A new No Man's Sky major content update is out, and the patch notes detail everything players can expect in-game. You can now collect and display skeletons found in planetary fossil beds. These fossils can also be exchanged with a newly added collector in the Space Station. Moreover, the fossil beds are guarded by lumbering Stone Guardians — "a huge living statue, and a whirling storm of re-animated rock."
Apart from all these, players can also expect several QoL updates, bug fixes, and plenty more in the latest No Man's Sky update.
Also Read: No Man's Sky: 10 best beginner tips
No Man's Sky Patch Notes 5.6 revealed
The full set of patch notes for No Man's Sky Relics Update 5.6 is:
COLLECT AND DISPLAY SKELETONS
- Planetary fossil beds now contain a vast array of specific bone formations.
- Each of these bones can be placed as a decorative base part, either individually or mounted on a display plinth.
- Larger display plinths allow a collection of bones to be reassembled into a complete skeleton, allowing the design and reassembly of ancient and extinct beings.
- Completed displays can be packaged into an easily transportable module, allowing them to be re-deployed in other locations, traded with other players, or sold on the galactic market.
- A new planetary dig-site building has been added, serving as a hub for interested fossil collectors.
- The icon for planetary fossils has been improved.
- A small tutorial mission has been added to guide new palaeontologists.
- A new palaeontology section has been added to the guide.
FOSSIL EXCHANGE
- A fossil collector has been added to the Space Station.
- Surplus fossils can be exchanged with the fossil collector, allowing players to target specific skeleton components for their designs.
- The fossil collector will barter for items in their collection, allowing individual inventory items to be swapped.
RELICS EXPEDITION
- Expedition Eighteen, Relics, will begin shortly and run for approximately six weeks.
- Rewards include new posters, decals and titles; a living stone suit customisation set; the unique Basilisk Crown staff; a mysterious skeletal companion; and the exclusive Living Stone jetpack.
STONE GUARDIANS
- Fossil beds are now watched over by a vigilant stone eye, ready to protect the bones from those who would exhume them.
- Disturbing the vigilant eye may yield valuable rewards, but comes at the cost of awakening the guardians.
- Two forms of stone guardian await - a huge living statue, and a whirling storm of re-animated rock.
- Huge guardian statues have been added to relic worlds.
SKELETAL LIFEFORMS
- A new and highly rare skeletal lifeform has been added to some planets.
- Some planets are now home to the elusive titanic bone-worm…
QUALITY OF LIFE AND UI
- Planets in your current system can now be marked from the discovery page, adding a marker to the starship navigation systems.
- Added an accessibility option to increase the contrast in mission-critical UI panels.
- Fixed an issue that could cause the camera to move erratically back and forth while inside high-ceilinged rooms in player bases.
- Nearby NPCs that have specific unseen interactions will now be highlighted with a marker.
- Added a new water state for ocean worlds with significantly larger waves.
- Various volumetric and other atmospheric effects no longer play on planets without an atmosphere.
- Story details from the In Stellar Multitudes mission now appear in the Journey Records page in the catalogue.
- Reduced the number of corrupt drones that attack player settlements.
- The space station marker is now dynamically offset, preventing the marker from obscuring the station while at a distance.
- Fixed a number of minor text issues in some extractor UIs.
- Fixed a number of minor text and icon issues in shop interactions.
- Fixed an issue that caused companions that were set to use no accessories to have a random accessory assigned after re-summoning them.
- Fixed an issue that caused the starship to too-aggressively lock on to markers when engaging the pulse engine.
- An organic version of the Teleport Receiver has been added for use in living starships.
- Fixed an issue that caused the repair requirements for several living starship technologies to all be the same.
- Lingering on-screen display messages that report pulse drive errors will now clear as soon as a successful pulse drive engagement is detected.
SAVE SYSTEM
- Significantly improved the compression used for saved games, improving filesizes and upload/download times for players in the cross-save beta.
- Created a section for cross-save settings within the general Options menu.
- Players in the cross-save beta are now alerted to situations where uploads are timing out, and can manually adjust how long the game will wait for a successful upload before detecting a timeout and cancelling.
COOKING
- New fossil-related cooking recipes have been added.
