Here is an overview of the update, via its official website:
Cosmos: Introducing Update 7.0
Become director of a space station, join a galactic alliance, construct a space base, and discover deep-space marvels in No Man’s Sky Cosmos. Navigate space with a new star system map, strip colossal hulks for parts before hull integrity fails, recover and haul physical salvage to remote space outposts, celebrate 10 years of No Man’s Sky in the Our Journey Continues expedition, and much, much more.
- Direct a Space Station – Prove yourself to the local authorities to become director of a Space Station. Style your station’s central lobby, expand it with ancillary rooms, and decorate its exterior to welcome—or deter—visiting Travellers.
- Alliances – Join a galactic alliance to make friends, co-ordinate exploration, and compete for the most expansive territory in the galaxy. As a station director, you can found your own alliance, and design a name and banner to propagate across the universe.
- Deep-Space Outposts – Alien lifeforms have established deep-space outposts in inhabited systems. Visit these remote buildings to process rare minerals, trade with the quartermaster, and sign up for deep-space contracts.
- Orbital Construction – Establish a free-floating base anywhere in space. Deploy a deep-space base computer and claim a volume as your own to construct your dream orbital habitat or celestial city.
- Derelict Hulks – Colossal shipwrecks can be found drifting in the depths of space. These huge derelicts are a dangerous maze of rusted chambers and narrow chokepoints, only navigable via careful spacewalk. Pluck valuable technologies and cargo from their skeletons, but be wary of disrupting structural integrity…
- Shape Your Station – As a Station Director, personalize and adorn the exterior of your space station. Design a cozy, welcoming flightpath, or impress visitors with opulent decorations.
- 10 Year Anniversary Expedition – A new community expedition, Our Journey Continues, celebrates ten years since the release of No Man’s Sky. Each milestone represents an update or moment in time in the history of the NMS journey—from launch through to Cosmos.
- Alliance Leaderboards – Nurture and contribute to your in-game community, and rise to the top of the alliance rankings. The most populous, active, and expansive alliances will be featured on the ranking leaderboards, accessible from the Space Station core.
- Framed Commemorative Art – Join the Our Journey Continues expedition and earn a beautiful set of framed artwork, featuring the book cover images from some of No Man’s Sky’s biggest updates.
- Star System Map – Navigate deep space with an interactive star system map, plotting the location of celestial bodies, deep-space points of interest, and unidentified signals in your current system. Mark any planet or POI on the map to enable starship navigational assistance.
- Renovate Station Interiors – Decorate the central hub of the space station, shaping its atmosphere and flow. Re-arrange pre-existing furnishings and add new parts to create a truly unique environment for visiting Travellers.
- Diplodocus Companion – Complete your pilgrimage through No Man’s Sky history in the Our Journey Expedition, and adopt the majestic diplodocus companion. This prehistoric beast has been resurrected from pre-release footage, and completely retextured and reanimated.
- Hulk Meltdown! – Push your luck as you strip derelict hulks for salvageable technologies and forgotten loot. These colossal shipwrecks are unstable, and liable to explode when disturbed. Prudent explorers will prioritize the most valuable loot first to make a timely escape…
- Deep-Space Looting – Well-prepared Travellers can find rare resources at the new points of interest. Using a Gravitino Coil and a Corvette-class starship equipped with a Tractor Beam ensures that you will be ready to salvage anything you come across. Load your Corvette up with loot and haul it back to a deep-space outpost for processing. Sell this salvage for good profit at stations and outposts or save them for customizing the exterior of your own space station.
And here are the full patch notes:
Deep-Space Mapping
- A map for the local star system is now accessible from the Quick Menu, displaying local celestial bodies, the space station, and other deep-space points of interest.
- Added an array of new deep-space points of interest, including rocky and icy asteroid belts, inhabited and infested deep-space outposts, procedurally-generated variations of deep-space hulks, debris fields, and asteroid platforms.
