No Man's Sky's adds Pokémon-inspired battles in major game update

Xeno Arena allows players to capture and battle monsters with elemental affinities and rarities

No Man's Sky continues its unbelievable, decadelong streak of new content updates with Xeno Arena, a patch that lets players raise, breed, train, and battle aliens you discover across the galaxy. The new mode is part Pokémon Stadium, part Star Wars holochess, and, like all No Man's Sky updates, it's free.

Players who visit space stations can now challenge their friends or NPCs to monster battles in exchange for all-new rewards. As in Pokémon, creatures you collect have elemental affinities that are dictated by their home planet's biome. Planets with harsher biomes can yield stronger, rarer creatures — so there's some incentive to take risks. There are even legendaries in Xeno Arena; Hello Games teases that rarer xenos will be difficult to find unless players cooperate. What are the odds that the infamous giant sandworms will become a No Man's Sky legendary type?

"We are huge fans of Pokémon, Palworld, and pet-battling in World of Warcraft," Hello Games founder Sean Murray said in a press release. "Now when discovering a rare robotic creature in a far-flung purple system planet, you can check their abilities, and for instance discover a powerful neutron blast attack. Suddenly it brings a new dimension to exploration. Rare creatures and beautiful pets become something exciting to show off in the Arena."

Hello Games says that this update is big enough to qualify as its own game. The breeding system by itself certainly sounds complex. You can raise or genetically modify monsters to attain special colors and variants, for example. There's a bonding and feeding system, which affects the abilities your aliens acquire. New daily challenges, as well as the ability to host tournaments, further flesh out this update. Hello Games suggests that players could even become something akin to gym leaders via the new ranking system.

"We have this whole universe filled with an infinite variety of creatures, and we've added to that for ten years now," Murray said. "You have everything from dinosaurs to flying cows to robots to gaseous blobs. We started with this thought that you can discover them and name them... but what if all that variety had a gameplay purpose?"

Players in the No Man's Sky Federation already like to catalog rare monsters such as the elusive Diplo, which only has a 0.25% chance of spawning on any given planet. Periodically, the world is reminded of No Man's Sky's propensity for generating genitalia-shaped creatures as well. Adding a monster-raising sim on top of that will push that existing culture to an entirely new level, though.

"The satisfaction of watching a scrappy little creature you found on a desolate moon grow into a fearsome arena champion is something we’re really proud of," Murray said.

You can read the full patch notes for No Man's Sky's Xeno Arena update here.

No Man's Sky is available on Mac, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.