No Man’s Sky ‘Beacon’ update now available alongside Switch 2 version

Become Overseer of multiple planetary settlements.

Hello Games has released the “Beacon” (version 5.7) update for No Man’s Sky. A Switch 2 version of the game will also be available as a free upgrade from the Switch version when the hardware launches on June 5.

Here is an overview of the update, via its official website:

Beacon: Introducing Update 5.7
Expand your planetary empire in No Man’s Sky “Beacon.” Become Overseer of multiple planetary settlements, and discover the townships of the secretive robotic Autophage. Introducing improved settlement balance, more variety of management decisions, building upgrades, infestations, new base parts and more!
Nintendo Switch 2 Edition
Explore an infinite universe at home or on the go with the cutting-edge No Man’s Sky: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition—available on launch day. Featuring full multiplayer, beautiful high resolution graphics, touch controls, increased planetary detail, higher framerates, high-res UI, gyro aiming, cross-play and cross-save support to continue your existing journey.

Update Features
Oversee Multiple Settlements – Become Overseer of up to four settlements, managing townships on the frontier of multiple worlds—each with their own set of citizens and challenges. Govern your settlers wisely and invest in their infrastructure to enable each settlement to flourish, producing lucrative resources, and becoming an invaluable base of operations throughout your journey.
Historical Records – As Overseer, review a history of your settlement’s accomplishments and statistics achieved throughout your tenure. Improved record-keeping now documents your influence on your citizens’ happiness, the number of sentinel attacks successfully repelled, new infrastructure constructed, and more.
Pyrotechnic Spectacles – Significant events in a settlement—including festivals, new citizens, successful expeditions, building constructions, and more—will now prompt the settlers to celebrate with fireworks in the town centre.
Autophage Settlements – Discover rare Autophage settlements, populated by secretive robotic lifeforms and assembled from scrap and crystal. Travellers who have encountered the Autophage can join these settlements as Overseer, and those who have earned their trust may receive a special invitation…
Inspect Building Details – Inspect settlement structures from their building details terminal. Each building provides an ongoing contribution to the settlement’s productivity and happiness levels, and some can provide special features to boost the entire settlement.
Weathered Construction Materials – Adopt a rustic aesthetic for your bases with new sets of weathered and rusted surfaces. Applicable to all existing timber, stone, and alloy structural components—as well as the new salvaged components.
Deep Settlement Management – The underlying systems controlling settlements have been completely reworked for greater choice and depth. Every building now has its own calculated contribution to the happiness, population and productivity of the settlement, making construction choices more important than ever. Choose carefully which buildings to upgrade as you specialize your construction efforts to improve your citizens’ lives—or their revenues…
Settler Personalities – Conversing with your settlers can now reveal an information page about each of them—providing insight into their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and quirks—as well the skills of any specialists such as bakers or musicians.
Citizen Dilemma Improvements – Citizen disputes have been completely reworked and expanded, removing ambiguity from the scenarios described and presenting the Overseer with a much wider pool of resolutions. Determine your own moral stance on the quarrels of your citizens—or fine them all if everybody is at fault!
Customize Your Settlement – Settlement buildings can now be upgraded to higher classes, increasing their utility, enhancing their appearance, granting them a more prestigious name, and raising the overall status of your township.
Autophage Settlers – Some of the highly enigmatic Autophage have built settlements of scrap metal and Atlantideum—where they live safely cloaked, only visible when scanned with specialist technology. The thoughts of these secretive robotic lifeforms are their own, with only fragments of meaning understandable to their Overseer.
Squadron Defends Your Settlement – Travellers who have recruited pilots to their squadron now benefit from additional defenses against pirate raids, as brave pilots scramble their ships to defend the settlement.
Exosuit Voice Options – The Exosuit AI narrating your journey can now speak with a masculine voice—or be silenced entirely.
Settlement Fishing – Relax at the water’s edge of settlement fishing ponds, reeling in bigger and juicier catches with each upgrade of the pool.
Richer Citizen Guidance – A variety of new management decisions are available to the Overseer, reflecting the consequences of previous choices. Blessings and specialist workers will return to benefit the settlement, and other new scenarios will arise—such as commissioning artwork or helping name a newborn citizen.
Custom Resource Production – Settlements that are clear of debt now have a far greater range of options for resource production. Each resource is now tied to particular buildings’ upgrade levels, allowing Overseers who develop farming, industrial or trade specialisms a greater range of materials. Manufactured resources are now directed by the Overseer instead of automatically assigned. Return to a thriving settlement to harvest its resources to assist your journey—or export them for sale on the galactic exchange.
An Essential Base of Operations – Structures at your settlement now offer deeper interactivity and gameplay. Converse with Guild envoys at marketplaces, probe deep space from towers, determine the soundtrack at the saloon, deconstruct starships at landing pads, purchase new Multi-Tools from factories—and much more.
Intel XeSS – Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) uses machine learning for real-time upscaling—enabling both higher performance and exceptional image quality for PC players.
Player Voice Options – Player vocalizations—such as breathing or exertions when running—can now be customized to several different voice types, varying in pitch and character.
The Vile Brood Seeks Hosts – The dangers that threaten a planetary settlement are now much more varied. Sentinel forces seeking to eliminate settlements now include waves of repair drones, summoners, heavy, corrupted, and standard drones—leading to more interesting and tactical combat encounters. The vile insect queen and her brood have also developed a new “curiosity” about these deliciously-populated points of interest…
Autophage Base Parts – Visit the Space Anomaly to obtain a multitude of new structural and decorative Autophage base parts, and construct your own base in their hard sci-fi aesthetic.
Settlement Event Balance – Sentinel incursion events have been rebalanced, so that settlements call their Overseer to return and defend them less frequently. The range of citizen and management decisions settlers can ask your guidance on has been expanded, and the rewards for doing so have been adjusted to be more enticing to a busy Overseer. The range of stat-boosting special features a settlement can acquire has been tripled to eighteen.
Survey Your Empire – Use the Quick Menu to access the Settlements Register from anywhere, allowing an Overseer to quickly assess the status of all their managed settlements. View debt progress, production status, and history—and even retire as Overseer.
Settlements Influence System Economy – A flourishing settlement benefits an entire solar system, with the local economy receiving a boost from its wealth.
Improved Snapping – The mechanism for snapping structural base parts together has been revisited, greatly improving the building experience when placing floors and roofs.
Cross-Save Full Release – The Cross-Save feature is now available to all players, allowing you to seamlessly continue your journey across any platforms running No Man’s Sky. To transfer your save data across platforms, read more about Cross-Save and connect your platform accounts here.

