No Man's Sky Cosmos Is Live for Free on Every Platform: Run Your Own Space Station, Salvage Drifting Hulks, and Build Bases in Open Space

No Man's Sky turned ten this summer, and Hello Games marked the birthday the way it marks everything: with a free update that is far bigger than a ten year old game has any right to receive. Cosmos, version 7.0, went live on Wednesday, September 9, 2026 for every existing player on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 1, Switch 2, Mac, PSVR 1 and 2, PC VR and Xbox Game Pass. A 7.01 patch followed on Steam the next day, so if you are jumping in this weekend, the first wave of launch bugs is already behind you.

The pitch is simple. Sean Murray put it plainly in the launch post: space is a huge part of No Man's Sky, but space itself had stayed largely unchanged through ten years of updates. Cosmos is the update that finally fills the void between planets with things to find, own and fight over.

Video: Hello Games on YouTube

What is actually out there now

The change you will notice first is the new star system map, opened from the Quick Menu. It shows the local celestial bodies, the space station and the new deep space points of interest, and it is what turns empty flying into a list of places to go. Those places include dense asteroid belts you can mine for minerals and strange crystals, and deep space outposts where you can process rare minerals, trade with a quartermaster and sign up for contracts. Some outposts are infested with a spreading biological goop and have to be cleared before they are useful.

The headline destinations are the hulks. These are colossal shipwrecks drifting in deep space, full of rusted chambers and narrow chokepoints, and Hello Games warns they are volatile: disturb the structural integrity too much and the whole thing melts down and explodes. You pull technologies and cargo out of them with a tractor beam, and after 7.01 both players in a multiplayer run can claim the rare items. There is also a proper eject button now for starships that are not Corvettes, so you can leave the cockpit anywhere in space and float with true six degrees of freedom, roll included. And for the stubborn, every star in a system is now a point of interest you can fly to. The patch notes call these players hubristic, which feels like an invitation.

Owning a station, and building one from nothing

The feature that will keep people playing for months is space station directorship. You prove yourself to the local authorities of a system and take over its station. As director you can bolt colossal decoration modules onto the exterior, redecorate the interior with the full range of existing base parts, and add extra rooms to the main hangar. Directors can also found an alliance and recruit other travellers, and any player can join up to three of them. The largest and most active alliances show up on leaderboards at the station core, which is the closest No Man's Sky has come to a competitive layer.

If you would rather not answer to any authority, orbital bases now go anywhere. You can start from a natural asteroid platform or simply stake a claim on an empty volume of space and build a free floating home out there. Cosmos also ships with Expedition Twenty-Three, called Our Journey Continues, which runs for roughly six weeks and walks back through the game's history, with each milestone standing in for one of the 40 major updates since 2016. The rewards are nostalgia bait in the best sense: a golden Rasamama S36 starship, a Starbound v0.27 multi-tool, a vintage Interceptor, a bobblehead and a diplodocus companion.

The 7.01 patch that landed on Steam on September 10 fixes crashes, geometry problems with the new base parts, a pulse drive that disengaged near deep space objects, and a Grave of the Ocean King that was rendering 600 times smaller than intended. Hello Games says it is coming to the other platforms as soon as possible, so console players may still hit a few of those issues this weekend. Even so, this is a rare thing: a free update that reads like a sequel's feature list, from a studio that says it feels lucky to still be doing big, crazy things after ten years. We would say the players are the lucky ones.