Experimental Branch 02/08

[Hello Games]

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.

[gNg]

Cool! Thank you

[YuMo]

Thanks for your update!

[Tolwyn]

Originally posted by UNBREAKABLE:

Are the floating islands that were front and center of the update's marketing going to remain without any collision? Kind of disappointing to find one of those planets with floating islands and then not be able to interact with most of them.

Be on the lookout of floating islands with flora on them. THOSE you can land on.

[Durghan]

There's still a brief hitch, or pause when transitioning from space to atmosphere. I know there was a mod years ago that fixed that issue but are we ever going to get an actual proper fox for it?

[UNBREAKABLE]

Originally posted by Tolwyn:

Originally posted by UNBREAKABLE:

Are the floating islands that were front and center of the update's marketing going to remain without any collision? Kind of disappointing to find one of those planets with floating islands and then not be able to interact with most of them.

Be on the lookout of floating islands with flora on them. THOSE you can land on.

Yeah, that's like the 1 specific model with the waterfall and vines attached. All the other ones have no collision which is sad considering they suggested that we jetpack between them.

[wkitty42]

Originally posted by Durghan:

There's still a brief hitch, or pause when transitioning from space to atmosphere. I know there was a mod years ago that fixed that issue but are we ever going to get an actual proper fox for it?

that mod ""fixed"" that problem by extracting the textures from the archive they reside in... the ""hitch"" so many complain about is NMS opening the new texture archive so it can access the contents inside... so yes, it can be ""fixed"" but at the cost of more drive space consumption...

[Prescient Stones]

Originally posted by Durghan:

There's still a brief hitch, or pause when transitioning from space to atmosphere. I know there was a mod years ago that fixed that issue but are we ever going to get an actual proper fox for it?

https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/3126

Worth a look to read the well explained description of nut-n-bolts.

[DarkH2O]

Thankyou, the VR performance seems about what it was before the 5.0 update again. I wish it could be better though.

[Sky]

X class neutron cannon upgrades are bugged and the best version of them is worse than any S class variant.

A shame as it seems you award a few of these as an expeidtion milestone reward (phase 5 Timberwolf).

[pRaX]

Claimed the first Minotaur Liquidator part on Expedition save today. Returned to Main Save and can't install it. Quicksilver shop claims I already own it.

[Kalis7777]

Chitin armor is broken in vr. Only shows the fingers when flying in your ship. Autophage body is also broken in vr. If you select the autophage race and have your body showing in vr tons of parts are missing. Ringed planets also seem to cause a halo around objects and make them appear low quality.

[UncreativelyNamed]

Originally posted by Sky:

X class neutron cannon upgrades are bugged and the best version of them is worse than any S class variant.

A shame as it seems you award a few of these as an expeidtion milestone reward (phase 5 Timberwolf).

I don't think that's a bug. X-class upgrades always have been a gamble, for at least as long as I've been playing, and I think they're meant to be. Some of them are super-good, better than the best possible S-class ones, but I've also had some that were worse than some C-class upgrades I had at the same time. Similarly, I've also had some B-class upgrades that are better than A-class ones I've had, and some A-class that were better than some S-class, etc. Each upgrade is procedurally-generated, as I understand it, and the classes seem to have a range of possible buff values, some of which overlap, and the X-class ones seem to have the widest range of possible values. For me, I always find them in buried caches for free, so they're not a gamble at all, but if you choose to buy them, you're rolling the dice. They're "contraband," after all. Quality is not guaranteed.

Now, I don't know about expedition rewards because I don't do expeditions. Were I a dev, I wouldn't put X-class upgrades up as a reward for anything, precisely because they are so variable. But a bug? I don't think so.

[Planetpink]

Originally posted by Kalis7777:

Chitin armor is broken in vr. Only shows the fingers when flying in your ship. Autophage body is also broken in vr. If you select the autophage body and have your body showing in vr tons of parts are missing. Ringed planets also seem to cause a halo around objects and make them appear low quality.

yes, i also noticed the halo effect, but i am not sure of this is by design.

There are quite some glitches in the new updates since it launched, mostly related to weather and water. Sometimes weather and water effects disappear while looking through doors or while in a building walking back and forth. While flying in a sentinel ship some weather effects are not rendered in every window.

I am working on some new bug/glitches videos, which will be published here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWI_K4SkY9k&list=PLxrUW3hfVgtFjuMeuozCStkGRsG0zh1ef

However, the new experimental version improves VRAM usage, which is a pretty big deal in GPUs with only 8GB of VRAM. This was a pretty big issue if you want to play in a decent quality.

[Prescient Stones]

Originally posted by Sky:

X class neutron cannon upgrades are bugged and the best version of them is worse than any S class variant.

A shame as it seems you award a few of these as an expeidtion milestone reward (phase 5 Timberwolf).

I'm gonna take my chance and cross post this answer to RNG on "C,B,A,S,X" mods. I am mindful that HG's rewards can actually PIN the specific #ID for their super duper X Class Nuetron Cannon. But the rest are by RNG by sequence.

_________________________

Originally posted by GenSec39:

Originally posted by catch22atplay:

It's not that uncommon to get great mods. I have 3 that are pretty good at 10.9k, 10.5k, 9.8k, 49%, and 10.4k, 10.2k, 10.0k, 48% and 10.6k, 9.9k, 9.6k, 48% Just random crap i pick up. All from my main save. Not sure what Gensac is talking about. I'd not heard of the 3, 11 and 27 thing or if i did i forgot. But i've probably opened 30+ scanner mods. I've seen better ones than i have. 12k if memory serves. No save editor. Here's my best one.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3300302281

OP started expedition from the new save and got X mod with great stats right away so, he was thinking that if he started expedition from current save - he would also get it there right away. But this is not so.

I didn't say that it is impossible to get cool X mods on main save - chances are the same everywhere. I was explainig how mechanics work. It is not tied to specific mod that you found somewhere at some time - only the order you install the mods matters. Order. Only order. Not place you found it. Not price you paid. Only order.

3,11,27 - that was just a random example. Let's say, you have 5 stacks of X shields. 50 mods. You randomly install any 20. Then you check their stats. You may notice (FOR EXAMPLE) that modules 2, 9, 19 have great stats. Now you can reload your game and unpack any other 20 mods from these 5 stacks - the very same (in your case) 2, 9, 19 mods will have the same stats.

Even if you choose absolutely another X modules (let's say life support) and unpack 20 again - you will notice that those 2, 9, 19 have great stats. And due to that fact that on diff saves you already unlocked (or not) diff quantity of mods (any mods, even C, B, etc) - your jackpot order for them will be different. Now you see?

[kngmob]

They seems to finally fixed the issue with poor fps when looking at the sky after a while.