No Man's Sky's latest content update, The Swarm, brings a community-wide war against The Hive of Glass, an invasive threat to the entire universe. The new update is available now.
When Hello Games head Sean Murray posts a single emoji on social media, the No Man's Sky community starts speculating what it means. April's Xeno Arena update, a Pokemon-style creature arena battler, was teased with a simple stadium emoji. February's Remnant update was preceded by a safety vest. Murray has been doing this unique form of marketing since 2020, so when he posted a single bee this past week, the theories came fast. A cooking update? A tease for Hello Games' upcoming game, Light No Fire? A new beekeeper feature?
None of the above. Instead, it's The Swarm, where Travelers (players) have to work together to fend off an enemy "unlike anything we've seen before," according to Murray.
Here's the trailer:
In The Swarm, players will load into a personality test that divides each of them into one of three factions. These three factions will compete against one another to combat the Hive of Glass, a massive space bound structure that deploys hundreds of drone ships to protect itself. The Hive itself is also a weapon equipped with a central laser powerful enough to destroy entire freighter fleets and possibly space stations. It all sounds very Star Wars Death Star adjacent. As a lifelong Star Wars fan, I'm in.
The war with the Hive is waged on two fronts: in space and on the planet. Travelers on the ground will investigate and loot the remains of downed drones using the gravity gun introduced in the Remnant update. These drones have to be salvaged and researched to discover the secrets behind the Hive while Travelers also have to defeat planetary swarms.
The efforts of each faction will be tracked in the Space Anomaly and the Galactic Atlas, with the most effective of the three factions being memorialized in the Space Anomaly. This event is reminiscent of the monthly Cosmic Events in the now defunct Sanzaru Games' Asgard's Wrath 2, where players chose between two factions and competed for exclusive rewards. The Swarm also has exclusive rewards for participation, including a retro-styled suit of armor, a new rifle, and a huge new jet pack.
Regarding the community style challenge of The Swarm, Murray had this to say:
The prospect of all existing Travellers converging on a single area of the universe to take the largest space battles to date, against the back-drop of an ominous, mysterious Death Star like construct, with the ability to destroy space station sized objects… is going to make for some exciting weeks ahead for us and for players.
No Man's Sky is available on Steam and PS VR2. The Swarm update is free to all players.
