If you're experiencing issues that cause your game to crash shortly after booting, or are having severe graphical/visual issues, please make sure you try the following.
**Note that playing Mods with NMS can cause a number if issues with the game depending on the mods, this is especially the case shortly after an update, so before you try anything, make sure all mods are disabled.
1) Ensure that your Graphics Card drivers are completely up to date. Windows will often incorrectly report these as up to date so it's best to check the following links:
- For Nvidia Cards please visit https://www.nvidia.co.uk/Download/Scan.aspx?lang=en-uk. We recommend you at least have driver version 419 installed but the latest is ideal.
- For AMD Cards please visit https://www.amd.com/en/support. We recommend you at least have driver version 18.2 but the latest driver would be best.
- Please note that having both AMD and Nvidia drivers installed on your machine can cause conflicts in some cases so if you used to own a different card, please make sure all older drivers are removed.
2) Try disabling in-game overlays in various 3rd party apps, good examples of this are:
- Discord Overlay
- Nvidia Experience Overlay
3) Try disabling 3rd party software you may have running in the background that are not essential to running the game. In some cases external software has been known to cause issues with the game, some examples of this are:
- MSI Afterburner
- EVGA PrecisionX
4) Delete all your shadercache files, these files can be found in the following directory.
"\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man's Sky\GAMEDATA\SHADERCACHE"
Note that after doing this, the next time you load the game, it may take slightly longer to load in, but this only happens once.
5) Delete your settings files called "TKGAMESETTINGS" and "TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS" located in the following directory:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man's Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS"
6) Check the file integrity of your game install in Steam. This means that any corrupt or missing files will be repopulated. You can do this easily with the following instructions:
- Right click No Man's Sky in your Steam Library
- Click "Properties"
- Click on the Local Files" tab
- Click the button "Verify Integrity of Game Files..."
This will take a moment whilst Steam scans your game install, and replace any missing or invalid files.
If none of the above steps resolves the issue, please consider opening a ticket with our help desk so we can look into this further.