New No Man's Sky update takes us to the sunken depths

No Man's Sky channels Subnautica with its big new undersea-themed content update.

Hello Games today announced No Man's Sky Abyss, a massive new content drop that takes the space sim to the sunken depths of alien planets. The update adds stylish submarines and scuba-craft straight out of a John Berkey illustration, blending that 1970s sci-futurism with classic aquanaut visuals. Abyss brings a host of new things to do in No Man's Sky, including traversing the deep in search of ancient alien treasures across sunken cities, collecting new materials for crafting, building undersea bases.

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Abyss will also have "abyssal horrors" that scour the dark waters (feeling some serious R'lyeh vibes here) along with a ton of fish and aquatic creatures to uncover and take on. A new string of story missions will take us into these weird aquatic realms in search of secrets and strange new relics. At it's core, though, Abyss is basically a more dynamic underwater version of No Man's Sky's planet exploration.

Introducing The Abyss, a free new update for No Man's Sky. Featuring a reimagining of underwater gameplay focusing on some of the eerier elements of No Man's Sky, and The Dreams of the Deep a dark story about a stranded freighter crew.

No Man's Sky Abyss is currently available as a free update on PS4, Xbox One and PC.

Check below for patch notes on Abyss:

UNDERWATER GAMEPLAY AND VISUALS

• Increased the diversity of underwater biomes.
• Improved character movement in the water.
• Improved surface swimming.
• Improved swimming for customised characters.
• Allowed the torch to be used underwater.
• Improved underwater and swimming cameras.
• Improved camera behaviour when approaching the surface of the water.
• Added support for jetpacking underwater.
• Increased the probability of oxygen spawning as a secondary resource underwater.
• Increased the depths at which underwater buildings can spawn.
• Prevented drones spawning underwater or following you deep underwater.
• Added underwater only emotes.
• Improved underwater character and swimming audio.
• Improved underwater prop placement and object densities.
• Improved terrain editing underwater and fixed an issue where it could rapidly propel the player upwards.
• Improved colours of the water surface, and underwater effects.
• Improved foam effect at the edges of water and objects.
• Fixed an issue where a line could be seen round underwater objects and the underwater horizon.
• Improved water visuals at night.
• Removed a hard pixelated edge seen at the edge of water.

FISH AND UNDERWATER CREATURES

• Improved detection of whether the player is inside a building while underwater.
• Improved general fish shoal behaviour.
• Increased spawn rates of fish and creatures underwater.
• Improved predatory fish movement and behaviour.
• Improved logic for spawning and despawning underwater creatures.
• Improved movement of underwater cow and rodent type creatures.
• Improved and added to fish and underwater creature audio.
• Added jellyfish, clams, crabs, and abyssal horrors.

UI

• Disabled censorship in text chat between friends.
• Added more options to the inventory transfer menu.
• Removed unnecessary UI data to improve load times and memory footprint.
• Disabled resizing the terrain beam at times when it cannot be used.
• Fixed cases where quick menu items were incorrectly highlighted.
• Fixed issues with vehicle inventory transfers.
• Fixed the hazard icons for protection tech against secondary hazards.
• Fixed a crash caused by opening the inventory while using the ship communicator.
• Improved ordering of some objects in the building menu.
• Fixed a clipping issue in the binocular UI.
• Fixed an occasional crash in the character customiser.
• Various minor text and localisation fixes and improvements.

BASES AND BUILDINGS

• Added the chance for abandoned buildings, ruins, crashed freighters, and crashed starships to spawn underwater.
• Fixed an issue where players could fall through storage room walls.
• Allowed storage rooms to be placed in a grid layout.
• Made minor improvements to the indoor camera.
• Corrected volume of NPC speech inside player bases.
• Fixed an issue where shop terminals placed in bases could cause certain rooms to be hidden.
• Altered limits on building some objects rewarded through the Quicksilver bot.
• Added a new underwater shelter building.
• Added over a dozen new base parts.

FREIGHTERS, SHIPS AND SPACE

• Improved spawning of frigates in multiplayer games when players are onboard them.
• Fixed an issue where the players ships would incorrectly appear in a new system after warping.
• Fixed cases where specific frigates would always take the same type of damage.
• Fixed an issue where multiple fleet missions would automatically be handed in simultaneously.
• Added ability to scan frigates and freighters using the Analysis Visor.
• Added ability for players to repair their friends' frigates.
• Fixed issues with characters on the freighter after the player is gifted it.
• Prevented dust being permanently active on frigate landing pads.
• Improved ejecting from your ship in confined spaces, prevented being launched through low hanging ceilings and anomaly walls.
• Improved positioning of players getting out of ships and respawning on landing pads.
• Fixed an issue where frigates failed to reset their resource collection after giving resources to the player.
• Fixed a crash caused by the anomaly in certain systems.
• Added a marker for off-screen black holes.
• Made frigate icons less intrusive.
• Prevented the anomaly being re-summoned if it is already present.
• Added ability to detect planets with water from the galactic map.
• Fixed an issue where the player could not land their ship after switching missions while looking at a mission marker.
• Added a vehicle shop to the space station.
• Fixed issues where players could be stuck in ship landing pads.

MISSIONS AND PROGRESSION

• Added the Dreams of the Deep mission.
• Added a new story to underwater ruins.
• Added a number of new aquatic substances, goods, and products.
• Improved the return marker on portals the player has travelled through.
• Fixed an issue where some missions would always give an identical reward.
• Improved ability for missions to select locations to send you to from small clusters of buildings.
• Fixed an issue where protection tech would only drain for one hazard at a time.

VEHICLES

• Reduced the radius on the vehicle gun to ensure particles spawn at the contact point.
• Improved vehicle boost effect colours.
• Disabled the find building ability in the vehicle's default scan, as it has been replaced by an improved scan.
• Removed decals from the default vehicle, allowing player to add them.
• Improved colours of vehicle decals.

CREATURES

• Fixed cases where birds would fly into the ground.
• Improved rodent tail animation.
• Improved creature scanning in multiplayer.
• Fixed an issue where filters for creature part generation were not correctly applying to all genders.
• Fixed an issue where biological horrors could become non-hostile after attacking an exocraft.

SYSTEM

• Improved shader uniform resolution on PC, a performance optimisation.
• Fixed an issue where there could be a long pause on a black screen when booting into the game.
• Improved multiplayer permissions for lobby use.
• Changed default multiplayer permissions to be more permissive in Creative Mode.
• Fixed various infrequent crashes.
• Implemented various performance, system and stability fixes.