No Man's Sky's latest free update lets you live out your childhood dreams of digging up dinosaur bones

a spacesuit wearing person looks at a cool dinosaur skeleton
(Image credit: Hello Games)

No Man's Sky has yet another free update. This time, you'll be able to become a paleontologist with the Relics update which lets you dig up the bones of ancient alien creatures. Be warned though, some of them were buried for a reason.

In this new update, which is available now on PC, console, and VR, you can uncover the lost remains of strange beasts. In keeping with No Man's Sky's procedurally generated worlds, there's no right or wrong way to reconfigure the bones once you find them. In fact, you can piece them together to create whatever weird and wonderful skeletones you like.

You'll then be able to display your collection of, well, I'm not sure if they'll be called dinosaurs officially, but let's just call them dinosaurs for now, in a makeshift museum that will be part of your base. Your friends and other players can then visit and marvel at your discoveries.

Just be careful. The bones you can dig up have different rarity levels, and some of the more uncommon ones can be guarded by Stone Ghosts and Stone Golems. That being said, nothing could stop me trying to unearth the skeleton of a Titan Worm.

The last free No Man's Sky update, Worlds Part 2, revamped the lighting, water, and added huge gas giants to the game. So, while this is a smaller, more focused update, it's intended to make the game feel "broader and more real," like the fishing update did back in 2024. You can read the full patch notes right here.

It's been almost a decade since No Man's Sky first released, and all the free updates have turned it into a game people love. The Worlds Part 2 update saw a peak concurrent player count of 43,695, which is the highest recorded for that time of year since it launched. It even got back into Steam's top-sellers chart.

When you're done digging, check out some of the other best space games you can play.

Issy van der Velde
Contributor

I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.

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