Premise: I'm using the non-Galaxy version of NMS.

This evening I did a little experiment.
I backed up my savegame and then uninstalled NMS removing everything, including config files.

Then, I:
a) installed the 1.07 version using teh GOG-6 full installer;
b) made a copy of the whole game directory to another drive;
c) installed 1.09 patch;
d) compared all files in the copy (1.07) with the files in the patched version (1.09).

Turned out that 1.09 patch changed several files under "GAMEDATA\PCBANKS", but did not change the main executable (NMS.exe).

In fact, the only file that were updated in "Binaries" directory is "goggame-1446213994.dll" (its sole purpose is to support Windows Game Explorer). Everything else was left untouched.

Now, if I learned something playing with NMS mods and psarc is that almost nothing is hardcoded in this game.
So, it's perfectly reasonable to think that some of the bugfixes and maybe even the exploits were removed just tweaking game data.

But it's a bit harder to believe that changes like "The game is now much more robust at recovering corrupted save files", "Player Standing now updates in real time when interacting with members of the Gek, Vy’keen and Korvax races" or even "Improved detection of available PC CPU cores and optimised settings for low-end CPUs with few CPU cores" were obtained without changing the main executable or any dll other than the one I've already mentioned.

Thoughts?