Here’s how to avoid it
No Man’s Skyis finally getting widespread acclaim. Almost two years after launching, Hello Games has eventually shapedNo Man’s Skyinto the game that most everyone originally wanted. It has been quite the redemption story.
It’s not all smooth sailing, though. TheNo Man’s Sky: Nextupdate has a nasty bug that’s erasing save files. When affected players load the game, the correct number of hours played will display but they’ll just be dumped on a new planet with an “Initializing” screen. All progress will be wiped and it looks as if a new game is starting.
It stems from a feature that’s new toNo Man’s Sky. Previously, repairing broken technology would require all materials to be used at once. Now, you can use what you have, go out to get more, and then come back to finish the job. However, people who make use of this new function are the ones who are getting hit with the erased saves.
Hello Games was quick to identify the problem and come up with a solution. It’s in the process of deploying ahotfix on PC. The patch is live on the game’s experimental branch on Steam right now; once it’s proven to be stable, it’ll be implemented on all active servers. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One support is on the way but it’ll take a little while since those patches need to pass each platform’s certification process.
In the meantime, here’s what you should do if you find yourself victim to this bug:Do not save your game. Even though your progress appears to be gone, all the data is still retained in your save file. The only way that will get erased is if you overwrite it by saving. Additionally, it’s not a terrible idea to make a copy of your save file on an external USB. You can’t depend on cloud saves because they’ll update automatically. It takes a long time and a lot of dedication to make notable progress throughNo Man’s Sky. This is definitely a “better safe than sorry” type of situation.
Here are thefull patch notesNo Man’s SkyPatch 1.51:
Latest changes on Experimental (July 26):
This is an addition to the fixes already deployed to the Experimental branch on July 25:
