Today, in a series of tweets, Sean Murray announced that the next big update for No Man’s Sky would be version 2.2 and is called Synthesis. This patch is set to go live on all platforms November 28th, Thanksgiving Day.

Announcing The Synthesis Update!

* Ship salvaging
* First person exocraft
* Multiple weapons
* Ship upgrading
* VR improvements
* Tri base building parts
* Backpack refiner
* plus nearly 300 tweaks and changes for this game we love so much

❤️https://t.co/QfFR1FC6U5

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) November 27, 2019

This update focuses on fixing a lot of smaller issues that have been hotly-requested by the community. Here are some portal-related improvements that will be coming with the Synthesis update:

1. The cost to activate Portal Glyphs has been reduced.

2. Fixed an issue where mission steps that involve going through a portal would fail to display any text.

3. Fixed an issue that prevented players from finding story-critical portals if they left the portal while it was in its active state.

4. Allowed players to permanently accumulate teleport destinations outside of their home (ie furthest progress) galaxy. Teleport destinations are no longer removed when leaving other galaxies.

I’m glad to see that the cost to activate Portal Glyphs has been reduced as the high price was a barrier-to-entry for some new players. Number 4 is also very exciting because now you don’t have to build a base in an old galaxy in order to return to it later. This means that if you find a unique system in Euclid for example that sells a particular commodity, after you progress to the next galaxy you can still teleport back to that space station in Euclid to buy/sell.

With regards to The Portal Repository, since there won’t be any substantial changes to procedural generation in the update I will not be archiving all the Beyond addresses. However, addresses submitted on/after November 28th will be given a new version tag for “Synthesis”.

This Thanksgiving, No Man’s Sky players have a lot to be thankful for! Thank you Sean Murray!

View the full patch notes.

The Portal Repository has grown organically since 2017 and has undergone several minor design changes, but now I am seeking a volunteer to help with a complete web design overhaul.

Any potential candidate should be very familiar with WordPress and modern web design practices. Knowledge of PHP, Javascript, Jquery also would be required. Time commitment can be flexible to accommodate your schedule, but I would ask that you can devote at least several hours per week to this project.

Like this website itself, the Web Designer role would be a purely voluntary position for a No Man’s Sky fan who wants to build a tool used to help thousands of fellow Travellers every day.

Interested in joining The Portal Repository as a Web Designer? Send an email to [email protected] describing your background in web design and a little blurb about why you want to volunteer for The Portal Repository.

Please note that the last day to submit portal addresses for NEXT is August 13th 1200Z. After this time The Portal Repository will go into maintenance mode in order to archive all NEXT addresses and prepare for the Beyond update.

The maintenance window could take up to 24 hours. I will make a great effort to restore the site in time for the Beyond release on August 14th. Depending on the exact new features introduced by Beyond I can’t rule out the possibility of brief maintenance down-times on the days following the release.

During the maintenance mode the portal submission form will be disabled but I will do my best to keep the rest of the site available so users can still browse the existing addresses. However, due to some intensive background processes happening during the maintenance mode the site may occasionally be slow or unresponsive.

Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding!

Today several articles came out with additional information from Sean Murray about the mysterious third pillar, now officially dubbed No Man’s Sky: 2.0.

I’ve summarized some of the new features below and the links to the original articles are included at the bottom of this post.

No Man’s Sky 2.0 Features Include:

• – Creature Riding
• – Creature Farming
• – Creature Milking 0_o
• – Creature Taming
• – NPC’s walking around on planets
• – Deeper missions
• – New alien languages
• – New alien races
• – Larger base limits
• – Industrial-type bases
  • — Generators
  • — Solar panels
  • — Mining extractors
• – New base logic
  • — Electricity
  • — Creative building
• – Cooking
• – New galactic maps
• – Increased scale of all assets (ships, exocraft, building, etc)
• – Ability to sit in chairs

This list isn’t all-inclusive and Sean Murray says that the patch notes for Beyond will be nearly twice as long as the patch notes for NEXT!

Sources:

https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/08/09/no-mans-sky-beyond-will-let-you-milk-aliens

Hands-On: No Man’s Sky Is About To Snap An Entire VR Universe Into Existence

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/08/09/no-mans-sky-beyond-everything-in-the-new-mega-update

 

Hello Games have released a full trailer for the Beyond update:

Some of the new or possible features noticed in this trailer include:

• New base-building assets
  • Bio-metric/face-scanning security devices?
  • Power generation devices?
    • Running power lines on your base?
  • Storage tanks and/or defense turrets?
• Ability to ride the fauna!
• Larger and different ships
• New and different character face/helmet customization
• More flora/assets in caves
• More varied color palette
• Knives that you can wear on your belt?
• The new “Nexus” anomaly
  • Multiplayer hub where players can meet each other, visit bases together and participate in joint missions (read more)

Hello Games has officially announced the release date of the next update, Beyond, as August 14th, 2019. Thus far we know two of the three major components to this update are No Man’s Sky Online and VR support. The third “pillar” of Beyond remains unknown at this time but may be announced at some time in the next couple weeks before the release.

