No Man's Sky update: Leviathan patch notes & when the expedition ends

"Our seventh expedition traps Travellers inside a time loop," the team from Hello Games added, "and [it] offers a taste of roguelike gameplay. Difficulty is tuned to survival-mode settings, and every death means a reset of the loop."

So, what's the deal with this week's big No Man's Sky update, and what else do you need to know about Expedition Seven and the Leviathan content in general? Keep on reading to find out.

No Man's Sky update: What is the Leviathan Expedition?

The latest No Man's Sky content introduces the Leviathan Expedition, where players can get trapped in a time loop as they try to unravel a sci-fi mystery. Fans of Returnal and Deathloop may well enjoy it, then.

The developers explained on their website: "As players seek a way to unbind the time-loop curse, they will find a story-driven adventure at the heart of the expedition."

The post also said: "As players explore the loop, they will recover Memory Fragments, lost remnants of previous loops. These manifest as procedurally generated technology, meaning each reset of the loop may play out very differently."

Players are encouraged to "Follow the trail of your previous iterations, absorb memories, investigate significant sites, and work together to escape from the curse of the loop."

And this ominous sentence has also been shared: "Shattered memories all point towards an encounter with an ancient space creature, The Leviathan – but will Travellers succeed in reshaping history, or are they doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past?"

Full patch notes for No Man's Sky 3.90

This update is officially numbered up as No Man's Sky 3.90, and the patch notes for it have now been released in full. They say this about the Leviathan content:

• Expedition Seven, the Leviathan, will begin shortly.
• This expedition takes players on a narrative-driven roguelike adventure to break a time-loop curse, where each death means a reset of the loop.Players can work together to assist Specialist Polo as they research the loop, increasing the quality of rewards and upgrades for each new iteration.
• Rewards include new posters; a Whalestalker Cloak; a juvenile cosmic leviathan suitable for construction within a base; and a chance to come face to face with the fully-grown Leviathan itself…
• PvP will default to off during this expedition.

And on the more technical side of things, the 3.90 patch notes look like this:

• Fixed a GPU crash on PlayStation 4.
• Introduced a significant memory optimisation for Xbox Series S.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a mission blocker if players were sent to an outlaw station to speak with an NPC or terminal not present in outlaw systems.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a mission blocker if players were sent to speak to an NPC on the Space Station (typically a recruit for their base) who had taken part in the tutorial sequence.
• Fixed an issue that could cause doors to fail to open on derelict freighters if several slime pieces were destroyed at the same time.
• Fixed a rare mission blocker that could occur when attempting to locate a planet with high sentinel activity.
• Fixed a rare mission blocker in the Trace of Metal mission, which would cause players to be sent to a Sentinel Hive many tens of thousands of light years away.
• Fixed a number of issues that could occur when joining players from the friends list page.
• Fixed an issue that could cause settlement charts to fail to find a settlement, yet still be consumed.
• Fixed a number of significant visual issues with wire placement.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a small number of X-class procedural upgrades to have unexpectedly low stats.

And there's also some further house keeping in the patch notes:

• Solar-class starships now display their sails on the inventory page.
• Fixed a small number of cases where items received from dismantling products or opening other items would be placed into the wrong inventory.
• The default craft amount for Creature Pellets has been increased, allowing more pellets to be crafted for the same cost.
• Fixed an issue that could cause Traveller NPCs to manifest on outlaw stations, resulting in badly generated text.
• Fixed an issue that could cause Traveller NPCs to manifest using Apollo or Null’s appearance.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the ship damaged VFX to continue playing even after the ship was repaired.
• Fixed an issue that could cause freighter battle missions to fail to trigger properly while the player was on the Under a Rebel Star mission.
• Fixed a visual issue with some specific underground creatures.
• Fixed a rare issue that could prevent interaction with some objects during specific network conditions.
• Fixed a rare issue that could prevent atmospheric frigate flybys on planets with high mountains.
• Fixed a UI issue that could cause the ship upgrade screen to automatically close after installing a new cargo slot, even if the player could afford to purchase additional slots.
• Fixed a number of minor text issues.
• Fixed a number of audio issues.

When does Leviathan end in No Man's Sky?

The Leviathan expedition began on 25th May and the developers have said that it "will run for approximately six weeks." That would take us roughly to the first week of July.

As for how that ending will play out, the developers note: "When the Leviathan expedition concludes, your progress will be converted to a Survival Mode save. Phase rewards can be redeemed across all save games from the Space Anomaly’s Quicksilver Synthesis Companion."

The announcement urges players to "Begin a new Community Expedition game to enter the loop", not least because doing so will earn you "a generous assortment of limited-edition rewards." You can even recruit the giant Leviathan space creature to your fleet! Surely that's worth getting involved for.

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