No Man’s Sky receives hotfix over massive save data corruption bug

No Man’s Sky players on PC just received an experimental branch for a hotfix after players reported losing their save data during freighter expeditions.

No Man’s Sky Next is out, and the game’s multiplayer patch has seemingly rejuvenated the two-year-old exploratory game.

But it’s not been all plain sailing. Hello Games had to rush out an experimental branch for the game’s PC version after multiple players reported having their save data corrupted by a freight expedition bug.

The bug dominated No Man’s Sky’s subreddit r/NoMansSkyTheGame late Sunday night after Redditor Kanosei shared a lengthy overview about the bug. His post received over 1,900 upvotes and several confirmations from other players.

According to that post, after players sent frigates out onto an expedition, the game would “start to replicate a line of code within your save file.” That code would continue repeating itself until the player’s save file hit 8mb, after which the code would save over additional data necessary to reload a game. That would essentially corrupt save files, but players wouldn’t be aware of the issue until exiting out of No Man’s Sky.

“TL:DR; if you haven’t done any expeditions yet, then don’t,” Kanosei wrote. “Don’t even talk to the expedition dude just in case. If you HAVE done expeditions, suck it up and read the post to help protect yourself.”

In an explanation pinned to No Man’s Sky’s General Discussion board on Steam, Hello Games revealed the save data bug arose after “a certain pattern of loading and reloading within a limited timeframe” made save files unloadable. Hello Games announced that the issue happened “under very specific circumstances” linked to freighter expedition, which means it probably did not affect all players who used the feature.

While the hotfix does not restore any corrupted save data, it does prevent the issue from happening again. Hello Games reports that a fix “will follow” for recovering saves. Hello Games founder Sean Murray tweeted that the hotfix is only available on PC right now, but will be coming as part of patches for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Hello Games’ hotfix is only available on an experimental branch through Steam. To download the patch, head over to the Steam Library tab, right-click on No Man’s Sky, select Properties, and add the code “3xperimental” to the beta opt-in section under the “BETAS” page for the game.