Tens of thousands of people are busy exploring No Man's Sky again, discovering all sorts of weird and wild sights in the procedurally generated galaxy. Below I've gathered up the weirdest of what players have found, but first let's start with a few of my discoveries. Probably the oddest moment I've had this past week was when I warped into a star system and found myself staring at a moon that appeared to be sporting a rather massive vagina on its surface.

I know there have been plenty of players who have use terrain tools to sculpt dongs on planets, but this is vagina so big you can see it from space, and it isn't the result of player shenanigans. It's a naturally appearing mathematical occurrence that just happens to look like a very big vagina. (Or maybe it looks like the flame of a candle. You be the judge.) Here's a full-sized image.

The moon, called Dagnor III, circling a planet named Crobia, was an 'Empty Moon', with no creature or plant life present. Even the vagina itself vanished when I flew too close, disassembling into more random-looking cracks and ridges in the moon's surface long before I got close enough to land. To me, though, it will always be the Moon Vagina of Dagnor III.

With that bit of business out of the way, here's a look at some other oddities spotted in No Man's Sky over the past week. Obviously there are some spoilers below if you want to find (and be surprised by) all this stuff yourself. 

This planet covered with bony things

Many players have come across planets that are lifeless but simply covered with these weird objects that look like they're made of bone. You can mine them for resources if you have an advanced laser, and as far as I can tell they're new to Next, joining other semi-rare oddities like bubble planets.

This other weird planet covered with these other weird things

If you've come across a [REDACTED] planet (that's what it's called on your scanner) and landed, you probably saw some of these... things. Again, it's another somewhat rare occurrence, littered with tall metallic spires, some of them hovering a few feet off the ground.

This blobby plant creature that has a huge butthole

I'm not obsessed with body parts or anything. I promise! I just keep accidentally finding them in No Man's Sky. Here's a large multi-eyed plant blob that was sloshing around on a planet, and I decided to kill it and push it down a hill because I am a massive space jerk. That's when I discovered it had an enormous butthole (or some sort of hole) that it hops around on.

OK, that's it for body parts from me, I promise. Probably.

This abandoned, pre-Next space station

You'll no longer find a space station in every single star system: some haven't been discovered or explored by the NPC factions yet. Others, however, have been colonized but later abandoned. What's really cool is that these abandoned stations have the same layout as the original space stations: the single round door and same types of small chambers they had before they were redesigned for Next. The landing pads all glow red and it's more than a bit creepy in there. If you find one, be sure to check it out.

Aliens that bring their own chairs everywhere

It was always a bit strange that trading posts had all these seats set out for visitors, rows and rows of them, but no one ever sat in them. Before Next, the single occupant at the post always stood. With more NPCs added, I figured now some of those seats would at least be filled.

Well, no. There are usually a handful of NPCs at the trading posts, and some of them are sitting. But it looks like NPCs prefer to bring their own chairs with them. I'm still not sure who all those seats at trading posts are for and why no one will sit in them. Another No Man's Sky mystery.

A very, very red solar system

I'm not the only one at PC Gamer playing No Man's Sky, as our intrepid photographer Andy Kelly posted last week about all the interesting stuff he's been coming across, including a startlingly lovely, extremely red galaxy (above). I've seen a lot of blue and yellow and green systems, and some that are fairly reddish, but I've never seen a bright red system quite like this. Beautiful.

This sentinel walker at rest

What I'd hoped (but sort of doubted) might be pilotable mechsuits shown in the Next trailer turned out to be high-level sentinel walkers, mechanical protectors of the resources on certain planets. Reddit member Scinetik spotted one on of these pain-in-the-asses on hunkered down in standby mode. 

I love that they have sort of an offline, resting pose. Just chilling out, relaxing, waiting for someone to break the rules. And then it's stomping time.

A floating chocolate-dipped donut

Mmm, delicious! If this planet found and posted by Reddit member Lunitari696 contains an island that looks like a chocolate-dipped donut, maybe it also contains a massive cup of coffee, too. You'd need a pretty big ship if you wanted to take it with you, though.

