about 5 years ago - Hello Games - Direct link
Hello everyone,

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who has already spent time playing BEYOND and letting us know about any issues you’ve experienced. It’s overwhelming to watch thousands of players begin or continue their journey across the universe.

Steam users are able to opt-in to the Experimental Branch, where we have pushed a rapid patch to fix a number of crashes and other problems seen since release. We’ll be rolling out these fixes to other platforms as soon as possible.

To play in Experimental, right-click on No Man’s Sky from the Steam library page and select “Properties”. Among the available tabs will be the “BETAS” tab. Enter “3xperimental” in the textbox and press “CHECK CODE”, then select it from the dropdown menu.

The patch notes are as follows:

Experimental Branch 02/09
  • Fixed an issue with Vive touch pad sensitivity and Left Trigger select.
  • A number of performance improvements for OpenVR.

Experimental Branch 30/08
  • Fixed a number of issues where technology was not being correctly detected in exosuits and starships after being moved around or between inventories. This includes being unable to recharge hazard protection.
  • Fixed an issue that was causing starships to vanish when landing on space stations in systems with a high number of ambient freighters.
  • Introduced a number of CPU and rendering optimisations for OpenVR.
  • Introduced better error messages when the game fails to start because of Vulkan compatibility issues.
  • Allowed users to choose preferred GPU on startup in cases where their discrete GPU driver requires an update but their integrated GPU driver does not.

As always, thank you to all players who use Experimental and take the time to report any issues you encounter.

Please note there is the possibility that experimental builds may introduce new issues that haven't been caught in test. We'd like to recommend that all players back up their save files, by making a local copy of the st_[userid] folder found here: %appdata%\HelloGames\NMS\

Note that we don't anticipate any issues here. However, performing your own backups could mean the difference between resuming play immediately, or waiting for the next patch.

If you decide to opt out of experimental and return to the main branch, we strongly recommend resuming from a backed-up save from the main branch, rather than taking an experimental branch save back to main, which may cause unexpected behaviour.

Feedback and reports of new bugs/issues being found on Experimental are welcome, so please reply to this thread or submit a ticket to https://hellogames.zendesk.com/ with the phrase "Steam Experimental" in the ticket title. If you are running any mods for the game, please list them along with your bug report.