No Man's Sky Cosmos: Orbital Bases, Owned Stations and Alliances

No Man's Sky
The Cosmos Update

Author:

Watty
Category:

General Gaming
Date:

Sep 21, 2026

Four No Man's Sky players walking through a player owned space station decorated with statues

Ten years after launch, No Man's Sky is still getting free updates that most studios would charge for. The latest, Cosmos, landed on 9 September as version 7.0, and this time the target is space itself: the stretch between planets that, for a decade, you mostly flew straight through.

Space gets things to do

Warp into a system and your first move will often be a scan of the new star map, which Hello Games says reveals "a whole new array of space points of interest". Among them are space hulks, wrecks you strip with a gravity gun and tractor beam, with a meltdown waiting if you over-harvest, and asteroid belts full of crystal resources, some with rocks big enough to build on. Outposts offer trading, maps and missions, and some come with biological hazards. You can even attempt what Hello Games calls "a perilous journey to reach the center of their own star system".

Build anywhere, own a station

The two changes that matter most to anyone who likes building: orbital bases, free-floating modular bases that "can be built ANYWHERE in space", and space station ownership. After ten years of docking at stations that belonged to someone else, you can finally buy one for yourself.

"A base anywhere in space, a station of your own, and an Alliance to fly under. No Man's Sky just became a much better game for groups."

The Exiles

Alliances

Cosmos also adds Alliances: player societies you can create and join, competing on leaderboards. No Man's Sky has had multiplayer for years, and Alliances give a group something to organise around beyond sharing a base.

Ten years, forty milestones

To mark the anniversary, the Our Journey Continues expedition runs through 40 milestones, one for each major update since 2016, with developer commentary along the way. It is a neat way to see how far a game that launched to a rough reception has come. Cosmos is free for everyone who owns the game, on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and Switch 2, Mac and VR, and it is on Game Pass.

Why we are flagging it

No Man's Sky is not one of the games The Exiles are organised around, and we are not announcing anything. But a space game that just added Alliances, owned stations and bases anywhere in space is squarely our kind of thing, so if you are tempted to jump back in, say so in the Discord and see who else is.

Further reading: Hello Games: No Man's Sky Cosmos