No Man’s Sky is celebrating a decade of exploration with one of the most significant changes in its history. Hello Games has released COSMOS, the game’s free 7.0 update, shifting attention away from planetary surfaces and dramatically expanding what players can actually do between worlds. Space is no longer simply the enormous corridor separating one destination from another. It is becoming a fully fledged environment filled with locations to discover, resources to recover, structures to build and communities to establish. According to Hello Games founder Sean Murray, COSMOS ranks among the studio’s largest and most ambitious updates to date.

Travelling into a new system now provides far more opportunities for discovery. An upgraded stellar map highlights points of interest that can lead to additional missions and exploration activities. Massive derelict vessels can be stripped for valuable components, with players physically tearing sections from wreckage before pulling them aboard their ships. Salvaging too aggressively carries its own risks, however, as unstable wrecks may eventually collapse or explode. Other locations include orbital trading outposts, abandoned structures infested with biological threats and expanded asteroid belts containing rare crystalline materials. Some asteroids are even large enough to land on, opening the door to permanent construction in places that previously existed only as scenery.

The biggest addition is arguably the new approach to orbital construction. Players can establish floating bases almost anywhere in open space, allowing them to design anything from remote refuelling stations to military installations or unconventional orbital businesses. Even more importantly, players can finally own a complete space station and redesign both its interior and exterior. These stations can function as personal headquarters or as the foundation of the new Alliance system. Groups of players are able to cooperate, connect multiple stations into a larger network and compete through rankings measuring factors such as wealth, scale and prestige. COSMOS even expands exploration toward the stars themselves, giving travellers the opportunity to undertake dangerous journeys toward the centre of their local systems.

Hello Games is also marking the anniversary with a special expedition titled “Our Journey Continues!”, which revisits the evolution of No Man’s Sky across the 40 major updates released since 2016. Features are gradually unlocked in roughly the same order in which they originally arrived, while a dedicated log provides development stories and retrospective commentary from the studio. COSMOS is available at no additional cost across PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Mac and supported VR platforms. Ten years after one of gaming’s most controversial launches, No Man’s Sky has become one of the industry’s most remarkable long-term reinvention stories — and with less than 1% of its procedurally generated universe reportedly explored, its frontier remains almost impossibly vast.