No Man's Sky's Worlds update adds walking houses, fancier weather and a touch of Starship Troopers

The Worlds update introduces water features that boast ripples, foam and reflections, clouds that form and disintegrate in real-time, and weather effects such as rolling fog, rain and blizzards – all of them sculpted by a revised wind system. Skies have more colours, iceworlds boast shinier glaciers, and deserts have more diverse vegetation. They’ve also gussied up the lighting so that objects, from trees to clouds, cast shadows in relation to the sun’s position.

Sparkling ambient flourishes aside, the update brings new solar ships, aka space sailboats, the possibility of sentient walking houses on weirder planets, and a host of new creatures for the menagerie. “We want to do things that people haven’t seen before,” explains studio boss Sean Murray in a release, bathetically adding “and of course, these new creatures can all be pets and mounts”. The Worlds update also introduces a new Expedition, which features a flamethrower-wielding mech, and is “Starship Troopers inspired” – I suspect it also owes something to the recent popularity of a certain squad-based democracy management game.

The update also makes a few improvements to performance. “Rendering of environmental objects such as trees, rocks, and grass has been moved to a GPU-based system, allowing for denser worlds with increased performance,” explains the full changelog. “Planetary flora, minerals and curiosities have improved levels of detail from further distances and a broader range of angles. Terrain generation has been rewritten to incorporate dual marching cubes voxel meshing, increasing loading speed, improving framerate and saving memory.”

There’s a lot more through the jump, including details of new cosmetics and underwater base fixtures, though beware that the patch notes are an absolute landslide of autoplaying videos. My laptop began to hyperventilate when I tried scrolling all the way to the bottom.