No Man's Sky Releases New Relics Update

Summary

Patch 5.6 (Relics Update) for No Man's Sky adds palaeontology, new features, and bug fixes.
Previous updates fixed launch issues and added features like companions, co-op, and base building.
The game remains popular due to continuous updates, making it worth playing years after release.

No Man’s Sky has recently released patch 5.6, also known as the Relics Update, which adds important features like palaeontology to the popular space exploration game. This is the latest of a few substantial updates received by No Man’s Sky as developer Hello Games continues to polish the experience and add more elements to the popular survival title.

Originally released in 2016, No Man’s Sky suffered from a controversial launch, as many gamers were disappointed with the lack of depth in the title’s universe, as well as the prevalence of many bugs. Over the years, however, Hello Games launched many updates, fixing the game’s worst issues and adding much more content to the experience. With additional features such as the ability to find companions, play in co-op, and build bases, No Man’s Sky eventually became one of the most popular space exploration games ever released.

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By Clayton Cyre

With the new Relics Update, No Man’s Sky players will be able to unearth hundreds of unique bones, assemble their fossils, and fight against gargantuan stone giants or ancient bone creatures as palaeontology is added to the game. This change adds a whole new system, as these bones will have a wide variety, and gamers will be able to sell their fossil exhibits. The patch also includes an improved Abandoned Mode, which has been streamlined and enhanced with more valuable items.

Other new features include a new skeletal companion, colossal stone effigies that can be found on planets, and much more. As usual, the 5.6 patch also fixes multiple bugs, making the experience of playing No Man’s Sky smoother. Overall, the 5.6 patch is larger than some of the most recent No Man’s Sky updates, which mainly fixed bugs.

The last major No Man’s Sky patch was 5.5, also known as Worlds: Part 2. This huge previous update introduced greater world variety, such as water worlds and gas giants, ruined civilizations, new missions, and much more to the popular space exploration title.

With these updates, No Man’s Sky is likely worth playing in 2025 even for gamers who have already tried it once. Even when considering only the updates in the last year or so, Hello Games did a good job of overhauling some of No Man’s Sky's systems and greatly improving the experience. This made the game feel fresh almost a decade after its original release, and gave a mysterious universe for players to explore at their own pace.

No Man's Sky 5.6 Patch Notes (Relics Update)

Collect and Display Skeletons

Planetary fossil beds now contain a vast array of specific bone formations.
Each of these bones can be placed as a decorative base part, either individually or mounted on a display plinth.
Larger display plinths allow a collection of bones to be reassembled into a complete skeleton, allowing the design and reassembly of ancient and extinct beings.
Completed displays can be packaged into an easily transportable module, allowing them to be re-deployed in other locations, traded with other players, or sold on the galactic market.
A new planetary dig-site building has been added, serving as a hub for interested fossil collectors.
The icon for planetary fossils has been improved.
A small tutorial mission has been added to guide new palaeontologists.
A new palaeontology section has been added to the guide.

Fossil Exchange

A fossil collector has been added to the Space Station.
Surplus fossils can be exchanged with the fossil collector, allowing players to target specific skeleton components for their designs.
The fossil collector will barter for items in their collection, allowing individual inventory items to be swapped.

Relics Expeditions

Expedition Eighteen, Relics, will begin shortly and run for approximately six weeks.
Rewards include new posters, decals and titles; a living stone suit customisation set; the unique Basilisk Crown staff; a mysterious skeletal companion; and the exclusive Living Stone jetpack.

Stone Guardians

Fossil beds are now watched over by a vigilant stone eye, ready to protect the bones from those who would exhume them.
Disturbing the vigilant eye may yield valuable rewards, but comes at the cost of awakening the guardians.
Two forms of stone guardian await - a huge living statue, and a whirling storm of re-animated rock.
Huge guardian statues have been added to relic worlds.

Skeletal Lifeforms

A new and highly rare skeletal lifeform has been added to some planets.
Some planets are now home to the elusive titanic bone-worm…

Quality of Life and UI

Planets in your current system can now be marked from the discovery page, adding a marker to the starship navigation systems.
Added an accessibility option to increase the contrast in mission-critical UI panels.
Fixed an issue that could cause the camera to move erratically back and forth while inside high-ceilinged rooms in player bases.
Nearby NPCs that have specific unseen interactions will now be highlighted with a marker.

Added a new water state for ocean worlds with significantly larger waves.
Various volumetric and other atmospheric effects no longer play on planets without an atmosphere.
Story details from the In Stellar Multitudes mission now appear in the Journey Records page in the catalogue.
Reduced the number of corrupt drones that attack player settlements.
The space station marker is now dynamically offset, preventing the marker from obscuring the station while at a distance.
Fixed a number of minor text issues in some extractor UIs.
Fixed a number of minor text and icon issues in shop interactions.
Fixed an issue that caused companions that were set to use no accessories to have a random accessory assigned after re-summoning them.

