No Man’s Sky’s latest update, Xeno Arena, is doing its best Pokémon impression by letting you raise, train and battle the alien creatures found across the universe.
“Most of the planets you’ve visited in your travels have always been teeming with wildlife,” developer Hello Games said, “and now, for the first time, those creatures are not just your companions, but your squad and maybe your champions!”
The update adds turn-based creature battles to the veteran space game for the first time. The idea is you explore the universe, assemble a team of creature companions, perfect their genetic makeup, and test their mettle at simulated combat arenas. There are hundreds of unique battle abilities, and you get to challenge new alien characters, with daily challenges and more to keep you going.
Patch notes, courtesy of the No Man’s Sky website, are below.
No Man’s Sky Xeno Arena Update Screenshots
Here’s Hello Games chief Sean Murray with more:
“We have this whole universe filled with an infinite variety of creatures, and we’ve added to that for ten years now. You have everything from dinosaurs to flying cows to robots to gaseous blobs. We started with this thought that you can discover them and name them… but what if all that variety had a gameplay purpose? What if you could collect them, breed them, have them as pets… but also battle them?
“We are huge fans of Pokémon, Palworld and pet battling in World of Warcraft. Now when discovering a rare robotic creature in a far flung purple system planet, you can check their abilities, and for instance discover a powerful neutron blast attack. Suddenly it brings a new dimension to exploration. Rare creatures and beautiful pets become something exciting to show off in the Arena.
“These holo-arenas can be found in Space Stations and in the Nexus. Players can battle their pets against friends, strangers and NPCs for huge rewards. It’s a genuine path for players to progress in the game, with daily challenges to compete in for ultimate rewards. This is an entire multiplayer game all of its own, with absolutely tons of depth, now existing within No Man’s Sky.
“Each species has unique elemental affinities tied to their xeno species and linked to their home world. A blob creature evolved on a toxic planet has different abilities to a flying dino born on a frozen moon. Rarer biomes can be harder to find but yield rarer creatures, which are much harder to prepare a team to battle against.
“Some creatures are extraordinarily rare – legendary variants with unusual and exceptional stats that can be incredibly valuable. Sharing knowledge and creature locations with other players opens up its own fascinating economy.
“Once found, creatures can be trained, or can be bred and even genetically modified to create new variants and unique colours. Feeding, bonding and sparring raises their abilities over time. The satisfaction of watching a scrappy little creature you found on a desolate moon grow into a fearsome arena champion is something we’re really proud of.
“The Xeno Arena itself is a new multiplayer-enabled structure you can construct and open to other travellers. Challenge friends to creature battles, host tournaments, or travel the galaxy taking on other players’ arena champions. Ranks, leagues and future seasonal rewards promise to keep that competition alive.
“2026 represents 10 years since we launched and I couldn’t be prouder. For any game to reach such a milestone is a privilege. It wouldn’t be possible without your continued support and we genuinely appreciate it.
“Our journey continues.”
Hello Games Update 6.3 patch notes:
The Holo-Arena and Creature Battles
- Added turn-based tactical Creature Battles, with all-new music, visual effects, cinematic cameras, and combat log.
- Players with adopted creatures can now assemble their companions into battle teams, and participate in simulated fights against creatures owned by alien lifeforms or other players.
- Each creature has a unique set of battle moves, influenced by their species and native climate. Battle moves include attacks, heals, stuns, shields, status effects, and more.
- Creatures in battle may sometimes dodge incoming attacks, perform bonus moves, or perform critical hits.
- Companions participating in battles will earn experience, gradually improving their combat prowess.
- Added a new interface for modifying the genetics of owned companion creatures, allowing upgrade of agility, health and combat battle traits.
- Added multiplayer Holo-Arena tables to the Space Anomaly, where players can challenge other Travellers to Creature Battles.
- Added Holo-Arena tables to planetary outposts, planetary archive buildings, space stations, and some settlement buildings, where players can challenge alien lifeforms to a Creature Battle.
- Alien lifeforms playing Creature Battles at space station Holo-Arenas are seasoned system champions. They will be more challenging to defeat than planetary lifeforms, but yield higher rewards.
