Hello Games continues to be one of the most impressive post-launch support stories in gaming. No Man’s Sky Update 6.3, titled Xeno Arena, adds turn-based creature battles to the space exploration game, giving players a reason to actually do something with all those creatures they’ve been taming over the years.
The new system lets players adopt wild fauna, assemble them into battle teams, and fight in simulated combat at Holo-Arena tables found at planetary buildings, space stations, settlements, and aboard the Space Anomaly. Each creature has a unique set of battle moves shaped by its species and native climate, ranging from straightforward attacks to heals, stuns, shields, and status effects. There are eight affinities to learn, meaning certain creature types will have advantages and disadvantages against others. Fire-based companions might excel against frozen creatures, for example, but find themselves vulnerable to radioactive attacks.
Creatures earn experience through battles, and players can use the Egg Sequencer aboard the Space Anomaly to modify the genetics of their companions, enhancing agility, health, and combat traits. Personality and physical characteristics like size also play a role in battle performance, so there’s genuine depth to breeding and team composition. The maximum number of tamed creatures has been increased from 18 to 30 to support the new system.
A new NPC, Iteration: Oceanus, has set up shop on the Space Anomaly and serves as an introduction to the Arena League, a new faction in the Catalogue and Guide. Oceanus also offers a daily challenge that’s the same for all players, which should make for some fun community discussion around strategies and lineups. Players can challenge alien lifeforms at Holo-Arena tables across the galaxies, with space station champions offering tougher fights and better rewards. Multiplayer battles are also supported, letting players face off against other travelers directly.
Rising through the Arena League ranks earns medals, nanites, unique titles, and a collection of strange companion prizes, including a Corrupted Quadruped, Geno-Prawn, and something called a Boundary Horror. The update also includes a Creature Survey mode for the Analysis Visor, making it easier to scout potential battle companions in the wild.
On the technical side, Update 6.3 brings a 15 percent rendering performance improvement on Switch 2, tiled lighting optimizations on PC, and various CPU and inventory-related performance fixes. There’s also a solid list of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.
No Man’s Sky is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2, PC, and Mac. It’s also playable on Xbox Game Pass.
No Man’s Sky 6.3 Patch notes
The Holo-Arena and Creature Battles
- Added turn-based tactical Creature Battles, with all-new music, visual effects, cinematic cameras, and combat log.
- Players with adopted creatures can now assemble their companions into battle teams, and participate in simulated fights against creatures owned by alien lifeforms or other players.
- Each creature has a unique set of battle moves, influenced by their species and native climate. Battle moves include attacks, heals, stuns, shields, status effects, and more.
- Creatures in battle may sometimes dodge incoming attacks, perform bonus moves, or perform critical hits.
- Companions participating in battles will earn experience, gradually improving their combat prowess.
- Added a new interface for modifying the genetics of owned companion creatures, allowing upgrade of agility, health and combat battle traits.
- Added multiplayer Holo-Arena tables to the Space Anomaly, where players can challenge other Travellers to Creature Battles.
- Added Holo-Arena tables to planetary outposts, planetary archive buildings, space stations, and some settlement buildings, where players can challenge alien lifeforms to a Creature Battle.
- Alien lifeforms playing Creature Battles at space station Holo-Arenas are seasoned system champions. They will be more challenging to defeat than planetary lifeforms, but yield higher rewards.
- Winning Creature Battles will yield a number of rewards, including nanites, invitations to play against alien lifeforms, and retroviral pellets to more efficiently upgrade the battle traits of creature companions.
- A new Traveller NPC, Iteration: Oceanus, has arrived at the Space Anomaly.
- Oceanus is a creature-collecting enthusiast, and will introduce players to Creature Battles and the Arena League through a lightweight tutorial.
- Oceanus offers a fixed-seed daily challenge to all players.
The Arena League
- Added a new faction to the Catalogue & Guide: The Arena League.
- The Arena League offers 5 new varieties of ranked medal and accompanying guidance missions.
- A set of special titles are available for accomplishments in the Arena League.
- A set of unique companions are available as rewards for accomplishments in the Arena League.
Creature Survey Mode
- Added a Creature Survey mode to the Analysis Visor, displaying markers related to creatures, and revealing the battle traits as well as species information for targeted fauna.
Stability and Optimisation
- Implemented a number of significant optimisations on Nintendo Switch 2, improving rendering performance by up to 15%.
- Implemented tiled lighting on PC, significantly improving GPU performance when rendering lighting, especially at higher resolutions.
- Implemented a number of CPU performance optimisations related to lighting.
- Implemented a significant optimisation in player-built bases containing large farms of harvestable plants.
- Implemented a significant optimisation in inventory handling, improving performance in all instances of querying the contents of inventories (for example, during missions, when calculating ship stats based on installed tech, or when accessing a shop).
- Implemented a significant performance optimisation when viewing a Companion Register containing a large number of creatures.
- Implemented a significant performance optimisation when displaying the UI notification for adopting a creature companion.
- Implemented a number of optimisations related to the Analysis Visor and scanner technologies.
- Implemented a performance optimisation related to the rendering of planetary objects.
- Fixed a number of crashes on Nintendo Switch platforms.
- Fixed a number of rare crashes.
QOL and Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue that could cause the camera to rotate when standing on a corvette.
- Fixed an issue that prevented interacting with modules on another player’s corvette.
- Fixed an issue that could cause asteroids to fade in and out erratically when first entering an asteroid field.
- Fixed an issue that could cause save game related issues for PC players with a Windows username containing non-ASCII characters.
- Fixed an issue that could cause an erroneous Cross-Save conflict dialog to appear after suspending and resuming the game on consoles.
- Fixed an issue that could cause missing interaction points in some planetary buildings.
- Fixed a dialogue issue in The Purge, where Artemis would make an inaccurate reference to a previous player choice.
- Improved the internal system used by missions to open the inventory to the most contextually relevant screen (for example, when being prompted to install a technology in a particular inventory).
- Fixed an issue that caused the Exploration Log on some planets to include extinct species in the count of total discoverable fauna and flora.
- Fixed an issue that caused some Twitch or Expedition rewards to display as “Available” at the Quicksilver Synthesis Bot when they had already been redeemed in another shop interface.
- Allowed the Egg Sequencer to access eggs stored in the Freighter inventory, providing the Freighter inventory is within range.
- Improved the visual clarity of which medal is selected in the Journey Milestones section of the Catalogue & Guide.
- Improved the appearance of a number of UI textures in 4K resolution.
- Fixed an issue that caused the labels for “Playfulness” and “Personality” to sometimes appear incorrectly at the Egg Sequencer.
- Fixed an issue that caused some rare crystal-based fauna to be invisible.
- Fixed an issue that caused companion accessory attachments to appear on some wild creatures on the Discoveries Page.
- Improved the appearance of some planetary trees on Nintendo Switch and in VR.
- Improved the lighting at Waste Processing Plants.
- Fixed a visual issue on the player model when equipping Autophage arms in combination with non-Autophage gloves.
- Fixed a visual clipping issue with corvette cockpits when flying into planetary atmosphere.
- Fixed an issue that caused companion eggs with regular shells to hatch into metal pieces.
- Fixed an audio issue with the Appearance Modifier on the Space Anomaly.
- Miscellaneous text fixes.
