Hello Games has rolled out the latest update for No Man’s Sky, called the “Frontiers” update. This update will establish settlements on certain planets, of which players can become overseers. If you’ve ever wanted to become mayor of a space settlement you build up yourself, and for some reason the myriad of city-building sims out there aren’t to your taste, then No Man’s Sky has you covered.
This new feature appears to add a lot of new mechanics to the game. The update from Hello Games says, “Make choices, guide your citizens, develop new structures and defend your people from the Sentinels. Or, take advantage of a massive overhaul of base building to construct your own dream base.” Multiple different people who’ve seen the update compare these settlements to Mos Eisley in Star Wars.
Each of the settlements will have its own unique appearance, decorations, and layout thanks to procedural generation, and several of them will be pre-established in inhabited systems. Players will also be able to found their own settlements, name them, attract citizens, and build up the town in the manner they’d prefer. They can even take care of minutiae like commissioning festivals and resolving arguments. Players can also build up existing settlements: “Different building types influence how your settlement grows. Build farms and factories to increase productivity, or choose to prioritize the comfort and leisure of your citizens with a more relaxed approach to frontier life.”
There are a few other updates coming with Frontiers as well. According to Hello Games, it’s adding beautiful nebulas to the game to make the sky more interesting. To help with the aforementioned town-building, they’ve also overhauled the base building interface in the game and added hundreds of new building parts. There will also be updated destruction mechanics. You’ll also be able to see the thoughts of the people in the settlements.