- Base storage container inventories are now accessible while cooking.
- Fixed an issue that prevented access to the nutrient processor’s internal storage while on a freighter or the Exo-Skiff.
- Fixed a number of issues while cooking the Exo-Skiff, including progress resetting or incorrect items appearing in various slots.
- Cronos’ grill on the Space Anomaly can now be used by several players at once.
- Fixed an issue that made it impossible to cook jellied eels.
ABANDONED MODE IMPROVEMENTS
- Multi-Tools found in abandoned mode are now always free, but start with damaged slots.
- Settlement-related missions will no longer start in abandoned mode.
- Abandoned space stations now have access to Exosuit, starship, and Multi-Tool upgrade stations.
- Additional salvage boxes have been added around abandoned space stations containing valuable upgrades and inventory expansion modules.
- Purple systems are now unlocked automatically in abandoned mode.
- In abandoned mode, crashed freighter containers and other buried caches can now contain additional valuable upgrades.
OPTIMISATION
- Introduced a number of optimisations to planetary prop rendering.
- Introduced an optimisation to dynamic physics groups.
- Introduced a significant memory optimisation for nav mesh generation.
- Introduced a number of minor texture memory optimisations.
- Introduced an optimisation for loading large bases.
- Introduced a number of optimisations for text display, particularly in the Journey Records pages.
- Introduced an optimisation to the various catalogue and guide pages.
OTHER BUG FIXES
- Fixed a number of issues that could occur when warping on board another player’s freighter.
- Fixed an issue that could cause water creatures to be generated for a planet that would never have deep enough water for those creatures to spawn.
- Fixed a number of mission blockers in They Who Returned.
- Fixed an issue that could cause some bases to become invisible when constructed at the water’s surface on ocean planets.
- Fixed an issue that could cause PC players to appear jerky in cross-platform multiplayer.
- Fixed a rare issue that could cause players’ settings to reset in VR.
- Fixed an issue that could cause NPCs to sink into the floor.
- Fixed an issue that could cause a softlock when browsing the Exocraft inventory.
- Fixed a rare hang on load when returning to a savegame that was saved while in an Exocraft after playing in multiplayer.
- Fixed a rare crash related to camera shakes.
- Fixed a memory-related crash on PlayStation 5.
- Fixed a number of rare crashes related to mesh scaling.
- Fixed a number of rare maths-related crashes.
- Fixed an issue that could cause some planetary props to pop in.
- Fixed a number of Mac-specific rendering issues.
- Fixed a rare issue that could cause saves to reach a max size and stop saving on Nintendo Switch - saves can now expand as required.
- Fixed an issue that could cause multiple ships to become docked to the same landing pad.
- Improved the placement positioning of decorative base building props.
- Fixed a number of text clipping issues in large popups.
- Fixed an issue that could cause a teleport destination to have two copies of a mission marker added.
- Fixed an issue that could make interactions difficult on freighters that were summoned a long way from the centre of the solar system.
- Fixed a number of issues affecting markers and planet labels when entering atmosphere.
- Fixed a rare issue that could cause empty systems to generate incorrect information about their potential Atlas Stations.
- Fixed an issue that could cause the galaxy map to incorrectly choose a purple system as part of its path to a distant star when purple systems are not unlocked.
- Fixed an issue that could cause players to start in a purple system when arriving in a new galaxy, when purple systems were not unlocked.
- Fixed an issue that caused the water effects from the Nautilon submarine to remain in the world after summoning the sub to a new location.
- Fixed an issue that prevented Exocraft laser effects from playing correctly in multiplayer.
- Fixed an issue that could cause erratic torso movements in Sentinel mechs.
- Fixed an issue that could cause the ship to hover as if above water when reloading on a planet.
- Fixed a number of inconsistencies in creature descriptions, where creatures would be described as being from the wrong environment.
- Fixed an incorrect texture being used for the Titan expedition in the expedition history screen.
- Fixed a number of decals and posters from previous expeditions being missing from the catalogue.
- Fixed an issue that caused a number of unusable and legacy items to be included in the catalogue.
With the arrival of a major update, No Man's Sky players can expect to see several Hotfix Patches that will be designed to address urgent issues that might crop up in the next few weeks.