No Man's Sky Atlas Rising update will improve story and add quick travel portals, drops this week

No Man's Sky developer Hello Games is still tinkering away down there in Guildford.

A big new No Man's Sky update is coming this week, Hello Games has advised fans.

The developer, which has been teasing a No Man's Sky update with an AR game called Waking Titan, emailed players to give them an early heads up about the Atlas Rising patch. Redditor GalaSniper was kind enough to share the text of the email in full.

"Update 1.3 will release this week and will be available for free to all No Man’s Sky players. We're calling it Atlas Rises," Hello Games boss Sean Murray wrote.

"It focuses on improving the central story of No Man’s Sky and adds the ability to quick travel between locations using portals."

Since the story and difficulty of travelling between discovered locations were two of the heaviest criticisms of No Man's Sky outside of the whole doesn't-do-what-they-said-it-would thing, the update sounds fantastic. Hello Games said full patch notes will be released shortly before the update goes out, so stay tuned for further information.

Elsewhere in the email, Murray thanked the No Man's Sky community for their engagement with the Waking Titan AR game, and gave a sort of apology for the developer's long radio silence.

"We have been quiet, but we have been listening intently," he wrote.

"What we do is much more important than what we say, but since launch we have sometimes focused too much on [doing rather than saying]."

No Man's Sky released for PC and PS4 one year ago, and had benefitted enormously from a series of free updates since then. New additions since release include base building, survival mode, more interesting space battles and fancy new vehicles you can take with you to new bases.

It's a much more interesting experience, and closer to what many of us imagined based on trailers, interviews and - to be fair - our own rampant whimsy.