Hello Games announced the latest No Man's Sky update, Worlds Part II, a free download available on all platforms that the developer says will add "trillions of new planets and billions of new solar systems." Worlds Part II is the sci-fi game's 36th major update since launching in August 2016, all of which have been free.
Some of those undiscovered systems fall under No Man's Sky's new purple class category, which have ties to dimensional distortions that have been the story's focus for the last several months. Others are gas giants, another fresh addition that Hello Games described as 10 times larger than Earth with violent storms raging across their surfaces. Some are, like Neptune in real life, composed of a single, massive ocean that's so deep that only bioluminescent coral can light the way down.
Hello Games' founder Sean Murray said in the Worlds Part II patch notes that all of these systems will feature new more environmentally diverse terrain types, thanks to improvements to No Man's Sky's procedural generation algorithm. The studio's new technology lets the game create larger water environments with new lighting effects that create the sense of delving ever deeper, along with improvements to other planet types -- lighting and rendering changes that make jungle planets denser and more lush, for example.
Murray said players can expect new, varied environmental hazards as well. These include recognizable disasters such as geysers and volcanic eruptions, along with more alien occurrences -- localized radiation fallout events and storms of toxic spores.
Worlds Part II comes with a few other changes, one of which is an improvement to inventory management in No Man's Sky. Players can now organize their inventory using parameters such as name, type and color. It introduces a new custom game mode called Abandoned as well. Abandoned removes all lifeforms from planets and is meant to make survival more challenging.