No Man's Sky embraces the 'thrill of space-walking' with new space wrecks to explore and salvage

A new update for No Man's Sky, called Breach, introduces space wrecks, expanded ship building, and a unique expedition. It also arrives with a press release from your man Sean Murray, who immediately cranks up the organ and starts singing mournfully about the "tiny team" that's "poured a lot of love into it", which makes me wonder if Hello Games is now staffed by Oompa Loompas.

In all seriousness, Hello Games long ago completed the redemption arc for No Man's Sky, (which now sits at "Very Positive" on Steam with around 170,000 reviews) and for years now has been on a well-deserved victory lap. We can have a laugh about Murray's inability to leave the 'we're just the little guys' schtick behind, but at the same time there's no doubting that love has been poured into this game over just shy of a decade.

No Man's Sky received the major Voyager update just over a month ago, adding the ability to build and customise giant spaceships known as Corvettes that you can get your mates to act as crew on. A really nice touch is that you can set your destination and then, just like Star Trek, go for a little walk around the ship's interior, have a chat, and fiddle around with the ship's layout.

Murray says the reaction has been "incredible" and saw the game hit its "highest player numbers since launch" (it's currently got around 27,500 people playing, per SteamDB, which is not bad going). He says they've been loving the creative ships players have come up with, "and just floating in space outside of your ship has really resonated with players and provides these tranquil moments of calm that I love."

The strength of that response meant the Oompa Loompas were sent straight back to the salt mines, and now No Man's Sky has a new update called Breach that zeroes-in on the whole space-walk / space-float thing.

"We’re introducing space wrecks to explore, leaning into that thrill of space-walking, and giving players more excuse to enjoy it," says Murray. "Salvaging these wrecks unlocks a huge array of new ship building parts which has been greatly requested. We’ve also improved and expanded ship building in response to watching players spend so much time in the workshop designing their dream ships."

Breach also adds a new expedition where players have to "voyage to the end of space" to find a mysterious wreck and salvage some unique ship-building loot. I kinda thought the whole point was that space doesn't have edges, but I suppose they had to stick the wreck somewhere.

The update also adds "purple-star solar systems", which boast planets with "deeper oceans, incredible terrains and volatile gas giants." The main reason you'll want to head here though is they guide you towards some of the new space wrecks and rare parts. Across the universe, Breach also adds randomly scattered wrecks containing various parts.

The full patch notes for Breach are here, and it's live now for all players. And if you've never been tempted but space-walking around space wrecks sounds like a good time, No Man's Sky is 60% off on Steam until November 3.