5.6 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 customisation 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 UI

• 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.

OPTIMISATION

• Introduced a number of optimisations to planetary prop rendering.
• Introduced an optimisation to dynamic physics groups.
• Introduced a significant memory optimisation for nav mesh generation.
• Introduced a number of minor texture memory optimisations.
• Introduced an optimisation for loading large bases.
• Introduced a number of optimisations for text display, particularly in the Journey Records pages.
• Introduced an optimisation 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.