Introducing...No Man's Sky BEACON
Hello,
Today we’re pleased to announce the release of our latest update for No Man’s Sky. BEACON completely overhauls settlements, bringing towns and their management to No Man’s Sky. There are huge new robotic settlements to discover, with impossibly new sci-fi buildings. Full patch notes are available here.
Players can become town mayor and take ownership of multiple settlements. You can construct buildings and upgrade each one, with new building types like jukebox bars where you can choose the music, merchants where you can build custom starships or even ponds you can chill and fish at.
One of the coolest additions in BEACON is the arrival of the robotic Autophage settlements. The most recent race introduced to No Man’s Sky, these large towns are built in their own image, an identifiable robotic style, all metal and mechanics. Unique Autophage building parts can be constructed in your own base and add a very hard sci-fi style to your dwellings and constructions.
For the ambitious Traveller, multiple settlements can now be owned and managed by one Overseer, so for instance you won’t need to abandon your existing charges to bring these new robotic citizens under your wing. 
Settlement visitors will also notice a complete level up of building details across all settlement types, including weathered building materials, upgraded settlement buildings and new settlement utilities.
Each inhabitant can be conversed with, with their own abilities and attributes to manage. As town mayor you’ll be enlisted to welcome new settlers, resolve disputes, and make choices to create prosperity.
It’s not all work, work, work though! You and your citizens can enjoy the more relaxing aspects of new settlement life too, including music, fishing and firework parties.
A well managed settlement can make their owners rich in resources, but they need to be protected. Travellers can hire a squadron of wingmen, who will now defend towns when they come under attack from roving pirates.
Threats have become more varied and unpredictable so you will need to stay on your guard and be prepared to defend your investments at a moment's notice.
To show the settlements off in their best light possible, and to level up the visuals of the No Man’s Sky universe overall, we are also introducing, with BEACON,a cutting edge graphical upgrade in the form of Intel XeSS2. The improvement this technology brings to the look and feel of the game is unbelievable.
Away from the huge settlement makeover, BEACON offers many more quality of life improvements which the community will love, such as the ability to change or even disable the voice communicator of your exosuit, and improved base part snapping to name just a few.
We introduced Cross-Save for No Man’s Sky at the end of last year to a limited few to ensure it was robust and that people’s thousand hour saves weren’t in jeopardy. Ever since we’ve slowly been opening up to more and more players and, with BEACON, I’m happy to announce that we are opening up Cross-Save fully to the entire player base. Now everyone can continue their travels no matter what platform they are playing on.
And Cross Save and Cross Play are particularly important as this update we also are releasing a cutting edge version of No Man’s Sky for Switch 2 launch.
It’s been fun to see Travellers exploring the universe in search of alien remains since we released the RELICS update last month, creating ever-wilder creature permutations and turning their bases into mini-museums. BEACON is the third update of the year and there’s plenty more planned. I’m so proud of the small team for continuing to pour such passion into this game we love so much.
Full patch notes here.
Our journey continues.
Sean
P.S. If you feel so inclined, please take a moment to wishlist our next game, Light No Fire here.