No Man’s Sky lets you unearth ancient, angry mechs in the astro-archaeology filled Relics update

While October might have been a better time to introduce spooky scary skeletons to No Man’s Sky, I don’t think anything is ever going to stop Hello Games in their quest to turn their once-bare-bones space sandbox into the home of all things to all people.

The Relics update, which rolled out today, adds a whole bundle of archaeological and paleontology-themed content to the universe, including alien fossils to unearth and showcase in your own private museum. Plus, the occasional piece of cursed ancient machinery that’ll try to murder you, as you can see in the trailer below.

“We wanted players to feel like true paleontologists”, says Hello Games. Digging deep beneath planetary surfaces will unearth valuable relics and mysterious new bones of all shapes and sizes, which you can then showcase in paleontology displays in your various facilities and ships. Of course, you don’t have to properly match the bones, allowing you to mix and match skeletons and create your own, wildly inaccurate natural history of each world to share with other players for giggles.

Not all fossils are made equal, and you can trade the fancier ones away at a new NPC you can find in space stations. Or if you’re already swimming in skeletons, you can swap some of yours with him to round out your collection. It’s just one more layer of cute roleplaying potential added to an already-intimidating game. Although as of the previous update (and updated further with this one), more solipsistic spacefarers can opt to wander a universe devoid of intelligent life, so maybe the bones will give you somebody to talk to in those cursed universe.

As a more action-oriented player, my main interest goes to the new threats you can dig up while playing in the galactic sandbox. There are a bunch of new things that can try to kill you, starting with the rocky Stone Ghosts, which appear to be a bit more tangible than your average apparition, and significantly more capable of punching you to death with big rocky fists. There are also huge Stone Golem boss-class enemies to dig up, so you might want to bring your own combat/excavation mech on digs, just in case you unearth something ornery.

Also mentioned briefly in the trailer (but not shown) are Skeletal Companions, which are exactly what you’d hope: Animated, rideable space-dinosaur skeletons that want to be your friend, and available as a reward for completing the expedition launching with this update. Less friendly-sounding are the Titanic Boneworms, because knock-off Shai-Hulud weren’t menacing enough, and now the universe is plagued by their undead cousins.

As is customary with No Man’s Sky, the new update will be accompanied by a new Community Expedition, giving more goal-oriented players an excuse to get together online and complete a bunch of paleontology-related challenges in exchange for a new round of special cosmetics that probably do belong in a museum.

This all comes just weeks after the release of the Worlds (Part 2) update, a sweeping overhaul to the game’s planet generation code so extreme that instead of scrungling existing worlds, they just doubled the number of planets in the universe, with fresher worlds more likely to contain more extreme environments populated by weird new creatures. It’s not all out of the kindness of Sean Murray’s heart, of course (although it is very generous), as it seems that No Man’s Sky is also being used as a testbed for new technologies to be used in the studio’s upcoming fantasy giga-sandbox Light No Fire.