Is this a ship for ants?

Hm. Decent little hauler there docked at a space station, until you notice it is a decent very little hauler. I'm not sure the player, if they chose to buy it, could even squeeze in there since they're actually taller than the wee ship. And if so, surely it wouldn't have the cargo space to hold more than a few gravitino balls.

A hex moon orbiting a hex planet

Hex planets have been around since the last expansion, and while I don't really know their purpose they're still one of my favorite planets to come across. I've seen these synthetic planets and hex moons before, but only one at a time and never two in the same systems. It happens, though, because he's a hex planet with a hex moon orbiting it. Reddit user TezzaMcJ found these two beauts.  There's a couple more shots here.

A frigate of hungy ghosts

You can acquire frigates by flying close to them and hailing them on the radio, and then inspecting their stats. Before you buy it, make sure you take a close look at the crew. This crew's mood is 'Hungry', which could mean hungry for action or maybe they're just not well-fed.

Be sure to look at the Notes section, too. It contains important information, such as about this frigate found by Reddit user phoisgood495. If you enlarge the picture above, you'll see the note mentions that the frigate is 'crewed by ghosts.' Huh. That seems important. That seems too important to be left to a note. In fact, it should really be painted on the side of the ship.

It was a big weekend for No Man's Sky. Following the release of the Next expansion, Hello Games' space sandbox drew a peak concurrent playercount of around 97,000 players on Sunday. That's not quite half the total the 2016 launch drew on Steam, which was just over 212,000 concurrent users, but it's close, and not bad for a game that's been out for two years. As a reference point, a Reddit member pointed out that this weekend's surge of players surpassed The Witcher 3's all-time peak of around 92,000.

Beyond the co-op multiplayer and other new features of Next, the price drop to 50% off is certainly helping, too: NMS has been sitting atop Steam's global top sellers list since Next launched last week. Reviews on Steam have also risen from 'Mostly Negative' to 'Mixed', which makes me think of the episode of Arrested Development when the Bluth's stock rose from 'Sell' to 'Don't Buy', but an improvement is an improvement.

We've been among the players exploring the features of the new expansion. Andy cataloged the coolest things he's seen in Next so far, I found a bizarrely sad little planet where happiness is forbidden and one where the awful weather made me never want to leave. In other words, if you own the game but haven't played in a while, it's a good time to try it again.

Hello Games just added a bunch of new features to its space sandbox with No Man's Sky Next, and here I come to ask for one more. I'm requesting a remote camera I can place on a planet so that after I've left it light-years behind I still can turn on a monitor in my ship and take a peek at what's going on. I made a video above (also here on YouTube) of a planet I visited that had some of the most constantly terrible weather I've seen, but it's a planet I still wound up exploring for days and not wanting to leave.

When it comes to No Man's Sky, I'm not a base-builder. I've been to a lot of planets but few that made me feel like setting up shop. I take some pictures, maybe do a little documenting (as I did on the colorless planet I named Sadworld this week) and move on forever. There's a few quadrillion other planets to visit! I've got no time for sentimentality.

That's why I was a little surprised to get so attached to a planet named Obosthom Gaur. First of all, it's in a system that seemed cool the moment I entered it. Just look at these beautiful babies all lined up in a row for me to land on and criticize (there's even a fifth planet in the row, but way too far off to fit into frame):

The purty one in front? That's Obosthom Gaur, and I landed there first. At least I tried: the planet was gripped in a storm so impenetrable I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me. At first I couldn't land at all: it turned out I was over an ocean I couldn't even see. On my second try I wound up plunging into a cave. My third try got me onto solid ground, but I still couldn't see with the exception of a bunch of enormous alien plants waving around in the wind and rain.

