No Man’s Sky’s latest update is all about rubbish-flinging spacetrashpeople with gravity guns and interstellar trucks

Look at all the mess lying around. You can’t move for discarded detritus on the planets of No Man’s Sky. Good news, then, that the space sandbox’s latest update delivers a gravity gun and interstellar rubbish collection lorries that’ll help clean those worlds up a bit.

The update, dubbed Remnant, is the first one Hello Games have put out this year. It turns the salvage that’s been strewn about on planets for a while into something you can gather up and recycle at Waste Processing Plants for “rare and highly prized resources”.

In line with that, the update’s two major additions are a multi-tool module dubbed the Gravitino Coil and customisable trucks to haul the rubbish you pick up. In practice, you run around launching the likes of trashed tyres and hunks of metal onto your lorry’s flatbed, optionally yelling ‘Kobe!’ with every successful landing. Then, once you reach the processing plant, you lob the waste into machines with big grinding rollers to break it down. Naturally, there’s the option to work as part of a waste cleanup team if you fancy bringing some mates along.

“Some of the scrap is highly volatile though and must be transported extremely carefully,” Hello Games’ Sean Murray explained. “It’s hard to resist over-stacking your truck, finding one more piece you think you can cram in, and then trying desperately to transport this house of cards on the back of your flatbed!” Ah, so maybe don’t just Kobe it all into the trailer from half a mile away then.

The gravity gun can also be used as a weapon if you run into anyone who fancies nicking your loot, assuming you’ve got stuff you don’t mind flinging at such assailants. The space trucks are customisable too, with options like tank tracks, wheels, or spindly legs allowing you to design the ideal ride for tackling a specific planet’s terrain. So yeah, NMS is a bit like SnowRunner or RoadCraft with aliens now. I look forward to rolling my space truck following a carelessly taken turn, then spending half an hour lying to myself that I’ll be able to get back on track if I can just lever the thing back ont-. Ah, it’s fallen off a cliff.

The Remnant update is out now. We’ve got you covered if you’re thinking of hopping in for the first time in a while and so need quick refreshers as to what last year’s bunch of No Man’s Sky updates added to the near decade old interstellar exploration game.