Something terrible is hanging in the sky. Hello Games has released update 6.4 for No Man's Sky, titled The Swarm, and it is one of the more ambitious expedition drops the studio has pushed out in recent memory. The Traveller soul is described as fragmented, and the galaxy is now crawling with fast-moving, fast-shooting enemies that want you dead.
Hive of Glass boss encounter
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What the swarm actually means for players
The centerpiece of this update is Expedition Twenty-Two, a time-limited community campaign running for approximately eight weeks. Here's the thing: this isn't a solo grind. Every player on the expedition gets sorted into one of three teams, each representing a fragment of the Traveller soul: the royal, the sage, and the weaver. You get a ship and uniform in your team's colours from the jump.
All three teams have to cooperate to unlock the final battle, with progress tracked through the construction of the Prismatic Core in the Space Anomaly. That construction is driven by completing missions across three categories: Purge, Restoration, and Sabotage. Each category pushes the build rate differently, so team strategy actually matters here. The team that contributes most gets immortalized in the Space Anomaly permanently.
Two new enemy types and a boss fight worth worrying about
The galaxy now has two new threats to deal with. Small, agile swarmer ships flood space combat encounters, designed specifically to overwhelm pilots who aren't paying attention. These aren't the slow Sentinel interceptors you've learned to kite. They move fast and shoot faster.
Then there's the Hive of Glass, a monstrous alien starship that lurks just outside planetary atmospheres. Taking it down requires piloting through a deadly wheel of lasers to hit its vulnerable core while its swarmer fleet defends it. Unprepared pilots will not last long.
Outside of space, crashed swarmer ships now appear on dissonant planets in all game modes, defended by small but surprisingly fierce planetary swarmers. Buried debris from those crashes can also be found on worlds that are both dissonant and contain salvageable scrap, which opens up new resource loops worth exploring.
The swarmer crash sites and buried debris are available in all game modes, not just the expedition. You don't need to be on Expedition 22 to encounter them.
Space combat gets a serious overhaul
Separate from the expedition content, Hello Games has made meaningful changes to how space combat feels. Enemy ship visibility in third-person has been improved, weapon aiming has been tightened, and auto-follow now actually boosts the ship during combat instead of just trailing lazily behind targets.
The weak point system also got a clean fix: hitting a weak point will now always crit, and hitting other areas will never crit. That sounds small, but it removes a lot of the frustrating randomness from boss-style encounters. Enemy flight patterns have been reworked too, which should make dogfights feel less like enemies flying in predictable circles.
Several long-standing bugs got squashed here as well. Sentinel interceptors can no longer spawn when space combat is disabled in difficulty settings, and the pulse engine re-enable notification now correctly displays the right technology name for your current ship.
Expedition rewards and what you're working toward
Completing expedition milestones earns the Direwasp cosmetic set, which is genuinely one of the more distinctive reward packages the game has offered. The full haul includes:
- Direwasp Armour: a six-piece heavy combat set (chestpiece, plating, boots, gloves, cuisses, and helm) forged from salvaged swarmer alloys
- Direwasp Flightpack: an exclusive jetpack that hums and oscillates like a swarm of metal insects
- Direwasp Disintegrator: a rifle Multi-Tool fabricated from swarmer alloys, calibrated for sustained combat against large groups
- Team-specific flags and a set of decorative posters representing all three Traveller fragments
- New posters, decals, and titles
The most valuable team gets their contribution permanently displayed in the Space Anomaly, so there's a real incentive to push hard on whichever mission category your team is prioritizing.
Performance fixes across every platform
The patch also delivers a notable round of stability and performance work. Freighter battle performance has been significantly improved, object visibility in complex scenes is faster, and wheeled Exocraft performance on Switch, Xbox One, and PS4 has been addressed. A crash related to rendering thumbnails for multiple corvette-class ships is fixed, along with a PS4 Pro 4K crash and a rare softlock on the initial frontend screens.
On the quality-of-life side, teleporter endpoints from previous galaxies no longer get wiped when passing through a galactic core, corvettes can now land properly in Space Stations and the Anomaly, and retroviral pellet duplication has been patched out.
For the full breakdown of every change in update 6.4, including all the space combat tweaks and QOL fixes, the No Man's Sky Swarm update patch notes guide has everything organized by category. The eight-week expedition window is already running, so the window to earn those Direwasp rewards is open now.