A lot of planets in No Man's Sky look weird, but this is the first one in a while that felt truly alien to me. The weather was just the start, hiding the planet from view most of the time but then allowing a glimpse of startling sunsets and the rest of the solar system before it began to storm again. I'd be looking up at the blue-tinged ringed planet in the sky, and then clouds would pass in front of it, and when they cleared the rings would be bright amber. The enormous plants writhed and waved slowly as if they were kelp caught in an ocean current. Despite yellow clouds and pink rain the oceans were bright blue. Storms would come on in an instant, turning the world a blinding white for ages, then clear just as quickly. Half the time I couldn't even tell if it was daytime or night.

So, yeah, I guess I'm saying I would love a little remote camera I could leave behind so that while I'm making long trips from planet to planet in the future, I could just turn on a monitor in my ship and see what the weather is like on Obosthom Gaur. In the meantime I think I'll actually break my own rule and build myself a little base with a teleporter. Just in case I've gotten a little sentimental and want to come back. I have a feeling, somehow, I'll wind up missing all that rain.

(Just for fun, here's a little outtake from my weather footage, because this one alien creature wouldn't stop messing with my car.)

I've spent the bulk of the last few days playing No Man's Sky following the release of its Next expansion, and you know what? Next is almost entirely good, including some of the features it adds that I don't personally enjoy. As with the three earlier expansions, Next doesn't rebuild No Man's Sky as an entirely new game but instead adds new features and supports new and different ways to play it.

Here are my thoughts on No Man's Sky Next after about 25 hours of play this week.

The deeper focus on crafting is ultimately a good thing, even if you hate crafting

Creative Mode or Normal Mode? If one element of No Man's Sky is going to push you in a specific direction it's the crafting and resource gathering, which has been both overhauled and expanded in Next. It always felt odd to me that a space exploration game began with you running around with your head down shooting rocks and plants for an hour, and now it becomes an even longer process since it takes a few extra steps to get your ship up and running. You no longer just need to gather resources, you need to refine them.

Even though I don't care for the crafting in No Man's Sky (and honestly never did), it's a much better system now. As someone who just wants to fly around and look at weird alien stuff, having to constantly refuel life support, hazard protection, weapons systems, ship systems—even needing to gather resources to fill the mining laser you use to gather resources. The crafting always felt at odds with the nature of the game: here's a few quadrillion planets to visit, but here's a few quadrillion speedbumps in your way.

For people who really dig crafting in general, the old system wasn't great, either. It was far too basic. Now it's more robust and satisfying. There were already items that required several ingredients and steps to make, like warp fuel, but the complexity has extended down to other items as well. There's now a refinery process, a piece of equipment you need to place on the ground, add fuel to, then process raw materials with, and sometimes you even need to process the resulting materials a second time to make something else. It feels like you're really crafting instead of just murdering rocks and trees and sticking their broken corpses into a gas tank, and for those that enjoy a bit more complexity Next is a great overhaul.

To be clear: I don't like it! But I respect it. And now that there's actual co-op multiplayer, people who do enjoy that aspect of the game can work on building projects together. (Me, I'll be sailing around in Creative Mode.)

It looks and sounds even better than it did

No Man's Sky was always a staggeringly lovely game, a lush and colorful intergalactic postcard generator. Land on a planet, look around, and you're bound to find the cover of a pulp science-fiction novel just waiting to be photographed. 

Its looks have improved over the past two year and Next drops still more beauty into your eyes with new cloud systems, more impressive storms, better planetary generation systems, and improved textures. Planetary rings, which appear in just about every star system now, are the icing on the cake. Whatever algorithm generates beauty, Hello Games definitely worked it out early and keeps refining it.

There's new music and sound too, and it's all lovely, from the ambient planetary sounds to the indecipherable broadcasts of a freighter fleet to the haunting and stirring soundtrack. This is one of the few games I will always wear a headset for.

The menus are still pretty awful, though

To switch from first-person to third person, you have to press a bunch of keys to cycle through what I think is intended to be shortcut menu. It's a pain. When fueling and loading a refiner, one act requires you to press X and the other a mouse click. It's also a pain, and a confusing one. There's a menu you can't scroll at all without using the W and S keys despite having a mousewheel. It's a pain. No Man's Sky needs way more hot keys and way more thought put into mouse and keyboard controls.

