No Man’s Sky’s next major update finally brings fishing to the game after fan art brought Hello Games to a halt.
Following the release of the No Man’s Sky’s Worlds Part 1 update and the introduction of recent water-related technology, Hello Games has today, September 4, released the Aquarius update, which finally adds the ability to fish to the long-running space simulator.
This fishing feature was inspired by the fan art below, which depicts a player avatar fishing while sitting in his spaceship. posted by redditor catador_de_potos with the thread title: “I am a simple man with a simple dream.”
“People really loved the Worlds update for its new water tech. A lot of players posted videos of themselves just chilling out by the water,” said Sean Murray, head of Hello Games.
“One piece of fan art stopped us in our tracks, a player lazily fishing from the wing of a boat. It inspired our next update, Aquarius – where we finally added fishing to No Man’s Sky!”
As Murray said, the Aquarius update adds “a huge array of fish to No Man’s Sky, from common minnows to wild alien species, each with its own habitat and fishing conditions.”
You can bait your rod to attract the rarest of fish or scour the depths for hidden messages in a bottle. There are trophies to earn, fishing journals to complete, and recent fishing tackle rewards. There’s even a special fishing expedition, Murray teased, that sends players in search of “the biggest catch of the day.”
New gear lets you fish in deep water from your personal fishing platform. New fishing pots can be used to bait and trap infrequent prey. You can cook up the catch of the day with recent recipe combinations to discover.
“My favourite thing to do is build a little base on the perfect shoreline so I can cast my line whenever I feel like it,” Murray added.
No Man’s Sky was released in 2016, initially for PC and PlayStation 4, and then for Xbox One in 2018, and for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S in 2020. A Nintendo Switch version followed in 2022. Hello Games has released a long list of major updates over the years, the most recent of which was the aforementioned Worlds Part 1. Murray said that Worlds brought No Man’s Sky its highest player count in over five years.
Indeed, it’s a busy time for Hello Games, as in addition to the update to No Man’s Sky, the company is working on another game, Light, no fire. This is a story of adventure, building, survival, and exploration set on a fantastic Earth-sized planet.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
