"No Man's Sky" is undergoing a major visual upgrade

Hello Games has developed the habit of giving up a large number of updates to No Man's Sky quite frequently. The 3.5 patch, called Prism, brings visual reforms and some gameplay changes to the space exploration simulation. This update adds new texture effects, biome details, sky, reflection and distortion effects, as well as enhanced lighting, rain, and particle effects.

There's support for screen space reflection on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One X. Hello Games says the tech brings reflective surfaces and improved lighting quality to many locations, including the Space Anomaly, space stations, Atlas stations, freighter hangars and derelict freighters.

The game now harnesses colored and directional volumetric lighting to add some atmosphere, including to Sentinel drone searchlights and spaceship headlights as well as the glow of bioluminescent flora. The Exosuit torch, meanwhile, now has dynamic brightness.

Caves and subterranean biomes have improved lighting and more detailed and diverse environments, while parallax occlusion mapping technology brings increased depth and definition to flat surfaces. You can also expect to see refractions and more stars in space and night skies.

NVIDIA recently announced support for its DLSS technology in No Man's Sky, including when playing in virtual reality. The patch enables the feature for PC users with a compatible RTX graphics card.

As for the gameplay, there's a wider range of creatures that you can adopt as rideable pets, including flying critters. Photo mode has enhanced depth-of-field quality and improved controls, including manual control over bloom settings. Tracks you create with the Bytebeat Synthesizer can be added to a library and used as a custom soundtrack while you explore. You can share your creations with other players as well.

A new terminal in the Space Anomaly blueprint research area provides a recipe for making, if you have enough nanites, a currency in "No Man's Sky". There are also some quality of life upgrades, including icons that appear when items are added to the inventory. Starting today, Prisms updates are available on all platforms.