Thanks. I was looking for what Hello Games called then too… “Floral Hybrids.”
6.3 Patch notes
The Holo-Arena and Creature Battles
Added turn-based tactical Creature Battles, with all-new music, visual effects, cinematic cameras, and combat log.
Players with adopted creatures can now assemble their companions into battle teams, and participate in simulated fights against creatures owned by alien lifeforms or other players.
Each creature has a unique set of battle moves, influenced by their species and native climate. Battle moves include attacks, heals, stuns, shields, status effects, and more.
Creatures in battle may sometimes dodge incoming attacks, perform bonus moves, or perform critical hits.
Companions participating in battles will earn experience, gradually improving their combat prowess.
Added a new interface for modifying the genetics of owned companion creatures, allowing upgrade of agility, health and combat battle traits.
Added multiplayer Holo-Arena tables to the Space Anomaly, where players can challenge other Travellers to Creature Battles.
Added Holo-Arena tables to planetary outposts, planetary archive buildings, space stations, and some settlement buildings, where players can challenge alien lifeforms to a Creature Battle.
Alien lifeforms playing Creature Battles at space station Holo-Arenas are seasoned system champions. They will be more challenging to defeat than planetary lifeforms, but yield higher rewards.
Winning Creature Battles will yield a number of rewards, including nanites, invitations to play against alien lifeforms, and retroviral pellets to more efficiently upgrade the battle traits of creature companions.
A new Traveller NPC, Iteration: Oceanus, has arrived at the Space Anomaly.
Oceanus is a creature-collecting enthusiast, and will introduce players to Creature Battles and the Arena League through a lightweight tutorial.
Oceanus offers a fixed-seed daily challenge to all players.
The Arena League
Added a new faction to the Catalogue & Guide: The Arena League.
The Arena League offers 5 new varieties of ranked medal and accompanying guidance missions.
A set of special titles are available for accomplishments in the Arena League.
A set of unique companions are available as rewards for accomplishments in the Arena League.
Creature Survey Mode
Added a Creature Survey mode to the Analysis Visor, displaying markers related to creatures, and revealing the battle traits as well as species information for targeted fauna.
Stability and Optimisation
Implemented a number of significant optimisations on Nintendo Switch 2, improving rendering performance by up to 15%.
Implemented tiled lighting on PC, significantly improving GPU performance when rendering lighting, especially at higher resolutions.
Implemented a number of CPU performance optimisations related to lighting.
Implemented a significant optimisation in player-built bases containing large farms of harvestable plants.
Implemented a significant optimisation in inventory handling, improving performance in all instances of querying the contents of inventories (for example, during missions, when calculating ship stats based on installed tech, or when accessing a shop).
Implemented a significant performance optimisation when viewing a Companion Register containing a large number of creatures.
Implemented a significant performance optimisation when displaying the UI notification for adopting a creature companion.
Implemented a number of optimisations related to the Analysis Visor and scanner technologies.
Implemented a performance optimisation related to the rendering of planetary objects.
Fixed a number of crashes on Nintendo Switch platforms.
Fixed a number of rare crashes.
QOL and Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue that could cause the camera to rotate when standing on a corvette.
Fixed an issue that prevented interacting with modules on another player’s corvette.
Fixed an issue that could cause asteroids to fade in and out erratically when first entering an asteroid field.
Fixed an issue that could cause save game related issues for PC players with a Windows username containing non-ASCII characters.
Fixed an issue that could cause an erroneous Cross-Save conflict dialog to appear after suspending and resuming the game on consoles.
Fixed an issue that could cause missing interaction points in some planetary buildings.
Fixed a dialogue issue in The Purge, where Artemis would make an inaccurate reference to a previous player choice.
Improved the internal system used by missions to open the inventory to the most contextually relevant screen (for example, when being prompted to install a technology in a particular inventory).
Fixed an issue that caused the Exploration Log on some planets to include extinct species in the count of total discoverable fauna and flora.
Fixed an issue that caused some Twitch or Expedition rewards to display as “Available” at the Quicksilver Synthesis Bot when they had already been redeemed in another shop interface.
Allowed the Egg Sequencer to access eggs stored in the Freighter inventory, providing the Freighter inventory is within range.
Improved the visual clarity of which medal is selected in the Journey Milestones section of the Catalogue & Guide.
Improved the appearance of a number of UI textures in 4K resolution.
Fixed an issue that caused the labels for “Playfulness” and “Personality” to sometimes appear incorrectly at the Egg Sequencer.
Fixed an issue that caused some rare crystal-based fauna to be invisible.
Fixed an issue that caused companion accessory attachments to appear on some wild creatures on the Discoveries Page.
Improved the appearance of some planetary trees on Nintendo Switch and in VR.
Improved the lighting at Waste Processing Plants.
Fixed a visual issue on the player model when equipping Autophage arms in combination with non-Autophage gloves.
Fixed a visual clipping issue with corvette cockpits when flying into planetary atmosphere.
Fixed an issue that caused companion eggs with regular shells to hatch into metal pieces.
Fixed an audio issue with the Appearance Modifier on the Space Anomaly.
Miscellaneous text fixes.
The creature “abilities” type settings will obviously be part of character abilities in Light No Fire. Nice.
How To Train Your Dragon…
Sean mentions in the blog post we can construct xeno arenas but I didnt see it mentioned in the patch notes nor any new items at the base construction module on the anomaly. Maybe its just unlocked by default? I’ll visit a base when next I’m on. Or maybe its an early reward from oceanus when a certain title is met? Or part of an expedition reward coming down the line
No biggy if it’s not in the game yet, can just build near one.
