No Man's Sky NEXT

Got the 6gb update for No Man's Sky last night, the latest version called NEXT. Only played it for about an hour, but I'm liking it lots. I'm down on record saying I loved the game when it first came out, and of course was in the minority of not getting my knickers in a twist about it not delivering on its promise, but I guess I'm not an average gamer, and just love wondering around at my pace and enjoying the scene....

 The update adds so much (see patch notes below), and has change the base game to the point that I believe anyone who didn't buy or have not touched it since it's release should really give it go.
 I am starting a new game, so I'm sure I will be doing a blog post run on what I get up to and find while playing this game.

Link

PATCH NOTES

THIRD PERSON
Third person camera for walking, jetpacking, swimming and in-ship flight
New player models
Completely reworked animation system
New animations for players, as well as NPCs and creatures
System and animations for gestures
Character customisation
Player character turns to look at points of interest
New get in / out of vehicle effect
Interactions show the player character where appropriate
Warping in ship is in third person
Resized various deployable tech to better fit third person mode

MISSIONS
Real time missions
Scheduled missions
Multiplayer missions
Completely overhauled tutorial
New mission types – photography, feeding, freighter combat, archaeology, and specialised hunting missions
Guild envoy missions

BASES
Bases can be built anywhere
Players can own multiple bases
Hundreds of new base parts
Increased base complexity / size limits
Joint base building
Improved teleporting and selection between teleport destinations
Improved terrain editor modes and options to be more intuitive
Toned down saturation intensity of palette choices for colouring base building parts
Base terrain editing now stops when you hit the limit rather than overwriting old edits
Bases can now be deleted
Improved system for placing base building parts
Increased base building radius and made it expandable
Disabled base auto uploading, and added manual controls
Enabled downloading more than one external base from other players

FREIGHTERS
Frigate fleets feature – including missions, upgrade system, system combat and exploration assistance
Overhauled base building inside player freighters
Reworked and added procedural textures to freighter bridge hologram planet
Redesigned path from freighter hangar to bridge
Improved speed of airlock doors opening on freighters

CRAFTING AND RESOURCES
Reworked and rebalanced all core substances and resources
Deployable tech can now be picked up
Added refiner based crafting system
Added Craftable ammunition
Improved damage falloff on mining beam

UI / UX
Additional markers visible in analysis visor
Points of interest can be tagged from analysis visor
Latitude / longitude displayed on analysis visor
Improved HUD layout
HUD lines dynamically hidden with the corresponding UI elements
Improved notification layout
Improved build menu
Improved quick menu
Inventory stack splitting
New repair interface
All player owned ships can now be summoned
Added system for repairing damaged inventory slots
Backpack showing in your inventory will now match customised character backpack
Backpack bars display hazard protection and life support
In-ship map now highlights enemies
Improved docking indicators when flying
Completely reworked shop UI
Nanites no longer take up inventory slots
Scanning ships shows their slot count
Save slots are now sorted by timestamp
Galaxy map can show multiple markers for each system
Added dynamic suit protection inventory icon
Inventory full notifications now take into account cargo slots
Fixed camera voxel to star voxel in Galactic map
Can pin base building recipes on the HUD
Added danger icons to tentacle plants
Improved tech and product pinning, with more detailed guides to obtaining the build requirements
Improved compass
Improved HUD marker icons for objects of interest
Added multiplayer text chat on PC

GRAPHICS AND PLANET GENERATION
Improved fog and increased draw distance
New terrain generation system for improved navigability and more varied earth-like and alien landscapes
Reduced situations where cave props can be spawned above ground
Improved particle systems fading out over distance
Added support for extremely large biome props
Improved and increased variety of clouds and cloud shadows seen from space
Improved planet surface rendering from space
Improved terrain lods and visuals when flying in from space
Improved colour selection during planet generation
Improved sky and fog colour selection
Tightened triplanar texture blend areas
New colour mapping system to create more varied and atmospheric visuals
Improved tree density
Tree size variation
Added empty systems, with no current inhabitants
Added abandoned systems, with derelict space stations
Improved storm visuals
Improved textures for ship, NPCs, and buildings
Added planetary ring system
Increased asteroids density in space
Improved space visuals
Added support for larger bodies of water
Character shadows for first person gameplay
Adjusted TAA settings to reduce shadow blurring on terrain
Added particle effect when flying above water
Splash particle effects
Inventory and pause menu now uses depth of field to blur in-game camera
Balanced intensity of lights in the Atlas station
Updated model of hologram backpack in suit upgrade chamber
Improved water surface and foam shaders
Improved water reflections to better match terrain
Improved imposter visuals and lighting to better match nearby objects
Switched object and terrain fading to use Blue Noise to give smoother transitions
Improved compression on some textures generated in-game
Improved terrain texture blending and selection
Improved sand and cave colour selection
Improved beach blending and visuals
Brightened cave interiors, especially at night
Improved storm effect fading as you enter buildings
Added gun model for ships
New high quality tree models and textures
Fixed an issue with landing pad UVs
Improved drone, quad and walker models
New drone texture effects
Added more varied underwater and underground objects
Improved appearance of Gravitino Balls
Major improvements to biome object placement
Improved crystal placement
Improved marker distances for gameplay props
Added terrain objects which cannot be destroyed by player ships
Improved colours, brightness, saturation of creature textures
Tweaked rock textures
Improved scale of underground objects
Tweaked poison blob particle effects
Improved cave biome glowing plant lights
Optimised cave biome prop performance
Improved bushes and underwater plants
Improved asteroid texture balance
Improved abandoned slimey diffuse colours
Improved under-foot dust effects
Improved heavy air in caves
Improved scale of gameplay plants
Improved toxic grass diffuse texture
Tweaked mountain fragments on certain biomes
Improved vertex displacement on flags to make them wave nicer
Improved smoke and damage effects on ships and distress beacons
Modified frequency of wordstones, crates, underground props and damaged machinery
Improved rare gem collection effect
Improved ship trail effects
New engine effect for ships

