A player modder is building the No Man’s Sky you always wanted

Way back in 2016, No Man’s Sky was all anyone talked about thanks to misleading hype positioning the game in the stratosphere. In fact, the multiplayer features that were teased (and apparently planned in spite of claims to the contrary) didn’t actually launch with the game, contributing to a regulatory investigation (which went nowhere). It was particularly disappointing to the MMO community, which didn’t believe NMS was itself an MMO but had been looking forward to online and social features, to the point that we were all deeply disappointed when it didn’t happen.

Some of that disappointment vanished last summer, when Hello Games emerged from its self-imposed PR silence with a new patch introducing “joint exploration,” which wasn’t exactly co-op multiplayer; instead, the devs called it “an important first step into the world of synchronous co-op in No Man’s Sky” – and we called it the first step into turning the game into what was originally advertised.

Players are now taking even more next steps. As Kotaku first reported, a player modder – RaYRoD – undertook a huge overhaul mod to basically reintroduce a lot of the planned features that people noted weren’t actually in the launched game.

The mod, dubbed RaYRoD’s Overhaul, is the result of “over 3,800 hours of work in-between studying the game’s filesystem, executable memory, creating content, testing content, enhancing the game’s experience in numerous ways, and using E3 trailers as concept art to re-create them after doing in-depth research of the game’s filesystem and also data mining.”

The mod features “a complete visual overhaul,” “re-enabled and re-created pre-release features,” “over 1,000 different handcrafted procedural biomes” – including lost content and specifically E3 demo content – plus ecology, terrain, and weather overhauls, all in addition to a massive graphical expansion.

“My goal and inspiration has been a cross between E3-style nostalgia with a modern vibe but linked to the initial game’s aesthetic with a few rare exceptions,” RaYRoD writes. “To not stray away from the original game’s intended lore and style and to not break the No Man’s Sky vibe, but to enhance the game in nearly every way…. while keeping it close to vanilla as possible.”

That oughta breathe some new life back into the title, eh?