Highlights
- The Echoes update for No Man's Sky introduces destructible freighters, allowing players to engage in space combat, though a bug appears to make it possible to annihilate other players' ships, causing the game to crash.
- Freighters have evolved over the years and now play a significant role in the game, with players able to construct interior facilities, command fleets of frigates, and undertake various missions.
- The Echoes update also brings other new features to the game, including the ability to destroy NPC freighters and a new type of pirate ship called the Dreadnought.
The new Echoes update for No Man's Sky adds a huge variety of new features to the game, but new updates to freighters have enabled players to completely annihilate other player's capital ships and even cause the game to crash as a result. Like many aspects of No Man's Sky, freighters have seen frequent tweaks and additions over the countless free content updates that Hello Games has provided over the past seven years, with these massive space cruisers now fully destructible in space combat.
Freighters have always played a crucial part in the overall space sci-fi aesthetic of No Man's Sky, but, like many parts of the ambitious space exploration game, these collosal ships didn't have a whole lot of utility during the game's earliest days. Thankfully, they've grown to become one of the most functionally significant parts of the game after 7 years of consistent support, with some of the game's earliest content updates allowing fans to construct full-sized interior facilities and bases on board their freighters. Not only that, these procedurally generated capital ships even allow players to become fully-fledged space captains, affording them command over a potentially massive fleet of frigates which can each be upgraded and sent on missions to gather resources, explore space, trade, and more.
The hugely-popular Echoes update is the latest content drop for No Man's Sky, and has once again put the game under the spotlight thanks to the wealth of new additions it brings to the game. Among these new features is the ability to reduce any freighter, be it a civilian trading vessel or pirate battleship, to dust through combat in space battles. The exception here is meant to be player-owned capital ships, but one spectacular bug captured by mozzz14 on Reddit shows them obliterating their friend's freighter with them on board. This causes the friend's game to crash after a moment, but not before they fall into the abyss of space when somehow surviving the freighter's detonation.
No Man's Sky's earlier Interceptor update first introduced the ability to completely destroy freighters, though at the time, this ability was restricted to Sentinel capital ships only. With the new Echoes update, fans can scrap any NPC freighter encountered in space, including a whole new type of pirate ship known as a Dreadnought which features an array of trenches housing shield generators which daring pilots can target.
The most recent tweaks to freighters in No Man's Sky are just a few of the many new features the Echoes update brings to the table, and further open up a whole new way to play the game. With the current No Man's Sky Twitch drop campaign coming to an end, it's likely only a matter of days before players can explore these possibilities further in the upcoming Voyagers expedition.
No Man's Sky is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.