This is stuff that can (and I hope will) be adjusted in future patches, because it's deeply unintuitive and cumbersome now (though perhaps it makes more sense on a controller). Flying in third-person mode with a mouse and keyboard is also extremely ungainly at first, though I've found a couple days into Next it's feeling much more natural.

Alien creatures are no longer front and center

One area No Man's Sky has still never quite realized its original promise is when it comes to alien creatures. That original E3 trailer with it's lumbering alien dinosaurs and flitting butterflies and massive sandworms—the game just never came close to living up to it, and despite everything the expansions have added, it still doesn't.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but after landing on dozens of planets since Next arrived this week it seems like creatures simply don't appear as often. They're still present on most planets, but there seem to be fewer of them, and fewer variations of them, and they're typically smaller (large creatures had a lot of trouble walking on procedural terrain with procedural legs and usually wound up looking stupid). It feels as if they've just been dialed back as a whole because, quite frankly, they simply didn't work that well. If another big expansion arrives someday, I hope it focuses on making alien creatures something more wondrous so they can take center stage again.

Whatever your playstyle is, it's now supported

Solo play, co-op, survival, crafting, exploration, base-building, money-making, ship collecting, fleet management, farming, radiant task-based missions, and no-hassle creative mode wandering—the updates to No Man's Sky haven't just added new stuff but support for the different ways people want to experience the galaxy. Letting you join up with friends or connect with strangers gives us another experience to try, and you can always disable it if you still want to pretend you're alone in the galaxy.

You're not, though: Tens of thousands of others have either tried No Man's Sky for the first time or returned to it this week, and it's easy to see why. There are still plenty of rough patches to smooth out, and obviously not everyone is going to be digging the new, more complex crafting system. That's what's great about the current state of the game, though: there are lots of different ways to play.

I’m addicted to No Man’s Sky all over again. Since the Next update I’ve sunk ten hours into Hello Games’ colourful space game, and I’ve been taking snaps along the way with the excellent photo mode. Here are my personal highlights.

This really, really red system

This was my view the instant I warped into this system. That pristine, Earth-like world and its dazzling rings set against the piercing red of space stopped me in my tracks. If this was the cover of a sci-fi book I’d read it.

This massive water world

I’ve never seen a planet like this. A vast, endless ocean dotted with small, scattered islands, some of which were perfectly round, as if they were man-made. And on one of them, a lonely tree.

This cool rock

There are a lot of rocks in No Man’s Sky, but this one stuck out. I like it when the algorithm throws up a shape like this that looks kinda unnatural on the horizon. I spotted this thing miles away and just had to take a closer look.

This floating island

Floating islands like these are quite common, but there was something about the size and shape of this one that caught my eye. I love how ominous it looks just looming there silently against that burning orange sky.

These massive plants

Officially the biggest living thing I’ve encountered in No Man’s Sky. This lush, lively planet was covered in weird, enormous plants, but these were my favourite. I was half expecting it to eat me, but thankfully it didn’t.

This collection of planets

There’s something striking about seeing a bunch of planets in close proximity to each other. The one at the bottom-left of the screenshot is the water world I mentioned earlier. I think I’ll make this my home system.

This dark system

No Man’s Sky is defined by its vivid colours, but sometimes you’ll jump into a system like this. It’s a nice change of scenery and gives you an idea of what it might’ve looked like if Hello went for a more trad sci-fi aesthetic.

This giant avocado

Another cool rock, this time shaped like a scooped-out avocado, but one made of stone and roughly the size of a skyscraper. I don’t know if shapes like this are an accident, but I’m glad the algorithm occasionally coughs them up.

This amazing sky

I mean, look at it. What a view. I began a creative mode save and this was my starting planet, so I didn’t even have to look for it. The game just handed it to me. Another one that could be the cover of a vintage sci-fi novel.