And here are the full patch notes:

Autophage Settlements
Added rare Autophage settlements, with uniquely Autophage names, to all inhabited planets. Travellers who have discovered the Autophage lifeforms can become Overseer of these settlements.
Players who have completed They Who Returned may receive an invitation at their settlement to visit an Autophage settlement.
At Autophage settlements, an Autophage Synthesis Terminal is available at the town centre monument for exchanging void motes and assembling your own Autophage Staff.
Added Autophage settler NPCs, with their own set of titles, dialogue, and thoughts.
Added Autophage settlement visitors, with their own set of gifts.
Autophage settlements always start with a specialist feature to decrease Sentinel attention.
Added a valuable new variety of planetary chart to locate Autophage settlements, available from Autophage Synthesis Terminals.
Multiple Settlements
Added support for becoming Overseer of up to four settlements.
Each settlement you oversee now has its own clearly-named management mission, with specific details about the settlement’s status available in the Mission Log.
Increased the robustness of the settlement management mission structure, including ensuring a settlement cannot be surrendered if an active mission requires it, and improving the user experience when cross-saving to and from a platform not supporting settlements.
When teleporting to a settlement with a settlement management mission selected in the log, the current settlement’s mission will be automatically selected.
It is now possible to retire as a settlement’s Overseer.
Settlement Balance and QOL
Settlements can now support up to eighteen special features (increased from six).
A settlement’s Overseer can now choose what resources the settlement produces. The list of choices is influenced by the settlement’s race and buildings; higher-class buildings will unlock more lucrative production options.
Resources produced by a settlement can be directly exported for sale from the settlement’s management screen.
The algorithm for determining a settlement’s class has been completely reworked and rebalanced. Returning players may find their existing settlements’ class has shifted slightly, but should also find upgrading to an S-Class settlement more achievable and predictable.
Returning players will be granted the unique “Pioneer Spirit” feature at their existing settlements, available only to settlements claimed prior to the Beacon update.
Individual settlement buildings now each provide an ongoing contribution to the settlement’s productivity and happiness levels, and some can provide specific features to boost the entire settlement.
Individual settlement buildings can now be upgraded, to enhance the appearance and class of the settlement. The upgrade process can be started from the building’s terminal, or when prompted by the administrative terminal.
Added a persistent terminal to each settlement building. In addition to serving as the receptacle for building supplies, this terminal also provides access to its building’s informational page and some special utilities.
The Analysis Visor now reveals taggable markers for individual settlement buildings, making it easier to locate and navigate to them.
Tower buildings at settlements now provide utility for scanning for points of interest on planets and in space, and generate a small quantity of navigation data each day.
Marketplace buildings at settlements now host an envoy for the local system’s most prominent guild.
Factory buildings at settlements now generate a Multi-Tool box, which refreshes its contents each day.
Farm buildings at settlements now contain planters.
Saloon buildings at settlements now allow the Overseer to prepare a menu for the facility, and to set the ByteBeat track at the jukebox.
Landing pad buildings at settlements now provide utility for locating crashed ships, and for salvaging starships.
Added options to build a fishing pond building at all settlements. The quality of fish will increase as the pond is upgraded (but only junk will be produced while the pond is under construction).
Added an additional step to settlement building construction, giving the Overseer the opportunity to officially open fully-constructed buildings with a short celebratory cutscene.
Receiving an overpayment on settlement debt now increases the settlement’s reserves, awarding a production equivalent to the excess.
Citizens now release fireworks in response to significant events at a settlement.
Added a history page to settlements, providing an overview of accomplishments and events throughout the current Overseer’s tenure.
Added an informational stats page to settlers, revealing insights into their individual personalities. Specialist citizens with a particular occupation have unique pages, as do visiting members of your squadron.
Added a Settlements Register page, providing an overview of the status of all managed settlements—including their statistics, debt status, production status, and history. This page is available from the Quick Menu, or from the Administrative Terminal in any managed settlement.
Refreshed and improved the visual style of all pre-existing settlement UI pages.
