Over 20 minutes to load for the first time?

[Davor]

I gave up after 2 minutes, thinking something is wrong. I Googled it and it seems it can take up to 20 minites maybe more depending on specs, for the game to load for the very first time? It also says next time you start it up it's so much faster.

Thing is, this takes away from our ability to refund on Steam correct? I am scared now. Is this normal and will not harm my computer? I am always worried when it's a long loading. So when should I stop? After 1/2? 1 hour?

I know I don't have the best specs, but man would have been nice to know what to do for the first time. I never seen a game where it needs 20 minutes to load for the first time and from what I read, people with top of the line rigs have the same issues.

Just want to know what to

[Scyris]

The first load is often very slow as it builds shaders I think for your system specs/for your graphics options, after that though it should be pretty fast. Took about 3-5 mins for me to load the first time.

TBH I have no idea what the hell they did to cause such a long initial load, never seen it before even in these types of games till NMS.

[Özgür Heiko Hansen]

My first load after NEXT took 10 minutes. Now it's like 3 minutes. Which is still quite long but bearable.

[Chasey]

First load is slowest; I promise it's WAY faster next time. I don't know why either.
My first load took about 10 minutes. Now it only takes between 30 seconds and a minute for me. i don't know if it's because of my graphics settings or what, though, sorry. :(

[Berzeger]

If you have an SSD, try to put the game on it. I did and my first load was about 30 seconds long. (With i7 7700, GTX 1080 and 32 GB RAM, if that helps anything, I have no clue what the game does while running for the first time.)

[Xilo The Odd]

that is correct, depending on your PC's hardware strength, and the storage medium you've got the game files written to (hdd, ssd, PCI-e ssd.) depends on how long it'll take to generate the first planet you'll be on, create all the shader files (yes they are created upon game start, not downloaded. this saves on bandwidth and makes the game take less time to download overall), and finally render your first enviroment and properly place you and everything in it.

im on a M.2 SSD and a first render only took about 2 mins for me. i got a decently beefy rig so that helps as well.

[Davor]

Thank you very much everyone. So I will try it again. I was scared something was wrong since I never herd of this before. Greatly appreciated.

[Astasia]

What's happening during the first load is the game is creating thousands of procedurally generated (I assume) "shader" files. It's actually not a lot of data, only about 50mb so I don't think a SSD would help that much, but it's over 2000 files that are generated one by one and it takes time.

My guess is the specific shader files being created are based on initial game seed and takes into account surrounding systems to minimize loading when traveling around in the early game. They are generated when you start a new game so you only generate the ones you need and don't have millions of files taking up space on your PC for planets you will never see.

[HK]

Originally posted by Davor:

I gave up after 2 minutes, thinking something is wrong. I Googled it and it seems it can take up to 20 minites maybe more depending on specs, for the game to load for the very first time? It also says next time you start it up it's so much faster.

Thing is, this takes away from our ability to refund on Steam correct? I am scared now. Is this normal and will not harm my computer? I am always worried when it's a long loading. So when should I stop? After 1/2? 1 hour?

I know I don't have the best specs, but man would have been nice to know what to do for the first time. I never seen a game where it needs 20 minutes to load for the first time and from what I read, people with top of the line rigs have the same issues.

Just want to know what to

specs?

[Davor]

It took about 10 or so minutes and then a white screen with an E came on. I waited and then thought "do I hit E?" I did nothing happened. Then my finger slipped and I held E for 2 seconds then noticed something. Went to fast. Then I held E and finally I am playing now.

My specs HK iis an MSI 2.5 ghz 16 gigs ram with a nVidia 960 GTX M video card. It's on the SSD. I tried all max settings, seems a bit slow. Will now have to go to lesser settings and see if it speeds up a bit. Maybe running is just slow in the begining of the game. Will find out soon.

I died within 1 minute LOL.

[Lil Puppy]

In total I have 2315 shader files (a few hundred get created after you get into the game...)
and the total size is almost 3gb (uncompressed, they compress down to 5mb with 7zip).

But yeah, first load is a chore.