This absolute unit

I don’t spend much time for looking for interesting creatures in No Man’s Sky, but I had to snap this guy. He was aggressive too, so moments after I took this he charged at me. Looks like someone skipped head day.

This stormy planet

Boiling hot rainstorms every minute made being stranded on this planet with no thruster fuel a bloody nightmare. But surviving, gathering enough resources to craft some, and escaping was immensely satisfying.

This, uh... whatever this is

This is one of the most bizarre and otherworldly planets I've landed on, covered in floating purple spores and  the strange plants pictured above. I mean, I assume they're plants. They could be intelligent life for all I know.

This crashed freighter

There’s something evocative about the image of a crashed starship. This one was absolutely massive, although I was in creative mode so I didn’t feel the need to go down and scavenge. I wonder what I would’ve found.

This orange planet

Similar to Chris’s depressing planet, this place seemed to change the entire colour palette of the game. The planet itself was kinda boring and lifeless, but the fiery colour scheme was cool to look at for a while.

This planetary ring

I found myself flying over this enormous planetary ring as the sun set over it, which was like something out of one of Roy Batty’s dying memories. The entire game is basically a procedural Roy Batty memory generator.

This big canyon

I love a good canyon, and this one felt particularly deep and wide when I stood on the edge. See that little starship flying through it? That’s a pal I was playing multiplayer with, which should give you a sense of its scale.

This abandoned starship

I found this dazzlingly yellow ship sitting in the middle of a green field, and I’m glad I was in creative mode so I could easily repair it and take it for myself. That ring around the engines is such a cool design element.

This ringed planet

This reminds me of when the Nostromo approaches LV-426 in Alien. There's something intimidating about this planet, shrouded in darkness, floating in a dark void. But when I landed it was actually quite nice.

This weird rock

This looked impressive from orbit, and when I swooped down I discovered that it was a giant floating island that was a few miles wide, covered in minerals ripe for mining. For some reason it reminds me of a giant game controller.

This vast desert

This desert had some really nice rock formations. I seem to land on a lot of desert worlds, but I love them. They usually have long, uninterrupted lines of sight, which makes the universe feel somehow more massive.

No Man's Sky has enjoyed a wave of positive Steam reviews following this week's NEXT update. But a number of PC players have had issues with game-breaking bugs tied to what appears to be corrupted save files. Patch 1.51 was released today to address the corrupted save issue. There are also fixes for bugs that were causing crashes plus some other small tweaks and improvements, including the ability construct Frigate Terminals in Creative Mode, which was absent.

See the complete patch notes below. These were tested on the No Man's Sky experimental server, so those experiencing the corrupted save issues will hopefully find this solves their problem. Players can also submit bug reports here.

• Fixed an issue where players who saved after partially repairing some items of technology would be unable to load that savegame. Please note that if the game has not been resaved, then progress has not been lost and will be recovered.
• Fixed a crash caused by memory corruption
• Fixed a crash in the animation system
• Fixed a crash when saving on a freighter
• Fixed a crash when fleet expeditions end without their capital ship present
• Fixed a number of memory leaks
• Fixed an issue where warping in multiplayer could cause players to spawn on a planet rather than in space
• Fixed an issue where freighter bases would be in the wrong position
• Fixed an issue where the build menu could crash if there was nothing available to build
• Fixed an issue where players would be unable to warp during the antimatter stage of the tutorial
• Fixed an issue where the mission destination would be incorrectly reported as in another system at the Hermetic Seal phase of the tutorial
• Fixed an issue where upgrade modules installed in the main Exosuit inventory would not be saved correctly.
• Fixed an issue where portable refiners placed near each other would share inventories
• Fixed an issue where the cockpit of some ships would continually open and close
• Fixed an issue where new controls were missing from the controls page
• Fixed a crash in creature routines
• Fixed a crash when multiple players put ammunition into a refiner
• Fix for occasional crash when receiving mission rewards
• Fix for crash when adjusting anisotropic filtering settings in the graphics options menu
• Fix for potential crash in geometry streaming
• Improvements to texture caching for AMD GPUs
• Fixed an issue where some players still had physical nanites in their inventory that could not be spent at vendors
• Granted players nanites when they dismantle their Obsolete Technology – spend nanites on new upgrades in Space Stations
• Added a tutorial mission to guide players through the restoration of their old base
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to build Frigate Terminals in Creative Mode
• Fixed an issue where S-Class ships changed appearance
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to build the Base Cache on their freighter to retrieve compensation for the loss of their freighter base
• Fixed an issue where some Exosuit technology was not converted to Obsolete Technology. Please note this does not apply retroactively to save games that have already been upgraded.
• Improved the mapping of old substances to new substances during the save upgrade. Please note this does not apply retroactively to save games that have already been upgraded.

