No Man's Sky just got another mondo update and I think it's a management game now?

You're mayor now. No, you can't refuse.

For as long as mankind has gazed up at the stars, it has been seized by a dream: to journey out there, into the void, to stand eye-to-eye with God, to slip the surly bonds of Earth, venture into space, and establish responsible local government.

No Man’s Sky’s latest in a frankly unbelievable line of updates is called Beacon, and it promises to let you become Overseer—or space mayor—of “up to four settlements, managing townships on the frontier of multiple worlds—each with their own set of citizens and challenges.”

Your stellar towns are yours to muck with. You can construct and upgrade buildings, resolve disputes between citizens, hold festivals, and generally do what I’ve decided to call ‘mayor stuff’. I’ve gotta be honest, I think Hello Games might have turned NMS into some kind of citybuilder/management game when we had our backs turned. At some point those guys are going to turn this game into a JRPG and then where will we be?

It’s not all about your new mayordom, though. It’s just mostly about that. On top of your new roles and responsibilities as planetary potentate, Beacon also marks the introduction of “robotic Autophage settlements.” These towns have their own thing going on: a rough, robotic style that you can make your own if you take an Autophage town into your remit.

A sprawling town on an alien planet. — (Image credit: Hello Games)

The good news is, your toil as mayor can pay off in the form of resources. Put those ungrateful citizens to work in the mines and reap the rewards, I say. The downside, though, is that they’re all weak and feeble, and you’ll need to defend them against incursions by miscreants. To do that, you can “hire a squadron of wingmen, who will now defend towns when they come under attack from roving pirates.”

It all sounds pretty involved—the kind of thing most studios would put out as costly DLC rather than a free update—and I won’t pretend I’m not tempted to leap back into No Man’s Sky. It’s about time someone brought some peace and stability to the galaxy; it might as well be me.