- Implemented a point of interest at the star(s) of a system, which hubristic Travellers may fly to if they choose…
- Many deep-space points of interest can be stripped and mined for valuable resources, including comet dust, gelatinous fibers, and contaminated metal. Process raw materials at a deep-space outpost to convert them into lucrative items to sell on the Galactic Trade Network, or utilize in space station construction.
- Points of interest will begin to appear on the star system map once a save has reached the Space Anomaly for the first time.
- Added a light tutorial mission, Signals, to introduce the star system map and navigation around deep-space points of interest.
- Outposts are managed by an alien quartermaster, who trades in maps and salvaged materials.
- Outposts also house a salvage & delivery terminal, offering deep-space contracts to adventurous space explorers.
- Added a number of new player titles earned for accomplishments at deep-space points of interest.
- Several deep-space anomalies now have a chance of granting rare station decoration blueprints to visitors.
- Converted the Dream Aerial to a reusable product, which can now be crafted and consumed multiple times to locate individual living frigates.
- The Living Ship encountered during the Starbirth mission chain now patrols around infested outposts, and can be actively sought out during the mission.
- Added several new music tracks for visiting locations in deep space. These include ambient tracks when near asteroid belts, stars, hulks, or space outposts, and more dramatic music when the structural integrity of a hulk begins to fail.
Shipbreaking
- Space hulks often house lucrative items, but they are volatile, and are likely to melt down and explode if their structural integrity is disrupted.
- Added a new Corvette utility part, the Tractor Beam, to gather physical cargo into the Corvette hold.
- The Tractor Beam can be purchased alongside other Corvette parts at the Corvette Workshop in space stations.
- Improved control handling, animations, and crosshairs for the Gravitino Coil.
- The Gravitino Coil may now be equipped in Space Stations.
Space Station Directorship
- Prove yourself to the local authorities to become director of a Space Station, gaining rights to shape its external decorations, interior layout and ancillary compartments.
- Earn colossal exterior decoration modules and place them around the outside of your station.
- Directors can remove and adjust existing station decoration.
- In addition, the full range of existing base parts are available to reshape and redecorate the interior of the station.
- Directors can expand their space station by adding additional rooms to the main hangar, which they are then free to decorate as they please.
Galactic Alliances
- Station directors may found their own alliance and seek like minded travellers to join their collective.
- Join an alliance by visiting any of their owned space stations.
- Quickly access your alliance’s systems via the teleporter.
- Players may join up to three alliances.
- Alliances are graded by the activity of their members. The largest and most active alliances are visible on a leaderboard at the space station core.
Orbital Constructions
- Construct orbital bases anywhere in space—utilizing natural asteroid platforms as a starting point, or staking your claim on any empty volume of space.
- Added a number of new corridor base parts, buildable in orbital constructions.
- A huge number of new station decoration parts have been added, unlockable from the Construction Research Terminal aboard the Space Anomaly.
Spacewalking
- Added an eject button for non-Corvette starships, accessible from the Quick Menu.
- Deepened and expanded spacewalking, adding true six degrees of freedom movement, including roll.
- Improved the transition when landing on and taking off from objects with gravity in space.
- Explosions in space will now knock the player back.
- Spacewalking drains the cold protection technologies in the exosuit, unless in close proximity to other hazards, such as hot balls of glowing gas.
Our Journey Continues Expedition
- Expedition Twenty-Three, Our Journey Continues, will begin shortly and run for approximately six weeks.
- This special event celebrates 10 years of No Man’s Sky, and journeys through the history of its evolution since launch.
- A developer’s commentary read by Sean Murray is available for each milestone of the expedition, permanently accessible in the Collected Knowledge section of the Catalogue once unlocked.
- Nostalgia-themed rewards include framed commemorative art, decals and titles, a golden edition of the original Rasamama 36 starship, an astronaut bobblehead, the Starbound v0.27 multi-tool, and a vintage Interceptor ship and diplodocus pet as seen in early trailers.
Twitch Drops
- A new package of Twitch Drops will begin shortly. Sign up and connect your platform accounts on the Twitch Drops page, then tune in to Twitch to earn exotic base parts, high-tech starships, fireworks, appearance modifications, and more.
