No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has announced The Swarm update, which adds a “mysterious Death Star like construct” to the sci-fi adventure.

The Swarm update adds “something new, huge and foreboding" to the sky above planets. Hello Games said it's "unlike anything we've seen before.” Patch notes, courtesy of the No Man's Sky website, are below.

“Players are going to need a combined community effort to figure out what is going on,” Hello Games chief Sean Murray teased. “Travellers will boot up to be greeted with a personality test, dividing players into three factions, each will need to 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 defenses 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 Swarm adds No Man’s Sky’s “biggest and most epic space battles to date,” Murray said. “The Hive of Glass protects itself by releasing swarms of robotic drones, creating an awesome spectacle of battles with hundreds of ships. The Hive itself is a weapon too, with the iris opening to release the largest weapon we’ve ever seen in No Man’s Sky. A laser capable of destroying freighter fleets and perhaps even something as large as a space station…

“While in space there are huge battles, on planet there is investigating and pillaging the remains of crashed drones (using the newly-acquired Gravity Gun we introduced earlier this year). Shot down drones need to be salvaged and researched. There are miniature planetary swarms to defeat, and research efforts to sabotage the swarm’s network. The secrets of the Hive’s origins and weaknesses can be uncovered and shared with your fellow rebels.”

Murray added: “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.”

No Man's Sky The Swarm Update Update 6.4 patch notes:

The Swarm Expedition

• Expedition Twenty-Two, The Swarm, will begin shortly and run for approximately eight weeks.
• Players on the expedition will be assigned into one of three teams of Travellers, and allocated a ship and uniform in their team colours.
• All teams must work together to unlock the final battle. Progress is represented by the construction of the Prismatic Core in the Space Anomaly, as well as displayed in the Mission Log and on the Galactic Atlas website.
• Construction of the Prismatic Core is driven by completing three categories of missions to counteract the Swarm - Purge, Restoration, and Sabotage. Each category has a different impact on the rate and balance of construction.
• The most valuable team will be glorified in the Space Anomaly for all time.
• Rewards include new posters, decals and titles; flags representing your assigned soul fragment; the Direwasp rifle Multi-Tool; the Direwasp Flightpack; and the six-piece Direwasp customisation set.

Swarmer Enemies

• During the expedition, players will encounter two new enemy types: small, agile swarmer ships, and the huge, formidable Hive of Glass boss.
• In all game modes, crashed swarmer ships can now be found on dissonant planets. Crash sites are defended by small but deadly planetary swarmers.
• Buried debris from crashed swarmer ships can now be found on worlds which are both dissonant and contain salvageable scrap.

Stability and Optimisation

• Fixed a rare softlock where the Connecting banner could display indefinitely when viewing the initial frontend screens.
• Fixed a crash related to rendering thumbnails for multiple complex corvette-class starships.
• Implemented a number of memory and performance optimisations related to ship trails and speedlines.
• Improved performance when piloting wheeled Exocraft on Switch, Xbox One, and PS4.
• Implemented a significant optimisation in freighter battles.
• Improved performance of certain lighting calculations on CPU.
• Significantly improved performance when handling object visibility in complex scenes.
• Optimised memory usage when rendering UI in sub-4K resolutions on PS4 Pro.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a crash when playing in 4K on PS4 Pro.
• Fixed a number of rare crashes.

Space Combat

• Improved the visibility of targeted enemy ships in third person space combat.
• Improved weapon aiming of the starship in third person space combat.
• Improved the navigation of the starship when using auto-follow in space combat, and allowed auto-follow to boost the ship.
• Improved the navigation and flight patterns of enemy ships in space combat.
• In space combat, when battling enemies with weak points, hitting the weak point will now always crit, and hitting other areas of the enemy will never crit.
• Improved the appearance of speedlines in the starship.
• Fixed an issue that caused mission notifications counting the number of nearby enemy ships to delay updating until a destroyed enemy ship completed its death spin.
• Improved controls for the player ship while in space combat.
• Fixed an issue that could allow Sentinel interceptors to spawn when space combat was disabled in the difficulty settings.
• Fixed an issue that prevented Sentinel interceptors from detecting criminal activity in space if ground combat was disabled in the difficulty settings.
• Fixed an issue that could allow the countdown notification for the pulse engine enabling after combat to display a negative time.
• Improved the notifications for re-enabling the pulse engine after combat to display the correct pulse technology name for the current ship.

QOL and Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that caused teleporter endpoints from previous galaxies to be removed when progressing to the next galaxy through the galactic core.
• Fixed an issue that prevented teleporter endpoints from being added in galaxies outside the player's "home" galaxy.
• Fixed an issue that caused In Stellar Multitudes to direct the player to the galaxy map when their first purple star system was actually in a different galaxy.
• Fixed an issue that prevented corvettes from landing in the Space Station and the Anomaly.
• Fixed an issue that caused the player's backpack to disappear from the inventory screen when piloting a corvette after being in third person.
• When viewing a corvette through the Analysis Visor, the name of the specific module is now displayed on the HUD.
• Fixed an issue which caused the Analysis Visor to close when attempting to tag a marker whilst facing an interactable object.
• Fixed an issue that could cause markers to be displayed for non-existent resource deposits.
• Fixed an issue that prevented transferring inventory items when purchasing a ship.
• Fixed an issue that prevented inventory items from being deletable when transferring into a storage container.
• Fixed an issue that caused the camera to spin if the player quickly exited the ship after answering the ship communicator.
• Fixed a camera judder when first entering a ship after repairing it.
• Fixed an issue that could cause Corrupted Sentinels to flicker rapidly on Nintendo Switch 1 & 2.
• Fixed an issue that allowed retroviral pellets to be duplicated.
• Arena League Challenger's Invitations are more likely to encourage you to battle on multiple planets before offering a Champion's Invitation.
• Arena League Challenger's Invitations are more likely to pick Holo-Arenas you have not previously visited.
• Arena League Champion's Invitations will now function correctly when used in Outlaw systems.
• Improved the balance of experience awarded to companions when battling in the Holo-Arena against opponents of a much higher level.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the prompt to claim Twitch rewards to persist when all rewards had been claimed.
• Added support for viewing the Gamercards of each Xbox player in the host's session when on the Join Game screen.
• Hid the Quick Menu keyboard hotkey prompts on PC and handheld devices when playing without mouse and keyboard.
• Fixed an issue that caused armour on display near the Exosuit Research merchant in the Space Station to disappear as you got closer.
• Hid the holographic representation of community mission progress above the Quicksilver Synthesis Bot when no blueprints are currently being generated.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the use of touch controls to claim expedition rewards.
• Fixed an issue that would prevent saving of gyro settings when applying changes from the front end menu.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.