Hello Games just shipped No Man’s Sky: Cosmos — free update 7.0 — and it finally treats outer space as a place to play, not a loading screen between planets. Station ownership, orbital bases, salvageable space hulks, and a 10-year anniversary expedition are live today on every platform that carries the game, including SteamVR and PlayStation VR2.
UploadVR’s Mike Johnson flagged the drop this morning: after the tenth-anniversary tease in August, Cosmos is an automatic free patch with the optional expedition Our Journey Continues. Hello Games’ own Cosmos update page and Steam announcement frame it as a full overhaul of deep-space mapping, shipbreaking, and station politics — the stuff the community has asked for for years.
Space stops being empty
Warp into a system, open the new star-system map, and points of interest now sit in space the way outposts used to sit on planets. Per Hello Games and UploadVR, the headline systems include:
- Space hulks — colossal derelicts you strip with the Gravitino Coil. Pull too much and structural integrity fails; the hulk can melt down and explode.
- Deep-space outposts — trade, maps, and contracts with alien quartermasters. Some are infested and need cleanup before they pay out.
- Asteroid belts and ice fields — denser resource nodes, some large enough to land on and build a star base.
- Orbital bases — free-floating modular habitats you can plant anywhere in empty space or on natural rock platforms.
- Space station directorship — buy (or earn) a station, decorate the lobby and exterior, and expand with ancillary rooms.
- Galactic alliances — player networks tied to owned stations, with leaderboards for size, activity, and reach.
Corvette pilots get a new Tractor Beam hull part so salvage yanked with the gravity gun can be hauled home. Non-Corvette ships can now eject for EVA too — Hello Games says spacewalking gains true six degrees of freedom, including roll. That matters in VR: the same loop UploadVR notes as “hands-on scavenging and building” is the loop that sells a headset.
VR gets the same free patch — plus foveated rendering on PC
No Man’s Sky has shipped full VR on Steam and PlayStation VR2 for years. Cosmos does not invent a new VR mode; it drops the same 7.0 content into those builds. The patch notes do add one PC VR-specific rendering win: foveated rendering when eye tracking is available, concentrating detail where you look. PS VR2 already had eye-tracked dynamic foveated rendering from earlier updates; Cosmos also piles on DLSS 4.5, XeSS 3, cloud-from-space upgrades, and a long list of VR QoL fixes (Corvette recolouring in VR, Move-controller base switching, black-screen edge cases).
Our Journey Continues
Expedition Twenty-Three, Our Journey Continues, is the nostalgia track. Hello Games says it runs about six weeks, with milestones keyed to each major update since 2016, developer commentary read by Sean Murray, and rewards that include framed commemorative art, a golden Rasamama S36, a vintage Interceptor, the Starbound v0.27 Multi-Tool, an astronaut cockpit figurine, and a diplodocus companion pulled from pre-release footage. Twitch Drops for Cosmos run Thursday 10 September through Monday 14 September.
UploadVR’s take matches the studio pitch: Worlds was the exploration rewrite; Cosmos is the builder-and-salvager rewrite. If you already live in freighter interiors and Corvette halls, the void just became another floor plan.
Availability: Cosmos (update 7.0) is free today for existing No Man’s Sky owners on Steam (including SteamVR), PlayStation VR2, and the rest of the supported platform set. Full notes and media live on the official Cosmos page; UploadVR’s wrap is here.