Finding a paticularly challenge NPC and sending players to fight em will be a fun new reason for a player base.
Errrr… ummm… Thanks HG… I guess.
You could gather all those murder creatures you find on australian planets and then bring them to the anomaly and terrify some traveller with your fearsome fighters.
Duck billed platypus. Scare me to death.
Gods version of Bubble & Squeek.
Lets get those webbed footsies & that flat bill & most of that otter except for the reproductive bits since there’s a ton of egg makers still here … oh & you know what? Lets slap a poisionous spur on the male ones just for giggles. It’s going to Australia so it’ll fit right in.
Actually, they are adorable in real life. Cartoonish.
In the 90s, a practical joke was played on my generation, to see how many could be tricked into their own doom.
This cartoon told us australias creatures are friendly, welcoming, and in need of our help.
# Xeno Arena 6.31
Bug Fixes
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Network optimisation.
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Fixed a crash that could be caused when moving tech while the charge popup is active.
Not currently playing on the experimental branch, but I hear there’s a fix in the works for a disappearing corvette tech module bug introduced with this update. I got hit with that one after a warp in search of new pets yesterday (filed a report). Staying parked in my current system until that gets patched on main. Closing and re-launching the game restored my tech, but having to rearrange it is a PITA 
Some report disappearing POI markets too. 
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue which could cause unresponsive NPCs to appear near game tables.
- Fixed an issue which could cause flickering graphics while underwater.
- Fixed an issue that caused Corvette technology to be removed when warping.
- Fixed an issue that could cause many duplicate items to be created in inventories.
- Fixed an issue that caused performance issues when on the Anomaly on PS5.
- Fixed a rare networking crash.
Bug Fixes
- NPC Holo-Arena opponents will no longer use a move that would cause their final pet to be knocked out.
- During NPC holo-arena battles, opposing creatures will now have more appropriate affinities.
- Fixed an issue which prevented ramping damage from being dispellable during holo-arena battles.
- Fixed an issue that could cause stunned pets to still take bonus turns.
- Fixed an issue that prevented the turn timer activating for Fireteam members during Holo-Arena matches.
- Improved NPC reactions during holo-arena matches.
- Holo-arena NPC opponents will now return to facing the table if they become distracted.
- Fixed an issue that caused Holo-Arenas to appear in Abandoned systems.
- Fixed an issue which could repeatedly send players to battle same NPC when using an invite from Oceanus.
- Fixed an issue which caused players to be thrown around during a holo-arena battle while in a storm on a planet.
- Fixed a rare issue that could occur if you started spectating a holo-arena battle at the end of a match.
- Fixed an issue that would cause status effects to trigger on knocked out creatures.
- Fixed an issue that could cause Holo-Arena battles to go out of sync.
- Fixed an issue that prevented starting new Holo-Arena battles after experiencing a disconnection from the server.
- Added audio to accompany a knock out at a Holo-Arena.
- Added audio to accompany a win result at a Holo-Arena.
- Show level up progress for creatures after a holo-arena battle.
- Fixed an issue that could cause overlapping UI when losing or winning a match at a Holo-Arena.
- Fixed an issue that would display chat messages during Holo-Arena battles.
- Fixed an issue that caused the win/lose screen to disappear quickly for the player who joined a Holo-Arena battle.
- Fixed an issue that caused camera framing to be incorrect for left handed players in VR during holo-arena battles.
- The collection of Arena League reward companions now display a thumbnail of the creature in Oceanus’ shop interface.
- Fixed an issue that would cause the helix upgrade icon to appear erroneously in the companion register.
- Summoned pets are now hidden when starting a battle at a Holo-Arena.
- Fixed an issue that caused some robotic creatures to lay eggs with organic shells.
- Fixed an issue that prevented robotic eggs from being picked up.
- Fixed a texture issue with squid creatures.
- Improved squid creature movement.
- Fixed an issue that prevented creatures from depositing faecium after being fed.
- Fixed an issue that prevented the Analysis Visor scanning mode for creature stats to appear until you adopted a 2nd pet.
- Updated icons for creature traits displayed when using the Analysis Visor.
- Fixed an issue that prevented the starship from being automatically repaired at the end of the Remnant expedition if some milestones had been left incomplete.
- Fixed an issue that could cause the camera to behave erratically when the player was sitting.
- Fixed an issue when attempting to transfer a stack of items from a chest to another inventory.
- Fixed several missing text strings.
- Fixed an issue which could prevent markers from rendering.
- Upgrade OpenVR to version 2.15.6
- Fixed an issue that caused gaps in the terrain with some graphics settings when using an integrated Intel GPU.
- Fixed a crash when attempting to mutate a max level creature.
- Fixed a crash that could occasionally occur during load.
- Fixed a crash in the particles system on Switch.
- Optimised memory usage on PS4.
Edit: Update now available on PS5
Let’s hope this cleaned up PS5. Currently in the recliner due to moving in a new washing machine and pushing out the old one.
PS5 has been a mess. Playable but messy
The POI’s have been very late to arrive to the party on PS5 for a little while now, and sometimes they seem to have no bother loading in. Hopefully something that will be addressed soon as its even more noticeable going archive to archive for battles. I’ve gotten used to finding my way across the invisible walkways. Should be even more fun when my VR arrives 
In case others are not aware, my daughter has a bad habit of not finishing expeditions and has found that when she eventually gets back into the game, the game asks if she would like to finish the expedition.