No Man’s Sky’s latest update, Relics, lets you become the space version of Ross from Friends by collecting big dead alien fossils

Good news, if you’ve ever wanted to fire up No Man’s Sky and roleplay as a guy who likes dinosaurs so much he’s made it a career and also somehow managed to shag Jennifer Aniston, today’s your lucky day. Developer Hello Games has just deployed the Relics update, and its big thing is letting you collect big alien fossils.

This follows the second bit of massive Worlds update arriving in the game back in Jaunary, brining with it “billions of new stars and planets” including huge gas giants and trippy flying squid mums that’d slap you up for fishing just too damn hard.

As outlined in the blog post about the Relics update and the video below, its big thing is introducing space palaeontology. You know, that thing Ross Geller from Friends does for a living, when he’s not being a depressed lump, freaking out about a sandwich, or dressing as a holiday armadillo.

Now you too can David Schwim your way through the galaxy on a journey to “unearth hundreds of unique bones” and assemble them in your museum to try and work out how these old, dead things used to look. Can you deliberately stick bum bones where skulls should be and convince NMS’ array of fun living aliens that they’re all descended from a race of ugly technologically-advanced folks with very bad breath called the Fartongueians? I don’t know, but it seems worth a go.

Ooh, actually on second thought, maybe not. The update also adds Reanimated Guardians, which are “hulking stone lifeforms [which] slumber by planetary fossil beds, defending these ancient burial grounds from Travellers who would seek to disturb them…”. They also look more like your cool stone robot things than creatures with bums for faces, so there goes my theory. There are also Living Stone Sentries and Colossal Stone Effigies, with the latter being seemingly dormant “monumental stone figures, vestiges of long-dead alien civilisations” that watch over relic worlds.

You might also run into some still living fossils, with Titanic Boneworms and “skeletal fauna” roaming around planets where bones can be found and in some purple star systems. Meanwhile, you can “visit Fossil Collectors aboard Space Stations to sell your created fossil exhibits – or trade some of your bones for any of their broad selection of fossils” and cook stuff with bones.

You’ll also want to sign up for the Galactic Palaeology Society and head off on the new expedition Relics adds, which rewards you with a jetpack made of sentient rock, the ability to override your character’s appearance to look like a sentient rock, and a skeletal animal as a companion.

Have you longed to be space Ross for ages? Let us know below!