'No Man's Sky' Update 1.70 Adds Abyss Mission & Submarine - Patch Notes

No Man's Sky update 1.70 is in the process of deploying across PS4, Xbox One and PC. The substantial patch adds underwater Abyss content, a buildable submarine and a wide assortment of bug fixes for existing content. Read the patch notes below courtesy of a blog post from Hello Games.

No Man's Sky Update 1.70 Patch Notes

New Content

• Improved Aquatic Biomes: Better flora fauna and increased variety.
• Aquatic Abyss missions that take place deep below the waves.
• Shipwrecks: Find freighters and structures underwater that carry secret cargo.
• Submarine: A new Exocraft called the Nautilon lets you explore the underwater depths in a submarine-like vehicle.
• New base parts to improve underwater civilization.

UNDERWATER GAMEPLAY AND VISUALS

• Increased the diversity of underwater biomes.
• Improved character movement in the water.
• Improved surface swimming.
• Improved swimming for customized characters.
• Allowed the torch to be used underwater.
• Improved underwater and swimming cameras.
• Improved camera behaviour when approaching the surface of the water.
• Added support for jetpacking underwater.
• Increased the probability of oxygen spawning as a secondary resource underwater.
• Increased the depths at which underwater buildings can spawn.
• Prevented drones spawning underwater or following you deep underwater.
• Added underwater-only emotes.
• Improved underwater character and swimming audio.
• Improved underwater prop placement and object densities.
• Improved terrain editing underwater and fixed an issue where it could rapidly propel the player upwards.
• Improved colors of the water surface and underwater effects.
• Improved foam effect at the edges of water and objects.
• Fixed an issue where a line could be seen round underwater objects and the underwater horizon.
• Improved water visuals at night.
• Removed a hard pixelated edge seen at the edge of water.

FISH AND UNDERWATER CREATURES

• Improved detection of whether the player is inside a building while underwater.
• Improved general fish shoal behavior.
• Increased spawn rates of fish and creatures underwater.
• Improved predatory fish movement and behavior.
• Improved logic for spawning and despawning underwater creatures.
• Improved movement of underwater cow and rodent type creatures.
• Improved and added to fish and underwater creature audio.
• Added jellyfish, clams, crabs and abyssal horrors.

UI

• Disabled censorship in text chat between friends.
• Added more options to the inventory transfer menu.
• Removed unnecessary UI data to improve load times and memory footprint.
• Disabled resizing the terrain beam at times when it cannot be used.
• Fixed cases where quick menu items were incorrectly highlighted.
• Fixed issues with vehicle inventory transfers.
• Fixed the hazard icons for protection tech against secondary hazards.
• Fixed a crash caused by opening the inventory while using the ship communicator.
• Improved ordering of some objects in the building menu.
• Fixed a clipping issue in the binocular UI.
• Fixed an occasional crash in the character customizer.
• Various minor text and localization fixes and improvements.

BASES AND BUILDINGS

• Added the chance for abandoned buildings, ruins, crashed freighters and crashed starships to spawn underwater.
• Fixed an issue where players could fall through storage room walls.
• Allowed storage rooms to be placed in a grid layout.
• Made minor improvements to the indoor camera.
• Corrected volume of NPC speech inside player bases.
• Fixed an issue where shop terminals placed in bases could cause certain rooms to be hidden.
• Altered limits on building some objects rewarded through the Quicksilver bot.
• Added a new underwater shelter building.
• Added over a dozen new base parts.

FREIGHTERS, SHIPS AND SPACE

• Improved spawning of frigates in multiplayer games when players are onboard them.
• Fixed an issue where the players ships would incorrectly appear in a new system after warping.
• Fixed cases where specific frigates would always take the same type of damage.
• Fixed an issue where multiple fleet missions would automatically be handed in simultaneously.
• Added ability to scan frigates and freighters using the Analysis Visor.
• Added ability for players to repair their friends' frigates.
• Fixed issues with characters on the freighter after the player is gifted it.
• Prevented dust being permanently active on frigate landing pads.
• Improved ejecting from your ship in confined spaces, prevented being launched through low hanging ceilings and anomaly walls.
• Improved positioning of players getting out of ships and respawning on landing pads.
• Fixed an issue where frigates failed to reset their resource collection after giving resources to the player.
• Fixed a crash caused by the anomaly in certain systems.
• Added a marker for off-screen black holes.
• Made frigate icons less intrusive.
• Prevented the anomaly being re-summoned if it is already present.
• Added ability to detect planets with water from the galactic map.
• Fixed an issue where the player could not land their ship after switching missions while looking at a mission marker.
• Added a vehicle shop to the space station.
• Fixed issues where players could be stuck in ship landing pads.

MISSIONS AND PROGRESSION

• Added the Dreams of the Deep mission.
• Added a new story to underwater ruins.
• Added a number of new aquatic substances, goods and products.
• Improved the return marker on portals the player has travelled through.
• Fixed an issue where some missions would always give an identical reward.
• Improved ability for missions to select locations to send you to from small clusters of buildings.
• Fixed an issue where protection tech would only drain for one hazard at a time.

VEHICLES

• Reduced the radius on the vehicle gun to ensure particles spawn at the contact point.
• Improved vehicle boost effect colours.
• Disabled the find building ability in the vehicle's default scan, as it has been replaced by an improved scan.
• Removed decals from the default vehicle, allowing player to add them.
• Improved colours of vehicle decals.

CREATURES

• Fixed cases where birds would fly into the ground.
• Improved rodent tail animation.
• Improved creature scanning in multiplayer.
• Fixed an issue where filters for creature part generation were not correctly applying to all genders.
• Fixed an issue where biological horrors could become non-hostile after attacking an exocraft.

SYSTEM

• Improved shader uniform resolution on PC, a performance optimisation.
• Fixed an issue where there could be a long pause on a black screen when booting into the game.
• Improved multiplayer permissions for lobby use.
• Changed default multiplayer permissions to be more permissive in Creative Mode.
• Fixed various infrequent crashes.
• Implemented various performance, system and stability fixes.

While No Man's Sky took a break from its weekly update pattern last week, update 1.70 proves Hello Games used the time wisely. As suggested by the lengthy details, The Abyss primarily focuses on improving the aquatic features introduced with NEXT earlier in the year. Past updates focused on above-ground aspects like terrain tessellation, but this is the first major polish pass we've seen for content that lies below the surface.

It's no secret that underwater vehicles like the Nautilon greatly expand the explorative properties of Hello Games' infinite universe. It means all that extra space below your favorite planets won't go to waste. In many ways, the added underwater flexibility increases the size of the space players can traverse without increasing the scope of the universe at all. Update 1.70 is yet another impressive patch in what has turned out to be one of the industry's biggest rebound stories.

No Man's Sky is available now on PS4, Xbox One and PC. Update 1.70 is deploying today across all platforms.

What are your thoughts on No Man's Sky update 1.70? Will you be spending time with Abyss missions? Tell us in the comments section!