Summary
On January 23, Sean Murray tweeted a singular emoji, 🪐. Just one day later,No Man’s Skydeveloper Hello Games retweeted his post, attaching the same Saturn emoji. Murray also retweeted his original post, but with three of the emojis. And just yesterday, he retweeted a photo of Saturn, captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, again with the emoji.
He’s clearly teasingsomething, and fans think it might be as obvious as a gas giant update.
Saturn, which the emoji depicts, is one such Jovian planet, and Murray has a history of teasing new expansions with emojis. He posted a globe emoji for the Worlds Part 1 update anda cursing emoji for The Cursed update. But how gas giants would work in No Man’s Sky is another question.
Gas Giant Moons, Aerial Extraction Platforms, And Cloud Cities: What Is No Man’s Sky Planning?
You can’t exactly land on a gas giant. If you were to miraculously survive the200,000-mile radius of Jupiter’s radiation belts(which are equivalent to 100 million X-rays), you would have to brave its pulverizing pressure, which is nearly 100 times what we’re used to on the Earth’s surface.
Venture any lower, and you’d plummet into a searing core measured at over 20,000 degrees Celsius. If your ship could weather the heat and crushing gravity without being obliterated, you would still betrapped within the core due to its inexorable gravity, with pressures 50 million times that of the Earth’s surface.
If No Man’s Sky does get gas giants, it’s unlikely that we’ll be’exploring' them as we do with terrestrial planets. As u/Dread-Cthulu speculates, the focus of a gas giant update might instead be on their moons. After all, those moons are deeply fascinating in real life. Last year, NASA even sent out a new spacecraft to journey 1.8 billion miles to study Europa’s ocean, which lies beneath an icy crust.
An update themed around these moons could introduce vast subsurface environments and unique biomes that stand in stark contrast to any other planet, adding even more variety to No Man’s Sky.
Others theorise that Hello Games might also implement floating cities akin to Cloud City fromStar Wars, which is located above the gas giant Bespin. More practically, u/Unlucky_Magazine_354 suggests that a Jovian-themed update would allow us to harvest valuable materials from gas giant atmospheres with an aerial extraction platform.
Others are worried that this might actually be for an expedition, not a fully-fledged update.
This would introduce elements like hydrogen, helium, and methane to the game, which in real life are valuable for nuclear fusion. But all of this is assuming that Hello Games sticks rigidly to science, which might not be the case. u/Srikandi715 argues that “Nothing else in NMS is true to astrophysics, so [there’s] no reason gas giants have to be realistic”. Hopefully, we’ll find out soon.
