No Man’s Sky focuses on customising and accessibility in its relaxed Waypoint 4.0 update

Sci-fi survival sim No Man’s Sky sees the launch of its next major update today, and it’s about making things easier to do and doing them the way you want them. Key to this are custom game modes, auto-saves, dynamic difficulty, and inventory streamlining. There’s also a new relaxed mode for the particularly chilled among us. Watch the update trailer below for a rundown, and some trippy space visuals.

Right, I’ll get this out of the way now. While I enjoy zipping about the spacelanes in No Man’s Sky, the bloody cursor has always massively irritated me in its menus. That’s why I’m mightily pleased to see that Hello Games say it’s been improved for playing with a gamepad. Less fiddly cursors are part of the Waypoint update’s tweaks to the game, with an eye towards improving ease of use and quality of life. Scanning with the analysis visor’s faster now, for example, so discovering new stuff feels more efficient.

People other than myself will be more interested to hear that there’s now custom game mode options, ranging from simple difficulty presets to really fiddly stuff to do with how the economy, survival, and combat work. You can make fuel usage really expensive to mimic the real world, or alter goods availability to scarce to again mimic the real world. Or turn the natural resources setting to scarce too, to mimic the real world even more.

If you’d like less of a reminder of how crap things are though, there’s relaxed mode. That dials down the danger and grind, but leaves all the storytelling, survival and combat in place. Dynamic difficulty settings mean you can shuffle the challenge up or down, even for existing saves. Inventories have been overhauled too, and expanded, so collecting stuff and finding it again later should be way easier.

Also dropping with Waypoint is the option to enable AMD FSR 2 for an image quality and framerate boost. There seem to be as many changes to No Man’s Sky in this update as there are stars in the galaxy – renaming saves, zhuzhed up visual effects, trade rockets for automated selling – so I won’t go through them all here. You can read the full patch notes for the Waypoint 4.0 update here.

No Man’s Sky is available from Steam, GOG and the Microsoft Store for £40/$60/€55. It’s also on PC Game Pass, and out today for Nintendo Switch.