Last Updated May 27, 2026
Update 6.4, The Swarm, has arrived for No Man's Sky, bringing a major community expedition, a terrifying new boss, and a wave of quality-of-life improvements across all platforms.
Hello Games has dropped The Swarm, the 6.4 update for No Man's Sky, and it is one of the biggest expedition updates in recent memory. A new galactic threat has emerged, the Traveller soul is fragmented, and something massive is hanging in the sky. Players will need to band together to battle swarms of fast-flying enemy ships, take on a colossal alien boss called the Hive of Glass, and collectively construct a device powerful enough to end the invasion. Here is a full breakdown of everything included in No Man's Sky update 6.4.
No Man's Sky Update 6.4 - What's New in The Swarm?

The headline addition in No Man's Sky update 6.4 is Expedition Twenty-Two: The Swarm, a time-limited community campaign that splits players across three rival teams - the Royal, the Sage, and the Weaver - each representing a fragment of the Traveller soul. Teams must cooperate to build the Prismatic Core in the Space Anomaly while competing to be the most valuable faction, with the winning team immortalized in the Anomaly for all time.
Beyond the expedition, the update brings sweeping space combat improvements, a full suite of bug fixes and QoL changes, and significant performance optimizations across Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PS4, and PS4 Pro.
Related: No Man’s Sky Save Editor
The Swarm Expedition
- Expedition Twenty-Two, The Swarm, will run for approximately eight weeks.
- Players are assigned to one of three teams and given a ship and uniform in their team's colors.
- All teams must work together to unlock the final battle, tracked via the Prismatic Core construction progress in the Space Anomaly and on the Galactic Atlas website.
- Core construction is driven by completing three mission categories: Purge, Restoration, and Sabotage. Each category impacts the rate and balance of construction differently.
- The most valuable team will be permanently honored in the Space Anomaly.
- Expedition rewards include: new posters, decals, and titles; team-exclusive flags; the Direwasp Disintegrator rifle Multi-Tool; the Direwasp Flightpack; and the six-piece Direwasp customization set (chestpiece, plating, boots, gloves, cuisses, and helm).
Swarmer Enemies

- Two new enemy types have been introduced: small, agile swarmer ships and the colossal Hive of Glass boss.
- The Hive of Glass lurks just outside planetary atmospheres and obliterates any Traveller who ventures too close. Defeating it requires piloting through a deadly wheel of lasers to reach its vulnerable core - and surviving the defending swarmer fleet at the same time.
- In all game modes, crashed swarmer ships can now be found on dissonant planets, with crash sites defended by small but fierce planetary swarmers.
- Buried debris from crashed swarmers can now also be found on worlds that are both dissonant and contain salvageable scrap.
- Fallen swarmer bodies can be dismantled to harvest corrupted ichor for research and war effort resources.
Space Combat
- Improved visibility of targeted enemy ships in third-person space combat.
- Improved weapon aiming for the starship in third-person combat.
- Improved auto-follow navigation, which can now also boost the ship.
- Improved navigation and flight patterns of enemy ships.
- Hitting a weak point in space combat will now always crit; hitting other areas will never crit.
- Improved the appearance of speedlines in the starship.
- Fixed a bug where mission notifications counting nearby enemy ships delayed updating until a destroyed ship finished its death spin.
- Improved player ship controls during space combat.
- Fixed an issue that allowed Sentinel interceptors to spawn even when space combat was disabled in difficulty settings.
- Fixed an issue that prevented Sentinel interceptors from detecting criminal activity in space when ground combat was disabled.
- Fixed a bug where the pulse engine countdown timer could display a negative number after combat.
- Fixed the pulse engine re-enable notification to correctly display the current ship's pulse technology name.
Stability and Optimisation
- Fixed a rare softlock where the Connecting banner could display indefinitely on initial frontend screens.
- Fixed a crash related to rendering thumbnails for multiple complex corvette-class starships.
- Implemented memory and performance optimizations for ship trails and speedlines.
- Improved performance when piloting wheeled Exocraft on Switch, Xbox One, and PS4.
- Significant optimization applied to freighter battles.
- Improved performance of certain lighting calculations on CPU.
- Significantly improved performance when handling object visibility in complex scenes.
- Optimized memory usage when rendering UI in sub-4K resolutions on PS4 Pro.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when playing in 4K on PS4 Pro.
- Fixed a number of additional rare crashes.
Quality of Life and Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue that removed teleporter endpoints from previous galaxies when progressing through the galactic core.
- Fixed an issue that prevented new teleporter endpoints from being added outside the player's home galaxy.
- Fixed a bug that caused In Stellar Multitudes to redirect to the galaxy map even when the first purple star system was in a different galaxy.
- Fixed an issue preventing corvettes from landing at the Space Station and the Anomaly.
- Fixed a bug causing the player's backpack to disappear from the inventory screen when piloting a corvette after being in third person.
- The Analysis Visor now displays the specific module name when viewing a corvette.
- Fixed an issue that caused the Analysis Visor to close when tagging a marker while facing an interactable object.
- Fixed markers appearing for non-existent resource deposits.
- Fixed an issue preventing inventory transfer when purchasing a ship.
- Fixed an issue preventing item deletion when transferring into a storage container.
- Fixed a camera spin triggered by quickly exiting a ship after answering the ship communicator.
- Fixed a camera judder when first entering a recently repaired ship.
- Fixed rapid flickering on Corrupted Sentinels on Nintendo Switch 1 and 2.
- Fixed a bug that allowed retroviral pellets to be duplicated.
- Arena League Challenger Invitations now more consistently encourage battles across multiple planets before offering a Champion's Invitation.
- Arena League Challenger Invitations now more frequently select Holo-Arenas not previously visited.
- Arena League Champion Invitations now function correctly in Outlaw systems.
- Improved the balance of companion experience awarded in the Holo-Arena against much higher-level opponents.
- Fixed a bug causing the Twitch rewards prompt to persist after all rewards were claimed.
- Added support for viewing Xbox Gamercards of players in the host's session on the Join Game screen.
- Hid Quick Menu keyboard hotkey prompts when playing without mouse and keyboard on PC and handheld devices.
- Fixed disappearing armor near the Exosuit Research merchant in the Space Station.
- Hidden the holographic community mission progress above the Quicksilver Synthesis Bot when no blueprints are being generated.
- Fixed an issue preventing touch controls from claiming expedition rewards.
- Fixed a bug preventing gyro settings from saving when applying changes from the front-end menu.