- Winning Creature Battles will yield a number of rewards, including nanites, invitations to play against alien lifeforms, and retroviral pellets to more efficiently upgrade the battle traits of creature companions.
- A new Traveller NPC, Iteration: Oceanus, has arrived at the Space Anomaly.
- Oceanus is a creature-collecting enthusiast, and will introduce players to Creature Battles and the Arena League through a lightweight tutorial.
- Oceanus offers a fixed-seed daily challenge to all players.
The Arena League
- Added a new faction to the Catalogue & Guide: The Arena League.
- The Arena League offers 5 new varieties of ranked medal and accompanying guidance missions.
- A set of special titles are available for accomplishments in the Arena League.
- A set of unique companions are available as rewards for accomplishments in the Arena League.
Creature Survey Mode
- Added a Creature Survey mode to the Analysis Visor, displaying markers related to creatures, and revealing the battle traits as well as species information for targeted fauna.
Stability and Optimisation
- Implemented a number of significant optimisations on Nintendo Switch 2, improving rendering performance by up to 15%.
- Implemented tiled lighting on PC, significantly improving GPU performance when rendering lighting, especially at higher resolutions.
- Implemented a number of CPU performance optimisations related to lighting.
- Implemented a significant optimisation in player-built bases containing large farms of harvestable plants.
- Implemented a significant optimisation in inventory handling, improving performance in all instances of querying the contents of inventories (for example, during missions, when calculating ship stats based on installed tech, or when accessing a shop).
- Implemented a significant performance optimisation when viewing a Companion Register containing a large number of creatures.
- Implemented a significant performance optimisation when displaying the UI notification for adopting a creature companion.
- Implemented a number of optimisations related to the Analysis Visor and scanner technologies.
- Implemented a performance optimisation related to the rendering of planetary objects.
- Fixed a number of crashes on Nintendo Switch platforms.
- Fixed a number of rare crashes.
QOL and Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue that could cause the camera to rotate when standing on a corvette.
- Fixed an issue that prevented interacting with modules on another player’s corvette.
- Fixed an issue that could cause asteroids to fade in and out erratically when first entering an asteroid field.
- Fixed an issue that could cause save game related issues for PC players with a Windows username containing non-ASCII characters.
- Fixed an issue that could cause an erroneous Cross-Save conflict dialog to appear after suspending and resuming the game on consoles.
- Fixed an issue that could cause missing interaction points in some planetary buildings.
- Fixed a dialogue issue in The Purge, where Artemis would make an inaccurate reference to a previous player choice.
- Improved the internal system used by missions to open the inventory to the most contextually relevant screen (for example, when being prompted to install a technology in a particular inventory).
- Fixed an issue that caused the Exploration Log on some planets to include extinct species in the count of total discoverable fauna and flora.
- Fixed an issue that caused some Twitch or Expedition rewards to display as “Available” at the Quicksilver Synthesis Bot when they had already been redeemed in another shop interface.
- Allowed the Egg Sequencer to access eggs stored in the Freighter inventory, providing the Freighter inventory is within range.
- Improved the visual clarity of which medal is selected in the Journey Milestones section of the Catalogue & Guide.
- Improved the appearance of a number of UI textures in 4K resolution.
- Fixed an issue that caused the labels for “Playfulness” and “Personality” to sometimes appear incorrectly at the Egg Sequencer.
- Fixed an issue that caused some rare crystal-based fauna to be invisible.
- Fixed an issue that caused companion accessory attachments to appear on some wild creatures on the Discoveries Page.
- Improved the appearance of some planetary trees on Nintendo Switch and in VR.
- Improved the lighting at Waste Processing Plants.
- Fixed a visual issue on the player model when equipping Autophage arms in combination with non-Autophage gloves.
- Fixed a visual clipping issue with corvette cockpits when flying into planetary atmosphere.
- Fixed an issue that caused companion eggs with regular shells to hatch into metal pieces.
- Fixed an audio issue with the Appearance Modifier on the Space Anomaly.
- Miscellaneous text fixes.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
