The impressive free updates and patches continue in No Man’s Sky. The latest Prisms update adds oodles of new visual enhancements and other goodies — like flying in the air on your friendly companion a la the the Neverending Story.
The free patch, out today, beefs up the 2016 game’s lighting effects, including new volumetric lighting, reworks cave biomes to add more detail, increases the quality and number of stars in the sky, improves rain and water refractions, and adds new parallax occlusion mapping technology, which sounds like a completely made-up sci-fi term.
Basically, the space-crafting-exploration adventure is a lot prettier than when it originally launched. In anticipation, Hello Games also improved the Photo Mode with more controls over lighting and depth of field.
Prisms also expands on the new pets system added in the Companions update earlier this year, by adding low-flying creatures such as giant beetles and winged worms to the list of adoptable companions. By riding these pets you can effectively fly through the air, which is somehow a bit cooler than just jumping in your starship.
Prisms is already the third major content update released this year for the once-beleaguered space game. The last update, Expeditions, added seasonal challenges and unlockable awards.
No Man’s Sky is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
