No Man's Sky adds Half-Life 2's gravity gun to your arsenal, and I can't believe it's taken almost ten years to get it

If you told my jaded, disappointed self back in 2016 that No Man's Sky would still be around almost ten years later, I'd have laughed in your face. How wrong I would've been. The prime example of a redemption arc, No Man's Sky is one of the best space games you can play right now thanks to all the incredible updates it's received. Now, the first patch of this landmark year has arrived, and while the new multi-tool attachment should make all players smile, Half-Life and Portal fans are going to be grinning like Cheshire cats.

When you talk about mindblowing videogame mechanics that were well ahead of their time, Half-Life 2's gravity gun is right up there. Later reimagined in Portal as the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, and spawning several similar weapons and tools in future games, it was a real trailblazer - we'll hopefully see similarly groundbreaking mechanics in Half-Life 3, if that ever shows its face… Anyways, my point is, No Man's Sky has just added its very own version of a gravity gun to its space sandbox in today's Remnant update. Meet the Gravitino Coil.

This "powerful new anti-gravity module for your multi-tool" turns No Man's Sky into "a physics playground," according to Hello Games. It lets you grab items, carry them in their own little zero-gravity bubble, and then fling them wherever you're aiming. It can also be used in combat situations, allowing you to grab Sentinel drones and blast them away from you, or simply lob large objects at them to cause damage.

Hello Games also wants you to become an expert salvager and environmentally savvy scrapper, so alongside the Gravitino Coil, you can now control new vehicle types and machinery that lets you recycle junk that's been discarded across a planet's surface.

Scrap can "be collected and recycled for rare and highly prized resources," Hello Games says. "New trucks, tipping flatbeds, and haulers can be constructed to transport resources back to industrial yards for reclamation. You can work alone or join a salvage crew with friends. It creates this really fun and tactile new loop of searching for wrecks, loading trucks full of cargo and hauling across the alien landscape to industrial yards to gain new loot and rewards.

"Sorting and depositing materials in these all-new Waste Processing Plants will reap great rewards. Some of the scrap is highly volatile though and must be transported extremely carefully." It sounds like some careful driving and a steady hand with the Gravitino Coil will be required.

A suitably themed, limited-time community expedition is also arriving with today's update. "It brings travelers together in convoys to clean up and reclaim a planet covered in wrecks and salvage. Perhaps you'll be a hauler, or the gravity gun wielding ground crew or maybe a scrap yard operator." The expedition's rewards include vehicle customization parts and a new armor set with "steampunk detailing."

No Man's Sky's Remnant update is live right now. You can take a look at the full patch notes right here.

While this update is of a more modest size to some of those that've arrived in the past, the addition of the Gravitino Coil is just wonderful. It feels like the kind of tool that should've been in No Man's Sky many moons ago, but it'll certainly come in useful with this new focus on salvaging and scrapping. However, I can definitely see some far bigger updates coming later this year to coincide with the game's tenth birthday in August.