No Man's Sky gets stranger planets and Venusian flytraps in Visions update
Space is the place, baby
If you're not already following Rob Fearon's @NoMansPics Twitter account, get on that now because it's about to get even prettier since No Man's Sky launched its 'Visions' update today. Visions introduces new anamalous biomes with stranger sights and stranger life, more potential shades of sky and grass, carnivorous flora, ambulant rocks, improved skies, and even rainbows. It whacks in more stuff to find and collect too but mate I'm all about that planetary variety.
The Visions page on the game's site lays out the additions, including many nice pictures.
Tourists can enjoy new biomes including oddities like formations of mirrored shards and other large spectacles, new weird fauna in these anomalous biomes (I like the example of... crystal shards rippling underground?), new potential colours for sky and grass, improved skies with rainbows in storms, dangerous flora like giant snapping traps or explosive gasballs, and adorable creatures who resemble rocks but will become quite startled when you try to mine them. I'll look for them in your holiday snaps.
It's not all pottering. Visions brings dig up ancient skeletons to sell (or maybe expose then build a nice museum around?), salvage scrap from fallen satellites, gather valuable crystals charged by storms in extreme climates, and exotic objects to collect. The game's crashed freighters are now procedurally generated too.
Oh! And you can make fireworks now. Oooh! Aaah!
Here, see lots of this in the trailer:
"More will follow," developers Hello Games say. They've already done a huge amount to improve the game from its disappointing launch state.
NoMansPics is great, by the way. The procedural generation combined with the photographic eyes of players and Rob Fearon's curation means it trickles pleasant, pretty, and sometimes surprising pictures into that punishment of a website. It captures the best side of the game: pottering around looking at new things. Do follow.
Disclosure: Our Alec wrote for No Man's Sky back before it launched.