No Man’s Sky’s new Joint Exploration shows players as a floating orb

No Man's Sky, despite the toxic hatred that surrounded it for so long, is still ticking in large part thanks to the content updates that Hello Games has continued to release. This latest one, Atlas Rises, brought a ton of additions to the game's repertoire including 30 hours of story content, and perhaps most notably, a light multiplayer feature called "Joint Exploration."

Multiplayer was undoubtedly the hottest topic of all when the game first launched, mainly because players couldn't see each other. That has now changed, but it's not quite the full fledged feature you were probably hoping for. DesignationG posted a screenshot of a chance meeting with another player on Reddit, and it turns out, other players will appear as orbs of light.

Check it out:

A Q&A posted on NeoGAF by user paulogy breaks down the detail on the Joint Exploration gameplay even further. The most notable details from the post are that players will not be able to see each other's ships and that the orb will glow green once they are in one. A planet's terrain can not be modified to affect a player near you either, though it's unclear if this also translates to the new terrain deformer tool. Players also can't see each other engage in battle with any of the fauna from a planet either.

So what can you do?

According to paulogy's Q&A, players can "create a monument together to memorialize your meeting."

More details will undoubtedly surface in time since No Man's Sky is easily the largest game space ever created, but the Joint Exploration mechanic sounds like it could potentially be the basis for a more complex feature.

Sources: [Reddit, NeoGAF]