Welcome

Overview

Welcome to No Man's Sky Retro, a community and wiki project centered on supporting, analyzing and celebrating the original releases No Man's Sky.

Here you will find information on how to get started playing older versions of No Man's Sky, in addition an archive of mods, tools, compatibility fixes, and other resources.

Additionally, we are continuing to grow and share a technical breakdown of the game to support and grow the modding community.

We also provide a platform for the community to share their own mods, tools, and projects. On our discord channel we discuss various topics related to the game, share our experiences, and ask for help or advice.

Here, we revisit and appreciate the magic of early No Man's Sky.

How to Play

PC

If you own No Man's Sky on Steam, you can use our No Man's Sky Legacy Installer tool with your Steam Account to download old versions of No Man's Sky. You can download this on the project's releases page.

Previous versions of No Man's Sky can also be downloaded from Steam manually using the DepotDownloader tool and your Steam Account. Read How to Install Old Versions from Steam. If you have an old offline installer from GOG.com, these can be installed as well.

You can learn more about the differences between each version in the Legacy Versions Guide.

If you have multiple different versions of No Man's Sky installed, check out the Change Save Game Folder page to see how to keep all of your No Man's Sky savegames in separate folders.

Some Graphics Cards and Drivers may have problems working with older versions of No Man's Sky, check out the Compatibility Fixes page for information on how to resolve any issues.

Playstation 4

Version 1.00 can be accessed by uninstalling the game from the harddrive and reinstalling with the internet disconnected. It's worth noting that only the Playstation 4 received version 1.00, where as the first PC release was 1.03.

Updates can also be installed manually and more detail will be added on this soon.

Current Version

Don't want to downgrade but miss the old aesthetic? The Back to Foundations mod allows players of the current version to restore planets closer to their appearance in the Foundation Update and is compatible with the latest updates to No Man's Sky.

While we focus on older versions we welcome discussion, modification and analysis of current versions of No Man's Sky, and are aiming to grow our collection of current version mods.

A Growing Interest

There has been a growing interest in revisiting the "original vision" of No Man's Sky

• This article from TheGamer talks about how No Man's Sky today is very different to it's initial release.
• In two Youtube videos here and here, Unholy_Mr_Brown talks about why he enjoys playing No Man's Sky Foundation.
• A reddit post by Sharks11 comments on how the pushback from gamers changed the direction of No Man's Sky.
• A reddit post by laikaspark about how planets looked in older versions with many comments of praise for the old No Man's Sky era.

Community & Friends

• We have a growing community of fans who love the older versions of No Man's Sky, please join us at the No Man's Sky Retro discord channel.

• NMS_Foundations Subreddit.
• Old_Mans_Sky Subreddit.
• NoMansSkyTheGame Subreddit (For all No Man's Sky discussion).

• Unholy_Mr_Brown's Youtube Channel.
• Gmr_Leon's Youtube Channel.
• MZK's Youtube Channel (covers No Man's Sky, old and new).

• NMSSpot is a blog ran by Blake Patterson that covers his many adventures in No Man's Sky, and was the first place to have a guide on running old versions of No Man's Sky.