No Man's Sky Surprise Free Update Adds Tough Star Wars Inspired Boss

This year, No Man’s Sky is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and it’s doing so by supplying players with tons of new content.

It all began with the Remnant update which added salvage-based tasks to the acclaimed survival title.

That was followed by the Palworld and Pokémon-esque Xeno Arena update which introduced creature battling.

Players can now look forward to The Swarm which Hello Games’ Sean Murray has teased on social media in recent days using bee emojis.

The Swarm Will See Players Split Into Factions, Taking On A Major New Threat

The Swarm is available now across PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC and introduces a major new threat to the game that all players will need to work together to defeat.

“Something new, huge and foreboding is hanging in the sky above planets. Unlike anything we've seen before,” Murray wrote in a press release.

“Players are going to need a combined community effort to figure out what is going on.”

Upon booting up the game, No Man’s Sky players will now be greeted with a “personality test” which is set to divide everyone into three different factions.

Within those factions, players should “co-operate, strategise, and compete to counter the Hive of Glass, an existential threat to the universe”.

“A war effort is being launched from the Nexus, with defences rapidly being constructed, and a new bulletin page tracking progress,” Murray continued.

“Your contribution to the face-off with the Hive is being logged for all to see in both the Anomaly and the Galactic Atlas.

“Travellers will want to keep a constant eye on which squad is contributing the most to the war effort. The most effective faction will be memorialised in the Space Anomaly for all time!”

The Hello Games team claim that this is No Man’s Sky’s most epic space battle to date, with the Hive of Glass unleashing swarms of robotic drones players will have to fend off.

This creates “an awesome spectacle of battles with hundreds of ships”.

The Hive itself also acts as a weapon. In fact, it’s the game’s biggest weapon so far with The Hive’s Iris opening to reveal something that can really turn the tide of battle.

“A laser capable of destroying freighter fleets and perhaps even something as large as a space station,” it’s teased. The weapon sounds a lot like Star Wars’ Death Star.

While all of this takes place in space, players can use the pre-existing Gravity Gun on nearby planets to acquire and salvage falling drones tying back to the Remnant update.

There are also “miniature planetary swarms to defeat” with players unlocking new rewards for defending the galaxy, including “a full suit of armour that has a retro sci-fi feel, a new rifle, a huge new jetpack, and much more”.

“I love that this year we’ve had players collecting trash with a new gravity gun, battling pets in the Xeno Arena, and now fighting off a high action threat to the universe in THE SWARM,” Murray concluded.

“The prospect of all existing Travellers converging on a single area of the universe to take the largest space battles to date, against the back-drop of an ominous, mysterious Death Star like construct, with the ability to destroy space station sized objects… is going to make for some exciting weeks ahead for us and for players. We can’t wait to see how this plays out.”

The Swarm is available to enjoy now. You can view the patch notes online.

READ MORE: No Man’s Sky’s Sean Murray Has Big Plans For The Game’s Future