No Man’s Sky update lets you drive around any planet

No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games recently patched the game with a minor update concerning exocraft, the pilotable vehicles that the studio introduced in last week’s massive Path Finder Update.

The Path Finder Update gave players new navigation options in the form of three types of exocraft, which could be generated by building a pad called a “geobay.” However, it was only possible to construct geobays on one’s home planet. If you visited another planet, you’d be stuck with the old method of getting around: flying across the world, which requires a lot of plutonium to fuel your aircraft’s launch thrusters.

Hello Games recently released the version 1.22 patch for No Man’s Sky, which allows players to build a geobay on any planet. Now it’s possible to summon a vehicle anywhere in the universe. The patch is available for both the PlayStation 4 and Windows PC versions of the game.

The patch debuted before the weekend as an experimental update on Steam, just two days after Hello Games released the Path Finder Update. For as long as the studio takes between major patches like Path Finder and November’s Foundation Update, this is an example of a very quick turnaround that’s responding to an immediate request from the No Man’s Sky community.

Everyone welcomed the addition of vehicles, but their excitement soon soured when they realized they could only use exocraft on their home planet. That limitation is now gone. Of course, plenty of problems remain — check out the Steam thread for people continuing to complain about PC performance issues — but this is an encouraging step.