No Man's Sky Patches Coming This Week and Next

No Man's Sky has experienced some problems on PC, and it's not without issue on the PS4, either. Frame rate drops and crashes are the most prevalent. Thankfully, it sounds like players on both platforms can expect a couple patches in the next two weeks, according to a support email that was sent to a Reddit user.

Reddit user Sam123bir posted the email to the No Man's Sky subreddit, revealing that the space exploration game is set for two separate patches in the near future. The email reads, "A patch for both PC and PS4 will be released this week. These will fix the most urgent and critical issues for all our players. Then next week another patch for PS4 and PC will be released which will help to improve the experience further for players." The email then offers its support site for "a list of the most common issues and workarounds."

You can download an experimental build of the first patch right now on Steam. All you need to do to download it yourself is right-click No Man's Sky in your Steam library, go to "Properties," make your way to the "Betas" tab, and enter the code "3xperimental." You'll then be able to select the beta patch from a drop-down menu. It improves peformance, saves corrupt data, and fixes various other issues. You can see a full list of the fixes below.

Improved AMD Phenom Support:

• Thousands of lines of assembly have been rewritten to support AMD CPUs. The game code no longer relies on anything above SSE 2; Havok Physics has also now created new libs. Game is now confirmed working on Phenom CPUs.

Mouse Smoothing:

• Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in "Mouse Smoothing." It now defaults to off. If you feel the framerate is "slow" or "lumpy," please make sure that this is turned off (it helps players with sub-30 frames per second).

Improved Performance:

• On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved. On CPUs with 8 threads, performance has also been significantly improved.

Radeon 6xxx:

• Added support for this GPU, which doesn't support OpenGL 4.5 fully.

Player Saves:

• Help to recover some player saves which had been lost or corrupt.

Alt-Tab has improved:

• Some systems/configs were crashing or not pausing correctly on Alt Tab. This should now be resolved.

Shader Caching:

• Framerate was initially stuttering due to shaders not being correctly cached by the GPU on some systems. We have replaced the GPU caching system. You may notice some stutter during the Galactic Map intro to the game (the very first time you run), but it should be smoother from then on (this will be fixed in future). This is particularly true on ATI cards.

Max FPS Cap:

• On some CPU/GPU configurations, setting Max FPS to 60 or 30 was not giving 60 or 30 FPS (causing stuttering). This has been improved.

Intel GPUs:

• The game will now let you know if you are trying to run with an unsupported GPU. This will hopefully flag for some users that their high-end GPU has not been selected. We are working on Intel GPU support.

G-sync:

• G-sync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some users.

No Man's Sky launched last week and received a score of 7 in GameSpot's review. Critic Peter Brown said, "[If] you consider everything it has to offer and listen to what Atlas has to say, No Man's Sky becomes more than a collection of slightly different worlds in a seemingly never-ending galaxy--it becomes an examination of the meaning of life in a way that's more valuable than all the gold or starships in its virtual galaxy."