That does look like an asteroid grouping in the upper left and it is being seen from the planets’ surface.
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Is there a chance that that mountain is actually a volcano? 
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I’m not sure if the game mechanics will allow for that kind of animation (lava flows and explosions) but an extinct volcano with smoking fissures would certainly be a possible landscape feature.
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Volcano is a thing that this game needs, cause it’s very common on planets
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Yeah those ships on the cover don’t look too different from some of the ships we have now so I wouldn’t take it as confirmation of new ships. Ringed planets are cool, it must mean they got some planets to have proper rings. The planet at the back does kind of look like a gas giant…here’s hoping it serves some purpose or was added on top the number of planets already generated rather than taking away from that.
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See I thought the same thing about lava flows and stuff like that in NMS… but then I thought back to Sean Murray mentioning something about a new cloud tech that he was working on…
Now if they do have some type of volumetric cloud tech then maybe just maybe they can use that same volumetric tech to make lava flowing or even water streams…
My tinfoil hat is on lol
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Knowing what little I know of programming, a decent code to program clouds “could” be repurposed to animate lava by changing its opacity and color. And it shouldn’t be too crazy to register damage based on passing through the lava. However, I can’t see how you would go about making the “thickness” of the lava so you won’t just walk through it like its non-existant. I guess coding the character to react to lava by slowing down its moving animations. Or making it easier by just letting the character die. It is lava after-all and not Super Mario 64 where you could touch the lava repeatedly. Lol.
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Lava is kind of rubbery like melted plastic IRL and there are some vids on YOUTUBE that show people fooling about, tapping it with their shoes and stuff.
For NMS, perhaps simply having smoking lava filled craters using with deadly water-based graphics as the mechanic would work. You fall in, you cook. Simple. No swimming and massive damage.
Given all planets have a watertable to utilise as a lava flow height, maybe a primordial type biome IS possible. Rivers of moving lava would only require a code similar to the gooey masses some plants and rocks have.
I’m thinking it is possible…just not yet.
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Blue dots on planet look like hyperspace entry points for the freighters. You can see where there is a blue line from them that aligns with the freighters (responding to earlier query).
I am not sure that the planet is a gas giant, it looks like a standard planet seen from a moon, or vice versa. What I think it may hint at is new cloud formations and massive asteroids. Possibly with the ability to land on them and mine rare elements.
Flowing rock graphics are already in the game on some types of iron, etc. You would just need the damage and collision set up. SM has talked about ‘rivers’ from the beginning and there are lots of terrain features that look like river beds without the water. If you can create rivers with water, it’s an easy step to create rivers of lava (or anything liquid).
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I like the idea of having more fluid motion added to the grpahics to make things more realistic: waterfalls, lava flows, sand seas, dripping ooze, ect.)
However, I don’t think that would be an easy addition, and I can think of a load of other (and likely easier) additions to the game that I would rather see. They could surprise us with everything we have asked for and more, but I want to keep my hopes in the reasonable range so that no matter what we get I will likely enjoy it.
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Voxel-based games that have nice water/fluid simulations are… scarce?
I remember “From Dust” as the best fluids I played…
Imagine…
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Lots of work has been done on procedural water effects, e.g. - YouTube very simple demo.
Procedural fluid effects are actually used in a lot of gaming dev tools, such as those used for big games like Horizon: ZD I believe.
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Really, lava in NMS could simply be a ‘solid’ mass that has a pattern of movement on its surface & a trigger for damage.
Only the most liquid lava is viscous enough to sink into. Would be cool but I won’t hold my breath waiting for it.
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I agree that for NMS, would be enough to completely have the water system it already has branch into A (water/liquid) with procedural coloring, viscosity (movement restraint) and procedural temperature/hazard (it already has), or B (lava/molten) planets, with same procedural color, no transparency (swim blind while health lasts), glow-map, damage (bipod effect style). Done.
To get both at the same time on a planet, or flow at different heights (volcanoes, waterfalls, streams, ponds…) is where the system would have to be revamped or seriously build upon. (I would like that effort more than, say, multiplayer… But I suspect would be in a minority, there…)
To not make this fully off-topic… The cover does show a river meandering on the distance. But as flat as the rest is, and without any other fluid shown at different height, (even taking at face value that the cover art is somewhat accurate representation of things inside) that river could be achieved within the current system.
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I really want waterfalls o this game 
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Im with you on this… Would much prefer improved single player mechanics and environments.
Its sad that so many millenials can’t play a game unless its an MMO of sorts… I fear in the long run that NMS will drift away from its roots much like GTA did… Hope HG can keep-it-real [simulated that is!]
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They made a better looking water on the atlas rises, maybe that is a “first step”, just like multiplayer.
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Relax, we will not have a battlegrounds. 
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That river on the art looks like it’s coming from the mountain, so maybe, just maybe we can have a waterfall on this update.
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A waterfall or river needs a point source for water generation and then flow dynamics, which have been coded in procedural environments plenty of times before. I strongly believe the Next is going to be a re-release of the game on all platforms with significant improvements to the world generation.
This will likely regenerate all the systems and biomes and may mean that they either scrap all discoveries made to date or they hold them on a different server as a legacy version of the game.
The new game will likely come with new planets (including the ring planets shown on the cover art) but there could be flowing water / lava, new weather effects like snow, hail, tornados, hurricanes, etc as well as waves, earthquakes, volcanos, geysers… who knows!!!
I am not going to get my hopes up too much but anything is possible.
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