No Man’s Sky’s latest major update overhauls its towering space freighters

No Man’s Sky has a major new free update releasing today, developer Hello Games has announced. The new Endurance update is focused on the game’s freighters and frigates, the large ships in the game that players can use as a mobile base of operations and to complete missions. Endurance is the 20th major update for the game, which was originally released in 2016.

Improvements coming with this major update include a new ship bridge that offers instant access to warping and teleportation to navigate the game’s universe. Players can also build bigger freighters featuring exterior sections, as well as with new plant growing and manufacturing features, and the ships can now analyze planets from space. New expedition- and combat-focused missions offer more objective-based tasks to complete.

Image: Hello Games

As well as the ships themselves, Endurance also includes improvements to the broader universe. Asteroids now appear more varied and can appear in vast asteroid fields featuring thousands of objects, and there are new black holes and nebulae to see across the universe.

The release of Endurance comes just a few short months after No Man’s Sky’s last major update, Outlaws, which included a variety of crime-themed activities like smuggling, bounty missions, planetary raids, and wearable capes. Between it and the other dozen-plus updates the game has received since launch, the game is almost unrecognizable compared to what was released six years ago.

No Man’s Sky is currently available across a variety of platforms, including the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. A release on the Switch is planned for October, and it’s also scheduled to come to Mac and iPad later this year.