"Can we give this game a round of applause for being one of the biggest redemption [stories] in game history?" reads one of No Man's Sky's most recent Steam reviews. Having launched its NEXT update earlier this week, players have returned to the space explorer in droves—many of whom seem to be enjoying their experience.

Of the 3,432 people that reviewed No Man's Sky on Steam over the last 30 days, 84 percent did so positively. As Murray points out above, this has raised its Overall Steam review rating to Mixed. And as Chris says, it seems that, two years later, the hype for No Man's Sky is back. Compare these figures to launch day, when 15,875 Steam reviews praised NMS for what it was; while 18,663 did not.

From now through 10am PST / 6pm BST, No Man's Sky is half-price on Steam—selling for £19.99/$29.99, down from £39.99/$59.99. 

Follow the link above if you fancy it, but, before you do, check out Pip and Chris's hands-on thoughts. The former explains what it's like to explore No Man's Sky Next with three other people. The latter asks: Is multiplayer really what No Man's Sky needs?

Even better than finding an interesting planet in No Man's Sky is finding an interesting system, where the planets form something of a theme. In my early days of playing, I found an Earth-like planet with a moon that looked a lot like our own (at least from space). While exploring the Next expansion this week, I discover another cool system. It has two planets, one of which my ship's scanner considers a 'Paradise Planet,' while the other it calls a 'Forsaken Planet.' Good and bad. Goofus and Gallant.

It seems like a nice duo to compare against one another, but then I notice a third planet further off in the distance. My scanner labels it a 'Terraforming Catastrophe'. That's a designation that's been in the game before Next arrived, but I still want to check it out. So I land and discover the saddest, shabbiest planet I've ever visited.

When I enter the atmosphere and approach the surface, it's like the color drains out of the entire game. That image above, that's not a filter. That's just how it is here. It's like Dorothy leaving Oz and going back to Kansas. Here's a short video to show you what I mean:

There are plenty of lifeless, airless, somewhat dismal planets in No Man's Sky, but this one feels much different. My first impulse is to leave, but I'm sort of intrigued by the world. Not only is it colorless, it also makes me colorless, draining the vibrancy out of my ship, my rockets, even out of my own character. It's almost monochrome, except for the water which looks brown like... well, sewage certainly come to mind. Also interesting is that unlike a lot of the darker, more morbid planets I've visited in No Man's Sky is that there's actually life here, both plant an animal.

What there isn't, however, is any joy to be found, even in normally enjoyable tasks like scanning creatures and plant life. The plants are tall and bulbous and expel clouds of fumes into the sky, which is the color of a fart (if farts had a color). Storms roll in every few minutes, not dramatic ones, just a bit of wind and rain and fog that dampen what little color there is here to begin with. I get into the habit of looking through my scanner simply because it adds some green and blue tint to the world, but the moment I stop everything is dull and gray again. 

I decide to feed one of the little crab critters scuttling around just to give something on this planet a little happiness. The critter eats and the smiley face icon appears. Less than a second later he's mauled to death by another creature, which then starts to eat him. As the predator feeds on the dead crabbie, I burn it with my laser. It doesn't run away as my mining laser burns it. It doesn't even look up or care that I'm killing it. It just eats while it's dying, and then it dies. Anything to escape this planet, I guess. I feed another crab and it too is summarily killed by another predator. What the hell, man? Is happiness against the law here?