The announcement was accompanied by a slightly different 4-second clip that shows a little more of what appears to be the inside of a new structure. The structure is vaguely similar to a space station or Atlas Interface, with landing pads, consoles, holograms and walkways, etc. The actual purpose and context of this new structure is still a mystery.

Read the official announcement from Hello Games here.

Today Sean Murray announced that PC No Man’s Sky players that have opted into the Experimental branch can now download a new performance-enhancing update called “Vulkan“. Vulkan is a graphics API that is intended to replace OpenGL in order to optimize resource allocation, increase framerates and improve overall game performance.

You can read the full announcement here.

The Vulkan update will first be rolled out to PC users on the Experimental branch and will be released to other platforms in due time. This technical overhaul will be instrumental in deploying Beyond later this summer with VR support.

 

 

Last night SXSW Gaming hosted their 2019 Gaming Awards show where the gaming community voted for the best games in a wide variety of categories. Among these categories, No Man’s Sky NEXT was nominated for “Most Evolved Game”. The Portal Repository is happy to report that No Man’s Sky won this award, beating other popular games like Destiny 2: Forsaken, Fortnite, Overwatch, and Pokemon Go.

As someone who has been playing No Man’s Sky since the 2016 release, it’s easy to see why Hello Games won this award. After a rocky launch, the developers behind No Man’s Sky were faced with a choice, listen to the constructive criticism of their fans and continue development, or listen to the disparaging comments and quietly let No Man’s Sky die. In the face of immense adversity Hello Games chose to double-down and show all the critics what the game had the potential to be.

A steady stream of free updates continued to roll out over the next several years, incrementally improving many aspects to the game. In the summer of 2018, just before the two year anniversary, Hello Games released an update titled NEXT, their most significant update since launch. NEXT was the result of general community feedback and direct player input from surveys sent out by Hello Games themselves during the Waking Titan ARG.

No Man’s Sky was also previously nominated for the “Labor of Love” Steam Award, and “Best Ongoing Game” at The Game Awards show. Although No Man’s Sky might not be all things to all people, Hello Games have demonstrated time after time that they listen to their dedicated fans and incorporate their feedback into each new (and free) update. It hasn’t always been rainbows and roses, but no one said evolution was painless. No Man’s Sky NEXT was the clear choice to win the “Most Evolved Game” award and Sean Murray and the developers at Hello Games should be very proud of this achievement.

Today Hello Games announced the next update to No Man’s Sky, called Beyond. This new update will feature 3 major components, the first of which is “No Man’s Sky Online”.

No Man’s Sky Online includes a radical new social and multiplayer experience which empowers players everywhere in the universe to meet and play together. Whilst this brings people together like never before, and has many recognisable online elements, we don’t consider No Man’s Sky to be an MMO – it won’t require a subscription, won’t contain microtransactions, and will be free for all existing players.

The other two components remain unknown at this time, but Sean Murray assures us that all will be revealed in due time. Beyond is expected to be released sometime in the summer of 2019. The Portal Repository will continue to post new information as it becomes available.

Read the original announcement from Hello Games.

 

I’m very excited to announce that The Portal Repository has officially reached over 1000 addresses!

Here’s a breakdown of some of the stats:

• 1002 addresses as of Feb 11th, 2019
  • 490 addresses on PC
  • 412 addresses on PS4
  • 100 addresses on Xbox
• October 17th, 2017 was when the first address was published
• 461,319 page views since the site was launched (if you don’t count browsers with Do Not Track active. In reality it’s closer to 900,000 views)
• 360 addresses were posted during the Atlas Rises version (pre-NEXT)
• 656 players registered
• 83% of post-NEXT addresses are in Normal game mode
• 27 civilizations posted at least one address
• 15 different galaxies
• 16 people financially supported this website (see the footer for full list – thanks!)

This site has growth substantially in just over a year since inception and it’s all thanks to the dedicated players that have shared their portal addresses! The popularity of No Man’s Sky waxes and wanes with each update, but the core of the community is solid. Even during the quietest times this site doesn’t go more than a day without a new address being uploaded.

I’d like to congratulate two players in particular, Elmseeker and Vangelis2019 for posting the addresses that took us over 1000:

Linasia Home by Elmseeker

Reol Minor by VangelisLA2019

Thank you to everyone who’s contributed to The Repository so far! Let’s go for 2000!