Significantly increased the variety of enemy types when Sentinel forces attack a settlement.
Significantly rebalanced the frequency of Sentinel attacks at settlements, notably slowing the increase of alert level while the game is not running.
Overseeing multiple settlements will distribute the Sentinel alert level between them, effectively meaning the number of attacks requiring player attention does not increase with the number of settlements managed.
The swarming brood can now occasionally attack a settlement.
Settlers with specialist jobs can now be encountered wandering around settlements.
Members of your squadron will now scramble to defend against pirate raids, and pilots can be encountered wandering around settlements.
Thriving settlements will now increase the wealth of their local solar system.
Enhanced the holographic orb at the Administrative Terminal in settlement Overseer’s Offices.
Added a new filter to the teleporter for “My Settlements”.
Teleporting to a settlement will now place you in the Overseer’s Office, rather than by the town centre monument.
Prevented extreme weather phenomena such as meteor showers and lava eruptions from occurring within settlements.
Settlement Management Decisions
Increased the variety of settlement management decisions across every category.
Expanded the settlement management decision UI to support a possible maximum four options (increased from two).
The existing citizen dispute management decisions have been completely reworked, introducing clearer scenarios and a broader choice of resolutions.
Increased the variety of questionable settler activities that the settlement advisory board may suggest banning or taxing.
Added a number of new specialist citizens who can join your settlement, such as a hologram architect and an astronomer.
Settlement management decisions can now award standing, alien vocabulary, procedurally-generated products and nanites.
Added a new type of settlement management decision to upgrade the class of constructed buildings.
Added a new type of settlement management decision to commission a piece of artwork.
Added a new type of settlement management decision to name a newborn citizen.
Added a new type of settlement management decision to utilize a settlement’s current blessing.
Added a new type of settlement management decision to receive a gift from a specialist worker.
Added a rare new type of settlement management decision to surrender one of your settlers for a bounty.
Rebalanced the weighting of settlement management decisions to prioritize more interesting and positive choices.
The leader of settler expeditions is now revealed in the request management decision, making it clearer which citizen is at stake should the expedition fail.
The missions tracking a settler expedition now display details about what the expedition party is attempting, and the remaining expedition time is now also displayed in the Mission Log.
At the conclusion of a settlement expedition, the Overseer will be prompted to debrief the expedition party for a report and rewards.
Base Building
Added approximately one hundred new Autophage-styled structural and decorative base parts, purchaseable from the Space Anomaly.
Added new sets of weathered timber, stone, and alloy materials for settlements and settlement-related base parts. Players constructing their own base with these structural parts can choose between weathered and polished materials.
Significantly improved the snapping of structural base parts when placing them on a plane below the player’s feet.
Fixed an issue that could prevent the Cylindrical Room Frame from snapping to other base parts.
Fixed a rare issue that could cause terrain edits to fail to be uploaded alongside the base they belong to.
Voice Options
Added audio options for adjusting the pitch and style for player vocalizations (such as grunting and breathing).
Added audio options for selecting a masculine exosuit voice (in English only), or disabling the exosuit voice entirely.
Nintendo Switch 2
Added support for the Nintendo Switch 2. Players who already own No Man’s Sky on Nintendo Switch can upgrade to the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition via a free upgrade pack from the Nintendo eShop.
Added support for multiplayer on Nintendo Switch 2, including support for Game Chat and in-game Friend List display. (Nintendo Switch Online account required.)
Players from your multiplayer Group will appear in the recent players list on Nintendo Switch 2.
Misc QOL
Added galaxy names to the Discoveries page.
Added the name of the current galaxy to the portal runes displayed in Photo Mode.
Engine and Optimization
Added support for Intel XeSS2 (Xe Super Sampling).
Implemented occlusion culling on PC and Nintendo Switch 2, significantly increasing framerate in indoor environments (such as in caves and planetary buildings).
Streamlined and modernized system dialog boxes for crash reports and startup errors. These now include clickable links to report the error, and can optionally disable mods if mods are detected (this is no longer the default behavior).
Implemented a significant memory-saving optimization in geometry streaming.
Implemented a significant performance optimization in animations on PlayStation platforms.
Implemented a performance optimization in planetary ring rendering.