Fixed an issue that caused the starship to too-aggressively lock on to markers when engaging the pulse engine.
An organic version of the Teleport Receiver has been added for use in living starships.
Fixed an issue that caused the repair requirements for several living starship technologies to all be the same.
Lingering on-screen display messages that report pulse drive errors will now clear as soon as a successful pulse drive engagement is detected.

Save System

Significantly improved the compression used for saved games, improving filesizes and upload/download times for players in the cross-save beta.
Created a section for cross-save settings within the general Options menu.
Players in the cross-save beta are now alerted to situations where uploads are timing out, and can manually adjust how long the game will wait for a successful upload before detecting a timeout and cancelling.

Cooking

New fossil-related cooking recipes have been added.
Base storage container inventories are now accessible while cooking.
Fixed an issue that prevented access to the nutrient processor’s internal storage while on a freighter or the Exo-Skiff.
Fixed a number of issues while cooking the Exo-Skiff, including progress resetting or incorrect items appearing in various slots.
Cronos’ grill on the Space Anomaly can now be used by several players at once.
Fixed an issue that made it impossible to cook jellied eels.

Abandoned Mode Improvements

Multi-Tools found in abandoned mode are now always free, but start with damaged slots.
Settlement-related missions will no longer start in abandoned mode.
Abandoned space stations now have access to Exosuit, starship, and Multi-Tool upgrade stations.
Additional salvage boxes have been added around abandoned space stations containing valuable upgrades and inventory expansion modules.
Purple systems are now unlocked automatically in abandoned mode.
In abandoned mode, crashed freighter containers and other buried caches can now contain additional valuable upgrades.

Optimization

Introduced a number of optimisations to planetary prop rendering.
Introduced an optimisation to dynamic physics groups.
Introduced a significant memory optimisation for nav mesh generation.
Introduced a number of minor texture memory optimisations.
Introduced an optimisation for loading large bases.
Introduced a number of optimisations for text display, particularly in the Journey Records pages.
Introduced an optimisation to the various catalogue and guide pages.

Other Bug Fixes

Fixed a number of issues that could occur when warping on board another player’s freighter.
Fixed an issue that could cause water creatures to be generated for a planet that would never have deep enough water for those creatures to spawn.
Fixed a number of mission blockers in They Who Returned.
Fixed an issue that could cause some bases to become invisible when constructed at the water’s surface on ocean planets.
Fixed an issue that could cause PC players to appear jerky in cross-platform multiplayer.
Fixed a rare issue that could cause players’ settings to reset in VR.
Fixed an issue that could cause NPCs to sink into the floor.
Fixed an issue that could cause a softlock when browsing the Exocraft inventory.
Fixed a rare hang on load when returning to a savegame that was saved while in an Exocraft after playing in multiplayer.
Fixed a rare crash related to camera shakes.
Fixed a memory-related crash on PlayStation 5.
Fixed a number of rare crashes related to mesh scaling.
Fixed a number of rare maths-related crashes.
Fixed an issue that could cause some planetary props to pop in.
Fixed a number of Mac-specific rendering issues.
Fixed a rare issue that could cause saves to reach a max size and stop saving on Nintendo Switch - saves can now expand as required.
Fixed an issue that could cause multiple ships to become docked to the same landing pad.
Improved the placement positioning of decorative base building props.
Fixed a number of text clipping issues in large popups.
Fixed an issue that could cause a teleport destination to have two copies of a mission marker added.
Fixed an issue that could make interactions difficult on freighters that were summoned a long way from the centre of the solar system.
Fixed a number of issues affecting markers and planet labels when entering atmosphere.
Fixed a rare issue that could cause empty systems to generate incorrect information about their potential Atlas Stations.
Fixed an issue that could cause the galaxy map to incorrectly choose a purple system as part of its path to a distant star when purple systems are not unlocked.
Fixed an issue that could cause players to start in a purple system when arriving in a new galaxy, when purple systems were not unlocked.
Fixed an issue that caused the water effects from the Nautilon submarine to remain in the world after summoning the sub to a new location.
Fixed an issue that prevented Exocraft laser effects from playing correctly in multiplayer.
Fixed an issue that could cause erratic torso movements in Sentinel mechs.
Fixed an issue that could cause the ship to hover as if above water when reloading on a planet.
Fixed a number of inconsistencies in creature descriptions, where creatures would be described as being from the wrong environment.
Fixed an incorrect texture being used for the Titan expedition in the expedition history screen.
Fixed a number of decals and posters from previous expeditions being missing from the catalogue.
Fixed an issue that caused a number of unusable and legacy items to be included in the catalogue.