Hack the galaxy: The nascent No Man’s Sky PC modding scene

Hack the galaxy: The nascent No Man’s Sky PC modding scene

Initial mod offerings focus on cosmetic and interface tweaks.

Kyle Orland – Aug 16, 2016 5:44 pm | 70

Back in 2014, Hello Games’ Sean Murray acknowledged in a Game Informer interview that official modding tools were practically a must for No Man’s Sky. “I almost feel like we need to give them the [modding] tools; otherwise then they’re just going to start making them, tearing apart your game,” Murray said at the time. “That’s what I have more of a fear of.”

Fast forward to today, and some PC No Man’s Sky players (who can manage to get the game running) are indeed just tearing apart the game to make their own mods. Despite the current lack of official mod tools, players are extracting game files and tinkering with them to create unsupported mods just days after the game’s PC release.

This short video outlines the basic process used to create these unofficial mods. Interestingly enough, the PC version of the game seems to be built on top of a host of files in the PlayStation Archive format, though they’ve been renamed to the more generic PAK extension for Windows. Regardless, these files can be uncompressed using a PSARC decompiler tool, and then edited and recompiled to get a modified version of the game up and running.

Already, the folks at VGMods have set up NoMansSkyMods.com as a clearinghouse for the nascent community of mod-makers (though some seem content just digging through the decompiled files for hidden secrets and behind-the-scenes trivia). Many of the very earliest mods on offer are cosmetic tweaks, playing with visual effects like chromatic aberration or the “Instagram filter” that adds a hazy glow over everything in the game.

Other mods let you alter the interface: toggling the HUD, speeding up the “hold timer” for every button press, and even silencing those annoyingly incessant exosuit health warnings. There’s also the obligatory Trainer mod if you just want to go nuts and mess with the universe without limits.

So far, all of the mods seem focused on tinkering with your local copy of the game and don’t seem able to make changes to the persistent parts of the galaxy managed by the game’s central servers. That means there isn’t yet a mod to force edits to the online Atlas that keeps track of plant and creature names or a mod that can alter the topography of a planet for the next person who might visit.

(Oddly enough, reports seem to differ on just how many of these persistent online changes are possible in the game in the first place. In this October 2015 GameZone interview, Murray and fellow developer Raffi Khatchadourian suggested that only “really significant” changes to the universe—such as an attack on a space station—would be uploaded to the server for others to potentially see.)

At this point, it’s unclear if modders will ever be able to unlock that kind of server-side, universe-altering hacking, though if it’s at all possible you can be sure they’ll at least try. In any case, that’s a theoretical state of affairs that Murray was already worried about back in that 2014 Game Informer interview:

I think if they get in there and they just start disassembling it, they will end up creating parallel universes; like genuinely that’s what would happen. They would change the numbers and then someone else would be playing in a different universe, but still posting to our servers.

We will probably give them some tools to allow them to do some [modding] stuff. But we don’t want people creating new planets within an existing game. I don’t think we can stop them doing that if there’s a clever enough programmer, which there always is, there are going to be weird things with the game unofficially. But officially I think we probably want to give people some modding ability just so they leave our game alone. Just give them enough creative outlet to keep them busy rather than them thinking of all of the destructive things that they could do.

The team at Hello Games had better hurry up with those official modding tools, because as of now, the first step in Murray’s nightmare modding scenario is already coming to pass. Really, though, we’re just hoping someone can eventually mod in that photo mode the game so desperately needs.