Implemented a memory-saving optimization in bounding boxes.
Implemented a performance optimization when loading building parts at settlements and bases.
Implemented a performance optimization when querying procedurally-generated products in the inventory.
Implemented a performance optimization on Mac.
Optimized the number of shaders used by the game, improving load times.
Stability
Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a large number of animations.
Fixed an out-of-memory crash on PS5.
Fixed an out-of-memory crash on Nintendo Switch.
Fixed a rare crash that could occur when duplicating a base part.
Fixed a rare crash that could occur when loading complex bases.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue that could prevent removal of players added to the No Man’s Sky Friends list.
Fixed an issue on Steam that prevented the game from recognising blocks issued to other players via the Steam interface.
Fixed a rare issue which could cause a ship to be overwritten with another player’s ship when going through a portal during the core story missions in multiplayer.
Fixed an issue that could prevent a mission with a very distant target location from being restarted if that location was in a different galaxy.
Fixed an issue that could cause duplication of a Starship’s core technology.
Fixed an issue that could cause the exosuit voice to be too loud.
Fixed an issue that could cause in-game options to reset when re-launching the game.
Fixed an issue that could cause some expedition reward Multi-Tools to rename themselves.
Fixed an issue that prevented crepuscular rays from rendering.
Fixed an issue that could cause slowdown when hovering over an item in the product crafting menu.
Added some missing ramp structural base parts to the Catalogue.
Fixed an issue that could cause a marker to appear above the ship communicator.
Fixed a rare issue that could block Tethys’ dialogue in the early stages of A Trace of Metal.
Fixed an issue that caused the settlers in A Trace of Metal to celebrate being put in quarantine.
Fixed an issue that caused Korvax visitor gifts at settlements to be mislabelled.
Fixed an issue that allowed applying for Overseer status during the initial tutorial combat at your first settlement.
Fixed an issue that could cause the settlement alert to increase before the Overseer’s Office had finished construction.
Fixed a number of issues that could cause “collect surplus resource” objectives in the settlement management mission to be prioritized above other available settlement activities.
Fixed an issue that could cause NPCs in settlement management decisions to celebrate their expedition request being denied.
Fixed an issue that could cause a “Nothing Found” message to appear when leaving the Settlement’s system before completing construction of the Overseer’s Office.
Fixed an issue that could cause the “Entering Planetary Settlement” message to appear multiple times when entering a settlement.
NPCs now navigate more intelligently around settlements, and are less likely to walk into walls.
Fixed an issue that could cause settler NPCs to spawn inside the terrain when loading a save at a settlement.
Fixed a number of camera issues when making settlement management decisions involving NPCs of differing heights.
Fixed an issue that could cause Traveller NPCs to appear in settlement management decisions.
Fixed an issue that could cause generated settlement names to be erroneously censored by the profanity filter.
Fixed an issue that could cause the player’s Sentinel Wanted Level to increase while fighting off a settlement attack.
Fixed an issue that could allow ancient living stone guardians to spawn and attack during the early tutorial stages of the game.
Fixed an issue that allowed ancient living stone guardians to target players with an active Cloaking Device.
Fixed an issue that prevented ancient living stone guardians from hitting their targets on low-gravity planets.
Fixed an issue that prevented Sentinels and ancient living stone guardians from targeting the player while piloting an Exocraft.
Fixed a visual corruption that could occur when the Minotaur was pushed by a physical force.
Fixed an issue that could cause the camera to dip beneath the terrain when riding a creature.
Fixed an issue that could allow ridden creatures to intersect terrain.
Fixed an issue that could cause invalid data to appear in the ship archiving interface.
Fixed an issue that could cause the current teleporter to appear as a possible teleport destination.
Fixed an issue that caused the eyes of some Autophage to float outside their head.
Fixed a UI overlap issue in Photo Mode, where the saved file path notification was obscured behind the controls bar.
Improved the placement of the “hold to skip” UI on Nintendo Switch.
Fixed several rendering issues on Nintendo Switch that could cause terrain to appear black or missing.
Fixed an issue that could cause motion blur to appear blocky when whipping the camera around quickly.
Fixed an issue that could prevent some planetary rocks and foliage from appearing.
Fixed an issue that caused the inventory to fail to open when using an Xbox controller on Mac.
Fixed a rendering issue that prevented decals from appearing on Mac.