No Man’s Sky Expeditions are, to many players, the true heart of the game these days. Well, they are to me, anyway, and based on the traffic we get for our guides I can at least guess it’s the same for many players. The one downside to these limited-time events is that they’re so… limited. You only have a set number of real-world weeks to complete each before they disappear forever! Or do you? Well, no. Not technically. Developer Hello Games has seen fit to rotate some of the older Expeditions back into the game via condensed “Redux” versions. Now they’re bringing back four more: Exobiology, Blighted, Leviathan, and Polestar.
You can see so for yourself on the No Man’s Sky Steam Discussions page (where minor announcements for the game are often teased early like this). The changes are part of the “Experimental Branch” build notes for Nov. 21, 2022. Which is to say beta testers can opt into the new version of the game ahead of time and see the upcoming changes. Standard PC players — as well as those on PlayStation, Xbox, and now Nintendo Switch — will then get access at a later date.
How much later is later? Unclear. The Redux editions of the Expedition (try saying that five times fast) are said to be “shorter versions of the primary version of the main expedition, with the same rewards, designed to offer players a chance to gain any rewards they missed from the year’s expeditions.” The notes then clarify that the events “will run over the holiday period and will be available on all platforms, including Nintendo Switch.”
It’s not the first time this has happened, either. Hello Games brought back another batch of Expeditions once before. Including the one that gave out the Normandy from Mass Effect as an in-game frigate. Sadly, that’s not one of the four listed here, but some of the rewards are still well worth it.
I especially recommend running the Leviathan Expedition. It’s probably the hardest content introduced to No Man’s Sky yet. However, the roguelite mission also awards you with an S-tier Organic Frigate that you can use on any save. It’s not the Normandy, sure, but it’s great for harvesting upgrades to your Living Ship. Polestar, which reintroduced players to Freighters after they were massively overhauled this year, is also quite good.
Speaking of which, these Expeditions will award Quicksilver. That’s the rarest currency in No Man’s Sky at the moment (and necessary to purchase the Living Ship questline). Thus there might be a reason for even players that already finished the old Expeditions to rerun them.
Besides that, there isn’t much to say about the latest update. It mostly appears to be a batch of bugfixes. Those are always appreciated, of course. They’re just not quite as exciting as the often-earthshattering patches the space life sim has introduced in the past. Update 4.0, Waypoint, was the last big expansion to the game back in October. It introduced Nintendo Switch players to the fold and made some quality-of-life changes. It just didn’t add much to those already invested.
This update seems to be in that same vein, but it’s hard to complain after so many enormous expansions to No Man’s Sky over the years. All of them for free. And I’m personally excited to finish out the Exobilogy and Blighted Expeditions. I never finished them myself!
