No Man’s Sky and its developer Hello Games continue its joint redemption arc into 2020 with the Living Ship update. The key feature being right there in its name – a new breed of starship which can be grown, are fully organic and are event sentient.

While there’s a short trailer (embedded at the bottom of this story) to see Living Ship in action, much more can be gleaned from the official patch notes.

As expected Living Ships will be available in “dozens of procedurally-generated variations” and they will have special loadouts to reflect their biological nature.

A new series of missions called Starbirth are available which explain the origin of these craft. Hopefully these end with the player being granted their own ship.

Living Ships can also be grown from Void Eggs, a process that doesn’t sound pleasant to watch but we want to see anyway.

For those playing on PC in VR or on PlayStation VR, the cockpit experience will be suitably weird as the organic nature of the ship extends to the controls. Instead of clean machinery you’ll be grabbing onto to control your starship, you’ll instead be greeted by vein-covered tendrils. Lovely.

Other, smaller features in this update include big fixes, quality of life changes, optimisations and other smaller “under the hood” stuff you’d expect for an update.

If you want to pick up No Man’s Sky it’s currently discounted on Steam by 50 percent and 55 percent on the PlayStation Store. It’s also available on the Microsoft Store for Xbox One, but it doesn’t appear to be discounted there at the time of writing.

While organic spacecraft are not new to fiction we really like the weird implementation here. It reminds us of the Tyranids from Warhammer 40K which cruise around the grimdark future in Hive Fleets looking to consume new biological matter.