Developer Hello Games has overhauled No Man's Sky's save system to try and make it easier to manage saves between game modes.
The new system has five save slots. If you select an empty slot you'll be taken to the game mode select screen before you start a new game, and there's no limit to how many saves you can have for a particular game mode: you could have five saves from the same mode if you like. Any existing saves will map to the five slots.
Also, each save has two sub slots, one for auto saves (when exiting your ship, dying, purchasing a Freighter or claiming a base), and one for manual saving at save points or beacons.
Hello Games has twice patched issues with save games in the past couple of months, so here's hoping the new system is bug-free.
The new patch makes a number of other changes, the most interesting of which is to the player's Analysis Visor. The visor can now scan farm plants and see their remaining growth time, scan ships at a distance and see their class, type and value, and judge the approximate distance of resources discovered with the Scanner, another player tool.
An army of bugs are squashed, too, including errors in the mission system that would make it impossible to complete delivery missions or randomly change mission requirements when you spoke to NPCs.