No Man's Sky's Echoes update is out, with new robots, quests and revised space combat
Includes trench runs
No Man's Sky developers recently teased its next update, titled Echoes. It's out now and it adds a new race of robots, expanded space combat, and a series of story quests that tie many of its new features together.
Seven years after launch, it'd be nice if they commissioned a new piece of music for their update trailers:
The race of robots are called the Autophage, a "long-hidden civilization" of robots cobbled together from scrap metal. That's the at the top of this post. The Autophage form part of the update's new story content, which is a guided mission chain that's apparently "many hours" long.
Spaceship combat has also been deepened, particularly as it relates to large capital ships. You can now destroy all of them, including new Pirate Dreadnoughts, and loot the remains. When attacking freighters, you can target specific modules on their hull to disable defences, weapons, shields and engines to avoid escapes. There are also new trench runs, which let you zoom Skywalker-style into parts of dreadnoughts to strike at their core.
The full list of patch notes is too long to list here. I haven't mentioned the ability to build your own robot avatar, to customise your own staff, to build new structures back at base including a holographic museum, or a range of quality-of-life tweaks.