about 2 months ago - Hello Games - Direct link
Hello Everyone,

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who has already spent time playing No Man's Sky and letting us know about any issues you've experienced.

Steam users are able to opt-in to the Experimental Branch, where we have pushed a patch to address some problems. 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 16/08
  • Fixed an experimental only issue which caused various particle effects to be missing on Mac.

Experimental Branch 15/08
  • Fixed an experimental only issue that allowed ships to fly beneath a planet's surface.
  • Fixed an issue that could prevent installation of the Liquidator Minotaur limbs after completing the Liquidators expedition on an existing save.

Experimental Branch 13/08
  • Ported new volumetric clouds and high definition water to Mac.

Experimental Branch 08/08
  • Implemented custom colour choice for Liquidator Minotaurs.
  • Improved freighter warping.
  • Fixed an issue that prevented Longshore S-Wing and Longshore C-Wing ship parts from being extracted when dismantling Haulers.

Experimental Branch 07/08
  • Improved collision on floating islands.
  • Improved discovery retention when at large numbers of discoveries.
  • Fixed an issue with the camera when the game is paused.
  • Clarified messaging when ending an expedition.
  • Fixed an issue with docking at spherical space stations.
  • Fixed a bug where swimming sounds would not stop.
  • Improved swimming audio.
  • Fixed a bug with teleporting to a freighter.
  • Added support for up to 8 mouse buttons.

  • Fixed an issue with water whilst editing terrain.
  • Fixed an issue with floating island lods.
  • Fixed an issue with staff multitools lagging by a frame.
  • Fixed an issue where freighter squadron pilot NPCs names would not appear.
  • Implemented water optimisations.
  • Fixed a texturing issue in reflections.
  • Fixed an issue which caused reflections to appear darker than they should.
  • Fixed an issue with jetpack trails being visible in first person.
  • Improved quality of volumetrics on water planets.

  • Optimised culling to improve rendering performance.
  • Implemented optimisations to reflections.

  • Fixed a navigation crash.
  • Fixed an interface crash.
  • Fixed a crash in the physics manager.
  • Fixed a rare lodding crash.
  • Fixed a crash related to creatures.


Experimental Branch 02/08
  • Improved the visuals of clouds during the transition to a storm.
  • Implemented a number of optimisations for cloud rendering.
  • Fixed an issue that caused the wrong control glyph to be suggested when reporting bases.
  • Reduced the VRAM requirements when running with VR.
  • Fixed a number of crashes.

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 on PC: %appdata%\HelloGames\NMS\ and here on mac: ~/Library/Application Support/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.