With every new update, No Man’s Sky becomes more like the game many thought it would be when it launched four years ago. Hello Games has taken major steps to improve the game from its underwhelming debut with a consistent stream of updates, which has culminated in today’s release of No Man’s Sky’s Origins update, one of its biggest to date. It’s so big, in fact, that the game’s version number has been pushed up to 3.0 to reflect just how much larger the game is now.

Everything about the game, from the visuals to the gameplay to the procedurally-generated universe, have been tweaked and improved multiple times already, but the new update takes it a huge step further. Not only does it update the UI and add billions of new planets, it also introduces new environmental elements like volcanoes, firestorms, tornados, and lighting, on top of improved clouds, larger mountains, and larger structures. Players can also now encounter NPCs on planets as well as discover all sorts of new fauna, including a sci-fi staple: giant sandworms.

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It’s an understatement to call it a lot, and according to Hello Games’ publishing head Tim Woodley, all that new content was quite a challenge to create. Speaking with GameSpot about it, he explained that overhauling No Man’s Sky’s universe was made trickier by the fact that much of it has been colonized by No Man's Sky's players who've built things like full-on cities. As such, none of the major environmental changes have been applied to existing planets, as that would have “run the risk of nerfing people’s finely honed bases and creations,” according to Woodley.

“When we launched No Man’s Sky in 2016, we created a universe which was our best guess for what people wanted to discover and explore,” he said. He went on to state that the goal with the Origins update was to recapture the experience of that original launch, where players “never really knew what was over the next hill, on the next planet, in the next star system.”

In an effort to recapture that feeling for the existing playerbase, Woodley said that Hello Games basically added another game’s worth of features on top of all of the content that No Man’s Sky’s previous updates like Beyond and Desolation have provided. “By our calculations, we have doubled the variety in the game and that is why we feel it is deserving of its 3.0 moniker.”

There’s a lot more to the Origins update than what Hello Games is able to show off in a brief trailer, with a few being a revamped photo mode, planets infested with anomalous lifeforms, and a streamlining of the game’s crafting system. These and the rest of the changes can be seen in the update’s full patch notes.

No Man's Sky is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

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Source: No Man's Sky, GameSpot