Rendering
- Completely rewrote the block compression (BC) encoder for textures, reducing artifacting and color banding for textures generated at runtime for procedural models. Significantly improves the quality of textures throughout the game.
- Authored a number of dazzling new particle effects at deep-space points of interest, including electrical fields, mist, stardust, smoke, debris trails, and biological slime.
- Significantly improved terrain tessellation quality, increasing the textures and details of the ground on planets.
- Added support for spotlights on transparent props, particles, and volumetric fog, notably improving the appearance of the player torch on smoke, fog, and other atmospheric effects.
- Significantly improved the appearance of clouds when viewed from space—upgrading their textures, lighting, ambient tint, and shape detail.
- Added support for volumetric fog volumes and particles, and implemented these around the deep-space hulks.
- Added support for Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) 3, which uses machine learning to deliver higher performance with exceptional image quality.
- Added support for NVIDIA DLSS4.5, enabling Frame Generation 5x and 6x. Deep Learning Super Sampling is a revolutionary suite of neural rendering technologies that uses AI to boost FPS, reduce latency, and improve image quality.
- Added support for foveated rendering on PCVR.
- Utilizing eye-tracking technology, foveated rendering concentrates rendering resources at the center of your vision, sharpening and beautifying the details you focus on.
- Improved the appearance of water and water foam.
- Fixed an issue that could cause water foam to load in abruptly when flying towards it, especially when transitioning from space to atmosphere.
- Fixed an issue that could cause the edges of islands to appear blurry.
- Improved the accuracy of lighting and post-processing effects above and below the surface of water, fixing a visible shadow above the water line in the distance, especially when transitioning from space to atmosphere.
- Improved the appearance of fog fading when transitioning from space to atmosphere.
- Improved the appearance of water fading when transitioning from space to atmosphere, notably reducing popping.
- Improved the density and consistency of planetary fog.
- Improved the density of the swirling atmosphere of gas giants, especially when transitioning from space to atmosphere.
- Improved the shape of planets when viewed from space.
- Completely reworked the generation of asteroids, improving their draw distances, visual distribution, and performance.
- Fixed an issue that caused the surface of water to appear too opaque.
- Fixed an issue that caused some reflections to appear as dark highlights when underwater.
- Fixed a visual issue with water reflections when resolution scaling is not at 100%.
- Fixed reflections and shadows appearing to “swim” when TAA is disabled.
- Improved color gamut handling for more vibrant and saturated colors.
- Fixed an issue causing noticeable clipping on very saturated out-of-gamut colors.
- Fixed an issue involving the wrong color space being used for HDR rendering; HDR colors will now be a closer match for their SDR counterpart.
- Fixed an issue causing HDR output to be clipped to a fixed limit.
- Improved the visual quality of FXAA anti-aliasing.
- Added support for running in HDR in combination with Frame Generation.
- Improved the lighting on models rendered on frontend screens, such as the inventory.
- Various shader fixes.
- Fixed an issue that caused fringing around planetary rings.
- Fixed an issue that caused distant planets viewed from space to shimmer with FSR2 enabled.
- Fixed an issue that could cause the orange mesh to flicker when using the “restore” function on the Terrain Manipulator.
- Fixed several issues in the offline texture compressor and made downscaling during mipmap generation more accurate, improving overall texture quality.
- Fixed a minor visual issue with distant terrain.
- Implemented support for roughness scaling, fixing some objects appearing too glossy when in the distance.
- Fixed an issue with normal maps that could cause lighting inconsistencies on specific objects.
- Improved the performance and precision of light culling and light sorting; reducing instances of light popping and flickering.
- Improved the appearance of materials using parallax occlusion mapping.
- Improved the appearance of lens flares.
- Fixed an issue that could cause the sun to reflect off clouds at an inaccurate angle.
- Significantly improved the appearance of ship trails.
- Fixed an issue that could cause speed lines to intersect the camera.
- Fixed an issue that could cause visual jitter when running in 8K resolution on Microsoft Store.
Watch a new trailer and deep dive below.
COSMOS (7.0) Update Trailer
COSMOS Update Deep Dive
