No Man’s Sky’s huge update is breaking bases people have spent years building

The latest No Man’s Sky update might be getting heaps of praise for breathing life back into the game, but it’s not all sunshine. Users have been reporting that their bases are getting ruined as of the latest patch, though it doesn’t look like anything can be done about it.

“Don’t do anything. Don’t delete anything. just wait. Every time they mess with procedural generation everything shifts around,” notes a No Man’s Sky veteran. They continue that the Worlds Part 2 update will likely “change things around again,” although there is some chatter that the latest changes will likely be here forever thanks to the Light No Fire tech update implemented into No Man’s Sky.

“The universal nature of these changes implies that it’s not a bug,” writes another. “I checked nearly 20-25 bases on paradise planets and all have changed.” That said, there’s chatter that “Part 2 will bring in a new star type. There’s already a placeholder for it. You can see it in your element menu next to cadmium. It’s purple.”

While some have been wallowing in their misery, others have found it amusing. “I went to check on my settlement and the poor people had been buried under a mountain, all gone. Tragic, but kinda funny.”

The sudden destruction of bases has been ‘feature’ in No Man’s Sky for a long while. This is thanks to the nature of procedural generation. When new updates are parsed and algorithms change, so too does geography apparently. Issues date back to release, and have been pretty consistent since.

People get – understandably – attached to their bases. I think it’s a testament to the cult following that No Man’s Sky has. Even after repeatedly seeing their hard-work undone in the blink of an eye by the instantaneous terraforming of a new mountain peak, or the sudden appearance of an ocean, No Man’s Sky still has a very devoted following, and I thinks that’s thanks to the frequent free updates that the game sees.