No Man's Sky: The Swarm launches a community-wide war against the Hive of Glass

Hello Games has dropped No Man's Sky: The Swarm, and it's the studio's most ambitious update yet. Something enormous and ominous now hangs in the sky above planets — the Hive of Glass, an existential threat to the entire universe that the whole community will need to fight together.

When players first log in after the update, they're greeted with a personality test that sorts them into one of three factions. Each faction needs to cooperate, strategise, and compete against the others to push back the Hive. The war effort runs out of the Nexus, which now has a new bulletin board tracking progress in real time. Every player's contribution is logged publicly — both inside the Space Anomaly and on the Galactic Atlas website at galacticatlas.nomanssky.com. The most effective faction at the end will be permanently memorialised in the Space Anomaly. In space, the Hive of Glass defends itself by unleashing swarms of robotic drones, producing battles with hundreds of ships on screen at once — the largest space combat Hello Games has ever put in the game. The Hive itself is a weapon too: its iris opens to fire a laser powerful enough to destroy freighter fleets and potentially even a space station.

On the ground, things are just as busy. Shot-down drones crash onto planet surfaces and need to be salvaged and researched using the Gravity Gun introduced earlier this year in the Remnant update. There are miniature planetary swarms to defeat, sabotage missions against the Hive's network, and secrets about the Hive's origins and weaknesses to uncover and share with fellow rebels. Rewards for taking part include a full retro sci-fi armour suit, a new rifle, a massive new jetpack, and more.

No Man's Sky turns 10 in August, and Hello Games frames The Swarm as one of the most ambitious ideas they've tackled across the game's entire run — following Xeno Arena's Pokemon-style pet battles on a small table, the stage is now the whole universe. Full patch notes are up at nomanssky.com/swarm-update.