Clouds,” featuring an intense duo-tone 80’s synthwave sort-of vibe at night (shown above); and the third was a lush planet more densely littered with Knowledge Stones than any world I’d previously encountered.
On that third planet, after zipping around and, in short-order, collecting 25 new Gek terms from the many Knowledge Stones, it occurred to me to record a bit of my gameplay as I went from Stone to Stone learning new words. And so here, I present a sped-up, time-lapse video of me collecting knowledge from 100 Stones in just 30 minute’s of play time (time lapsed it’s just over 10 mins). I thought a few Travellers out there might enjoy a look.
Everyone who’s played No Man’s Sky for any amount of time knows about the “melee jump” or “boost jump,” achieved by executing a melee lunge and triggering your jetpack in the middle of it, transferring the forward force of your melee lunge into your flight. This is a quicker way to get around than simply lifting off with your jetpack.
But…do you know about the melee + reload jump trick?
I was hanging out on the Discord sometime in late 2019 or so when someone was explaining the old reliable melee jump to a new player. In response, someone piped up, making mention of a many-times-faster jump trick that will let you cover a span of terrain about as fast as as a starship. No one in the channel had heard of this one, and the guy (I wish I could remember the handle) explained precisely how it is done. It took me a few tries, but I got the hang of it and have been using this trick to travel long distances across a planet surfaces ever since.
How to do it: Fire off a few rounds with a projectile weapon (Boltcaster, Pulse Spitter, etc.) and then, while walking forward (not running), press and hold down the melee button. While it’s still held down, tap fast and frequent on the weapon reload button (square on PS4/5, X on Xbox, ‘r’ on keyboard) — tap it over and over fast and you will sporadically gain ground speed, though the direction is erratic. When you’re moving at a good clip, light up your jetpack and away you go! Note: You must have spare Projectile Ammunition in your suit inventory for this to work.
I made a short, not-great video demonstrating the trick way back when and have shown it a number of times over the years to Travellers unaware. It seems like this is not a widely known technique. When this issue came up again this morning in the Discord, I decided to make a much better video and post the technique here to the blog.
