The Difference Mods Can Make in No Man’s Sky

Aug. 16, 2016 SXN31 1086 Views 0 Comments 1st person, action, adventure, chromatic aberration, combat, fps, game, gaming, graphics, guide, mods, no man's sky, open world, pc, Sci-Fi, screenshots, shaders, single player, space, space combat, steam, texture, tip 3 min read

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The Good Mods

In recent news, everyone has been talking about the mod scene for No Man’s Sky. Intrigued by images posted by Reddit users I went to check it out myself. There are 4 main mods that I found were really nice to have, though your preferences may vary. They are as follows:

The graphics mods are definitely user preference, but I appreciated seeing more of the true colors of the landscapes so far, and removing the vignetting, chromatic aberration, and scan lines gives cleaner images. The NoHUD lets you hide the HUD for picture taking purposes and requires an extender, or DLL injector. Fast actions is also really nice as it removes the need to hold down a key in order to select an option in the menus.

Comparisons

Chromatic Mod enabled. No Texture Mod, Default filter in place. — Chromatic Mod enabled. No Texture Mod. No Instagram Filter Mod

Chromatic Mod enabled. Instagram Filter Remover Mod enabled. — Chromatic Mod enabled. No Texture Mod
Instagram Filter Remover Mod enabled.

All Mods on Cockpit — Chromatic Mod enabled. 2.0x Texture Mod enabled. Instagram Filter Remover Mod enabled.

Chromatic Mod enabled. No Texture Mod No Instagram Filter Mod — Chromatic Mod enabled. No Texture Mod
No Instagram Filter Mod

Chromatic Mod enabled. No Texture Mod Instagram Filter Remover Mod enabled. — Chromatic Mod enabled. 2.0x Texture Mod enabled.
Instagram Filter Remover Mod enabled.

The Instagram filter adds saturation and a hue to the image while the 2.0x Texture Mod makes the images pop out a whole lot more sharper.

Installation

Installation of these mods is really straight forward. Simply download the zip and for the PAK files extract to K:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\No Man’s Sky\GAMEDATA\PCBANKS folder. The Chromatic Aberration remover requires you to delete your Shader Cache: K:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\No Man’s Sky\GAMEDATA\SHADERCACHE (the entire folder)

To do so go to K:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\No Man’s Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS and Right-click on TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS.MXML and click properties. Check Mark read-only and click okay.

(Where “K:\SteamLibrary” is the drive letter and file path to your steam installation if using steam.)

The F5 noHUD requires the installation of NMS Extender which has simple instructions listed on the page. You will need to launch the game through the launcher from then on in order to use this mod.

Note: Some of my settings got reverted after using the NoHUD mod so I just needed to set them back again and restart the game. Make sure to set your config file to READ ONLY to prevent the mod from reverting your settings after you’ve set them properly ingame. If you need to make changes again you need to disable read-only status.

Performance

There will be stutters as the shaders load for the chromatic mod, but over time gameplay goes smooth as all the shaders get cached and I have yet to see performance decrease on my rig with all those mods installed. I will play a bit more to double check. Below are my specs.

CPU: i5-3550p 3.1Ghz
RAM: 32GB
OS: Windows 10
Graphics Card: NVIDIA 970 GTX latest NVIDIA Drivers
Drive: SanDisk SSD

Your mileage may vary of course, but I have yet to encounter any of the issues other players have thus reported.