SPACE STATIONS AND BUILDINGS
Overhauled space station interior
New space station marketplace
New style for stairs in space station
Redesigned look of teleporter in space station
Added variation to building interior layouts and props
Added a small ramp to the drop pod for easier access
Improved building frequency
Added LOD system for base building parts to increase draw distances and complexities

EXPLORATION, FAUNA AND FLORA
New underground ruins building type
Buried technology modules and blueprint analysis
Overhauled signal booster and navigation data input
Procedurally generated technology
Procedurally generated products
Improved creature pathfinding
Improved creature response to feeding
Herd behaviour for creatures
Improved scales and maximum sizes of creatures
Improved sentinel drone behaviour, proximity indicator and escape gameplay
Improved matching of creature body parts to their role
Coprite improvements
New hazardous fauna
New hazardous flora
Improved scan ranges for biome specific plants
Added new armoured drone type
Must use the terrain editor to mine resource deposits
Improved Colossus speed and fuel tanks / consumption
Different ship classes use different amounts of launch fuel
New name generation system for planets / ships / weapons / creatures
Increased variety in creature descriptions
Nada + Polo’s tasks are now tracked in the Mission Log
Fancier descriptions for planetary weather conditions
Changed starting Exosuit inventory size
Increased the number of Exosuit cargo slots available to purchase
Increased crafted item stack size in the Exosuit to 5

CONTROLS AND COMBAT
Climbing traversal more challenging and rewarding
Added ability to slide down cliffs
Player movement is more dynamic
Air resistance simulation for jetpack navigation
Multi-tool manual holstering / unholstering
Ship weapons can be used against ground targets
Splash damage added to ship weapons when used against ground targets
Improved low level flight, with destruction of terrain objects with which you collide
Fixed jitter on physics debris pieces
Stopped player colliding with tiny rocks on scorched biomes
Crit points on sentinel drones and quads
Combat scope module for the Multi-Tool
Personal forcefield module for the Multi-Tool
New grenade types
Improved weapon alternative mode, also with better HUD display
Sentinel drones can repair quads and walkers in battle
Improved sentinel quadruped behaviour, pouncing, evade
Improved walker behaviour with different attack modes
Extra armour plating added to sentinels arriving in combat
Fixed placement of off-planet markers and improved pulse drive flight towards marked destinations

AUDIO
Updated creature vocals
New third person foley for player and NPCs
Additional loading music and a new track when starting normal mode
Revised ship engine sounds
Added low flying ship sounds
Revised underwater sounds
Improved combat audio and overhauled Quad and Walker audio
New NPC vocals
New Frigate audio

STABILITY / BALANCING / FIXES
Fixed a number of issues with atmospherics and water rendering on the horizon
Fixed text clipping issues in some languages
Fixed certain cases where opening the settings menu silently changed resolution
Fixes for several uncommon out of memory crashes
Fixed transition between lighting when flying to space
Fixed and improved a number of situations for flattening terrain around buildings
Fixed cases where terrain tiles could be missing or slow to appear while flying around or into planet
Fixed crashed freighters having underground treasure too low to mine down to
Prevented dead planets ever having atmospheres
Prevented some story-critical buildings being placed underwater
Fixed lighting issues with double sided leaf shaders
Fixed repetitive tiling textures on some foliage leaves
Fixed issues with loading some particularly large saves
Fix for superconductive lock bug
Voice chat quality and reliability improvements
Fixed scan events for players who have managed to go off-grid
Fix for edited terrain regions repeatedly regenerating themselves unnecessarily
Fixed rocks showing up as the wrong colour on frozen biomes
Fix occasional hang in asynchronous IO
Fixes for non-instance LODs
Added geometry streaming system
Made numerous memory savings to improve overall stability
Made the damaged machinery turn off the sparks and smoke effect when you have finished the interaction
Rebalanced AI ship damage
Balanced ship to ground target damage
High performance(1440p) and High Quality(2160p) rendering modes added for Xbox One X
Made numerous grass and foliage rendering optimisations
Optimised per-frame renderer memory usage
Optimised various engine components using async compute
Various optimisations
Various miscellaneous bug fixes