I fly around a bit more, thinking maybe I'll stay a while and scan every species, maybe even find something that appears not quite so miserable. I take a swim into toilet-water sea, finding a few drab sharks and some squids whose heads inflate to propel them around. I eventually find eight of the nine species, and head out to try to locate the ninth.

I fly around landing here and there, seeing only the same crabbies and turtle-panthers and boars and sharks, the same fart blossom plants, and not much else. I kill a few fart blossoms and no sentinels even fly over to scrutinize me. Even the extremely touchy metal guardians of galactic flora don't care about Sadworld, which is what I name the planet. Blow up whatever you like.

Half the world is brown ocean, so I check out more of the coastline and some islands. Islands are always nice, right? Even those floating in a sea of toilet water? Most of the islands on Sadworld are completely bland circles, the least imaginative kind of island you could picture. On one I find a single tree, a single crab, and a single boar. The boar promptly kills the crab. I didn't even get a chance to feed it.

One island looks just like a Google Maps indicator. It's just pointing to more brown water, though, as if to say "Want to visit? Well, this is all we've got. Toilet water, a bunch of it. It's right here. You probably don't want to visit, though. Whatever."

I finally locate and scan the final creature of Sadworld. It's half-boar, half-fish, and it's swimming in an awkward circle in the poop ocean, completely alone, which feels appropriate. I can't think of anything else to do here but leave. I climb out of the sea and pause before getting in my ship, admiring the view of the ringed paradise planet above.

Clouds immediately roll in and block it from view. Of course they do! There's no happiness allowed here on Sadworld. Not even for a moment. 

So, yesterday was weird. No Man's Sky sat atop the global top sellers list on Steam at a price of $60 while I sat there endlessly refreshing Sean Murray's Twitter, waiting for the download to begin. It was like it was 2016 again—though No Man's Sky did go on sale for 50% off and this time players could actually see each other in the game.

I wasn't the only one blasting off into the Next expansion: at its peak yesterday, No Man's Sky had 41,861 concurrent players on Steam. Naturally, that's not close to the all-time peak after the 2016 launch, which saw over 200 thousand concurrents. It's still twice as many the Atlas Rises update drew in 2017, which pulled in around 20,000 concurrents, according to Steam Charts.

With No Man's Sky selling well this week, it's impossible to say how many of these players are trying it for the first time and how many are returning after a break to check out the new features. And of course there are those who have been playing regularly all along. At this moment, No Man's Sky is the tenth most played game on Steam.

Update: Because of the delay in bringing multiplayer support to No Man's Sky on GOG, it is offering an extended refund policy on the game. Until 3 pm PT/6 pm ET on July 29, NMS owners can request a refund regardless of when they purchased the game.  

Original story:

Owners of the DRM-free version of No Man's Sky, which is only available on GOG.com, will not have access to the game's new multiplayer features until later this year. That's according to a joint statement made by GOG and Hello Games on the GOG forums, where the news was released roughly three hours ago.

"From launch, the DRM-free edition of No Man's Sky will include all single-player content introduced by NEXT: third-person mode, upgraded visuals, better base building, player customization, and more," the statement reads.

"However the multiplayer component will not be ready at launch; we expect it to be released later this year as full multiplayer parity remains in the pipeline."

The post goes on to explain the delay, pointing to the complexity of adding the functionality across a variety of platforms at once. The Next update has rolled out  across Steam and PS4, this week as well as launching with the newly released Xbox One version."For a small, independent studio, developing the feature across multiple platforms is a hugely ambitious and technical challenge which resulted in this delayed release," the statement reads. "Hello Games is however joining forces with GOG.COM to introduce full multiplayer via the GOG Galaxy platform. We appreciate your immense support and patience."

No Man's Sky Next went live earlier today, and Chris has already experimented with the game's frankly weird player customization feature. Expect to hear more from him on the update shortly.