No Man’s Sky’s Cosmos update launched on September 9, 2026 as Update 7.0, and it is free for everyone who already owns the game. When Hello Games first named it around the game’s tenth anniversary, nobody outside the studio knew what was in it. Now there is a feature list.

Key takeaways
  • Cosmos is Update 7.0, released September 9, 2026 across PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch 2.
  • The headline feature is owning and customizing a space station as its director.
  • It also adds a star system map, asteroid bases, player Alliances and a journey toward the center of a system’s sun.
  • The anniversary expedition, Our Journey Continues, runs alongside it.

What Cosmos adds

Launch coverage from GodisaGeek, Gfinity and Digital Citizen describes the same set of changes:

  • Space station ownership: you prove yourself to local authorities, become a station’s director, and can customize its central lobby, add rooms and decorate the exterior.
  • Star system map: the first screen you see after warping into a system. It shows points of interest that open new mission chains.
  • Asteroids and bases: belts of rock and ice carry crystal resources, some larger asteroids are solid enough to land on and build a base, and free-floating bases can be placed in open space.
  • Alliances: a system for banding together with other players to coordinate exploration and compete over territory.
  • The sun objective: a dangerous trip toward the center of a system’s sun, which was previously out of reach.

Alongside it, the tenth-anniversary expedition Our Journey Continues has milestones that map to the 40 updates the game has received since 2016. These details come from launch coverage by a handful of outlets and I could not cross-check them against Hello Games’ own patch notes, so confirm anything you plan around in the in-game notes.

Why it matters

Space stations were scenery for a decade. Letting players own one, with an Alliance system on top, is the first real step toward the game feeling like a shared universe and not a set of parallel solo ones. The anniversary announcement came with a note from Sean Murray that players had explored roughly 1% of the game’s planets, which is a useful way to read this update: Hello Games is giving you reasons to go back to the other 99%.

How the announcement played

When it was first teased, the message was short on specifics. Hello Games said details were coming later, and the update followed The Swarm and Xeno Arena earlier in the year. The same announcement also mentioned the studio’s next game, Light No Fire, which at the time had no release date beyond sometime after 2026. The rhythm of several content drops a year, kept up since launch, is the reason a vague teaser was easy to believe.

Sources

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