In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the launch of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games released one of the biggest updates in the game’s history with No Man’s Sky Cosmos v7.0. Players can now own and customize their own space stations, build floating bases on large asteroids or anywhere in space, join enormous galactic alliances, and much more. Space itself has been overhauled in this landmark update.

As has been the case with other major updates in recent years, Cosmos brought with it an accompanying community Expedition, one that trailed the update’s initial release by one week. Having just begun, this six-week Expedition is a love letter to the No Man’s Sky community, but especially to those Travellers whose journey has run long. It’s packed with callbacks and nostalgia, and for those of us who have been exploring since the beginning, some of it hits pretty deep.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the experience for other players out there, so I won’t go into details on any of it except the one mechanic that seems to have the most players scratching their heads in confusion.

“Why do other players look like floating orbs?”

Indeed. Since the start of the Expedition, I have seen this question repeated many times on Reddit, Facebook, and in the Discord. Having, myself, been exploring this universe since day one, I thought I would offer a few words of explanation.

The multiplayer aspect of No Man’s Sky was a much anticipated feature leading up to launch and was something Hello Games had talked about in interviews along the way. When the game finally landed, multiplayer was far from fully built out and its absence was a source of disappointment, even vitriol, for some players.

Almost exactly one year after launch (and after the Foundation and Path Finder updates), Hello Games released the Atlas Rises v1.3 update following the related Waking Titan ARG that many old-timers will recall fondly. A transformative update, Atlas Rises brought a new, greatly expanded central story, deeper lore, active Portals, new biomes, and most significantly: Joint Exploration.

Joint Exploration was No Man’s Sky‘s first step down the road leading to the multiplayer game we know today. It allowed players to finally encounter one another at the same location in real time. Acknowledged by Hello Games as being “very limited,” this new feature allowed up to 16 players to see each other at once, with proximity-based voice chat allowing them to talk to one another. In this primitive system, players were represented as floating orbs that tracked them as they moved about. What’s more, when two players met up, they could jointly create a Monument that served as a persistent memorial to their encounter in the game. (And these Monuments can still be found on certain planets in the game today, all these years later.)

It was the next major update, No Man’s Sky NEXT v1.5 released in July of 2018, that brought third-person character representation and a much more advanced multiplayer system—among a great many other improvements—to the game.

As one of the many callbacks to the early days of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games reverted the visuals of other players in this multiplayer Expedition to the floating orbs of olde and disabled keyboard-based chat, as well (sort of). When I first encountered another player as one of these orbs that I so well remember, it floored me! Seeing that orb was unexpected, and I think my wife might’ve been chopping onions in the kitchen at the time…

I’m not sure if this Expedition will go down as the best one yet—I’m not very far along, myself. But, for some of us Travellers who are a little long in the tooth when it comes to our time trekking through the No Man’s Sky universe, it will definitely always hold a special place in our hearts.