No Man’s Sky ‘Relics’ update now available

Turn your hand to palaeontology.

Hello Games has released the “Relics” (version 5.6) update for No Man’s Sky.

Here is an overview of the update, via its official website:

Relics: Introducing Update 5.6
Turn your hand to palaeontology in update 5.6, Relics! Unearth hundreds of unique bones, assemble skeletons to design fossil exhibits, join the community on an expedition to recreate lost creatures, battle against gargantuan stone guardians, and more!
Design Creature Skeletons – Design and assemble complete skeletons from your collection of ancient bones. Imagine how ancient alien creatures might have looked, and re-assemble their bodies from their fossilized remains—with millions of possibilities for unique species.
Reanimated Guardians – Hulking stone lifeforms slumber by planetary fossil beds, defending these ancient burial grounds from Travellers who would seek to disturb them…
Collect a Huge Variety of Bones – Exhume a vast array of ancient bones, from ribcages plated to spiked, limbs dangling and grasping, skulls from warhounds, bogsnappers and titan worms, and an assortment of tails and tailbones—there are hundreds of unique fossilized parts to unearth.
Relics Expedition – Sign up with the Galactic Palaeology Society and join the community on a journey to recreate ancient lifeforms and uncover secrets left undisturbed for millennia.
Fossil Trading – Visit Fossil Collectors aboard Space Stations to sell your created fossil exhibits—or trade some of your bones for any of their broad selection of fossils. Haggle and experiment to find the best deal!
Improved Abandoned Mode – Playing in an abandoned universe has been streamlined and enhanced. Derelict space stations now contain functional upgrade stations for the Exosuit, starship, and Multi-Tool, as well as salvage boxes containing valuable upgrades. Travellers can scavenge further technologies from planetary buried caches, and purple systems are automatically visible on the Galaxy map.
Otherwordly Bone Creatures – On planets where ancient bones can be found, or within purple star systems, skeletal fauna have risen from their fossil beds to roam their planetary homes once more.
Share Fossil Creations – Package assembled fossils into fused exhibits, conveniently stored in the Inventory. Reorganize your museum layout with ease, or gift your displays to other Travellers.
Living Stone Hardpack – Participants in the Relics expedition can earn this unusual flight device, sculpted from the remains of sentient rock.
Bone Cuisine – Prepare new bone-based recipes in the Nutrient Processor, to ingest for health and protective benefits, or to present to Iteration: Cronus for critique, judgement, and potential remuneration.
Planetary Digsites – Visit roaming fossil collectors and harvest large bone caches at Palaeontological Digs, established upon many worlds across the galaxies.
Living Stone Customization – Complete the Relics expedition to unlock a complete living stone appearance override. A powerful magnetic field runs through this ancient stone, turning lumpen rock into something almost alive.
Skeletal Companion – The Relics expedition unlocks the exclusive living fossil companion: a loyal, fleshless creature of animated bone.
Living Stone Sentries – Floating stone guardians protect fossil sites, hurling masses of rock and crystal at any who would seek to exhume their beds of ancient bones. Crafty and challenging opponents, these guardians will sometimes even resort to self-destruction to defend their territory.
Colossal Stone Effigies – The crumbling ruins of relic worlds are watched over by monumental stone figures, vestiges of long-dead alien civilizations. These mysterious effigies appear dormant, their purpose lost to time.
Titanic Boneworms – Rare skeletal sandworms thunder through the dunes and darken the skies of some worlds, bringing even stranger variety to these titanic lifeforms.
Precious Stone Relics – Bold explorers can steal the vigilant stones left by slumbering guardians. These rare relics are highly lucrative – but may provoke vengeance from the eye’s original owner…
Decorate Freely with Bones – Enjoy complete decorative freedom with precision placement of individual bones. Design even more outlandish, biology-defying skeletons, or simply furnish habitable bases with skeletal decor.
Basilisk Crown Staff – Travellers completing the Relics expedition will be rewarded with the exclusive Basilisk Crown staff, a fused pillar of bone and circuitry. Beware its gaze…
Interplanetary Navigation – Pin celestial bodies to your starship’s navigational systems from the Discoveries screen, to help locate undiscovered planets within the solar system, or narrow down your search for rare planetary features such as ancient bones or dissonant worlds.

And here are the full patch notes:

Collect and Display Skeletons
Planetary fossil beds now contain a vast array of specific bone formations.
Each of these bones can be placed as a decorative base part, either individually or mounted on a display plinth.
Larger display plinths allow a collection of bones to be reassembled into a complete skeleton, allowing the design and reassembly of ancient and extinct beings.
Completed displays can be packaged into an easily transportable module, allowing them to be re-deployed in other locations, traded with other players, or sold on the galactic market.
A new planetary dig-site building has been added, serving as a hub for interested fossil collectors.
The icon for planetary fossils has been improved.
A small tutorial mission has been added to guide new palaeontologists.
A new palaeontology section has been added to the guide.
Fossil Exchange
A fossil collector has been added to the Space Station.
Surplus fossils can be exchanged with the fossil collector, allowing players to target specific skeleton components for their designs.
The fossil collector will barter for items in their collection, allowing individual inventory items to be swapped.
Relics Expedition
Expedition Eighteen, Relics, will begin shortly and run for approximately six weeks.
Rewards include new posters, decals and titles; a living stone suit customization set; the unique Basilisk Crown staff; a mysterious skeletal companion; and the exclusive Living Stone jetpack.
Stone Guardians
Fossil beds are now watched over by a vigilant stone eye, ready to protect the bones from those who would exhume them.
Disturbing the vigilant eye may yield valuable rewards, but comes at the cost of awakening the guardians.
Two forms of stone guardian await—a huge living statue, and a whirling storm of re-animated rock.
Huge guardian statues have been added to relic worlds.
Skeletal Lifeforms
A new and highly rare skeletal lifeform has been added to some planets.
Some planets are now home to the elusive titanic bone-worm…
Quality of Life and User Interface
Planets in your current system can now be marked from the discovery page, adding a marker to the starship navigation systems.
Added an accessibility option to increase the contrast in mission-critical UI panels.
Fixed an issue that could cause the camera to move erratically back and forth while inside high-ceilinged rooms in player bases.
Nearby NPCs that have specific unseen interactions will now be highlighted with a marker.
Added a new water state for ocean worlds with significantly larger waves.
Various volumetric and other atmospheric effects no longer play on planets without an atmosphere.
Story details from the In Stellar Multitudes mission now appear in the Journey Records page in the catalogue.
Reduced the number of corrupt drones that attack player settlements.
The space station marker is now dynamically offset, preventing the marker from obscuring the station while at a distance.
Fixed a number of minor text issues in some extractor UIs.
Fixed a number of minor text and icon issues in shop interactions.
Fixed an issue that caused companions that were set to use no accessories to have a random accessory assigned after re-summoning them.
Fixed an issue that caused the starship to too-aggressively lock on to markers when engaging the pulse engine.
An organic version of the Teleport Receiver has been added for use in living starships.
Fixed an issue that caused the repair requirements for several living starship technologies to all be the same.
Lingering on-screen display messages that report pulse drive errors will now clear as soon as a successful pulse drive engagement is detected.
Save System
Significantly improved the compression used for saved games, improving filesizes and upload/download times for players in the cross-save beta.
Created a section for cross-save settings within the general Options menu.
Players in the cross-save beta are now alerted to situations where uploads are timing out, and can manually adjust how long the game will wait for a successful upload before detecting a timeout and cancelling.
Cooking
New fossil-related cooking recipes have been added.
Base storage container inventories are now accessible while cooking.
Fixed an issue that prevented access to the nutrient processor’s internal storage while on a freighter or the Exo-Skiff.
Fixed a number of issues while cooking the Exo-Skiff, including progress resetting or incorrect items appearing in various slots.
Cronos’ grill on the Space Anomaly can now be used by several players at once.
Fixed an issue that made it impossible to cook jellied eels.
Abandoned Mode Improvements
Multi-Tools found in abandoned mode are now always free, but start with damaged slots.
Settlement-related missions will no longer start in abandoned mode.
Abandoned space stations now have access to Exosuit, starship, and Multi-Tool upgrade stations.
Additional salvage boxes have been added around abandoned space stations containing valuable upgrades and inventory expansion modules.
Purple systems are now unlocked automatically in abandoned mode.
In abandoned mode, crashed freighter containers and other buried caches can now contain additional valuable upgrades.
Optimization
Introduced a number of optimizations to planetary prop rendering.
Introduced an optimization to dynamic physics groups.
Introduced a significant memory optimization for nav mesh generation.
Introduced a number of minor texture memory optimizations.
Introduced an optimization for loading large bases.
Introduced a number of optimizations for text display, particularly in the Journey Records pages.
Introduced an optimization to the various catalogue and guide pages.
Other Bug Fixes
Fixed a number of issues that could occur when warping on board another player’s freighter.
Fixed an issue that could cause water creatures to be generated for a planet that would never have deep enough water for those creatures to spawn.
Fixed a number of mission blockers in They Who Returned.
Fixed an issue that could cause some bases to become invisible when constructed at the water’s surface on ocean planets.
Fixed an issue that could cause PC players to appear jerky in cross-platform multiplayer.
Fixed a rare issue that could cause players’ settings to reset in VR.
Fixed an issue that could cause NPCs to sink into the floor.
Fixed an issue that could cause a softlock when browsing the Exocraft inventory.
Fixed a rare hang on load when returning to a savegame that was saved while in an Exocraft after playing in multiplayer.
Fixed a rare crash related to camera shakes.
Fixed a memory-related crash on PlayStation 5.
Fixed a number of rare crashes related to mesh scaling.
Fixed a number of rare maths-related crashes.
Fixed an issue that could cause some planetary props to pop in.
Fixed a number of Mac-specific rendering issues.
Fixed a rare issue that could cause saves to reach a max size and stop saving on Nintendo Switch—saves can now expand as required.
Fixed an issue that could cause multiple ships to become docked to the same landing pad.
Improved the placement positioning of decorative base building props.
Fixed a number of text clipping issues in large popups.
Fixed an issue that could cause a teleport destination to have two copies of a mission marker added.
Fixed an issue that could make interactions difficult on freighters that were summoned a long way from the centre of the solar system.
Fixed a number of issues affecting markers and planet labels when entering atmosphere.
Fixed a rare issue that could cause empty systems to generate incorrect information about their potential Atlas Stations.
Fixed an issue that could cause the galaxy map to incorrectly choose a purple system as part of its path to a distant star when purple systems are not unlocked.
Fixed an issue that could cause players to start in a purple system when arriving in a new galaxy, when purple systems were not unlocked.
Fixed an issue that caused the water effects from the Nautilon submarine to remain in the world after summoning the sub to a new location.
Fixed an issue that prevented Exocraft laser effects from playing correctly in multiplayer.
Fixed an issue that could cause erratic torso movements in Sentinel mechs.
Fixed an issue that could cause the ship to hover as if above water when reloading on a planet.
Fixed a number of inconsistencies in creature descriptions, where creatures would be described as being from the wrong environment.
Fixed an incorrect texture being used for the Titan expedition in the expedition history screen.
Fixed a number of decals and posters from previous expeditions being missing from the catalogue.
Fixed an issue that caused a number of unusable and legacy items to be included in the catalogue.