No Man's Sky Echoes update brings a robotic race, pirate freighter battles, and more

After a week of teasing, Hello Games today released the No Man's Sky Echoes update to the masses while also marking the seventh anniversary of the sci-fi space exploration and adventure title. The major content update touts a brand-new race of aliens to interact with, a ship combat overhaul, close-up battles with freighters, and more features.

The Autophage has risen across the No Man's Sky universe, a race of never-before-seen robotic beings that looks like they are made out of scrap materials. They will be present on many of the habitable planets, but to find their hidden camps, players will upgrade their scanner to a new tier.

There's a new language to learn, procedurally generated missions, new upgrades, hidden lore drops, and more to discover from this robotic race. Players can even take on Autophage fashion choices to customize their own character.

Also new to No Man's Sky are battles with pirate capital ships. Players can intervene when these dreadnoughts are preying on NPC ships to try and take them down. To help with this, space combat has been upgraded to include power modes in starships, letting players send power to their weapons, shields, or engines depending on the situation.

Meanwhile, to take down freighters players can do Star Wars-like trench runs by swooping into the superstructures and doing damage to their vulnerable points. These mega-ships now feature modules that can be destroyed to disable their weaponry, shields, and even warping capabilities to make destroying them, with a final hit to the core, a little easier.

The update also carries a new line of story missions covering the robotic race, new types of multitools, Switch and PSVR2 visual upgrades, plus the new Voyagers Expedition for the community to complete. Find the complete patch notes here.