Playing No Man’s Sky with mods is great. Installation is fast & easy. I’m going to show you exactly what you need to do, as well as what to do after every update in order to keep the mods working.
Sometimes certain mods might become outdated, and that’s fine. Things change. When that happens, you will generally want to visit the mod’s page and notify the author, or see if someone else already has.
I’m playing on PC through STEAM, so if you’re on another platform, just locate the root folder of the game.
Browse & Download Mods
The website that I use is Nexus Mods (No Man’s Sky) and sometimes I might check No Man’s Sky Mods (not sure if this one still works).
The first one requires a free account, and you can also find mods for many other games.
When downloading mods, always read the description and posts area to check for any issues, incompatibilities with other mods (they all edit certain files) etc.
If all looks good and the mod is up to date, go ahead and download it. Then extract with something like 7zip.
NMS Folders & Mod Files Location
Now that you have everything that you want, go to the root folder of the game and then go into GAMEDATA > PCBANKS.
Here you will see a text file that’s called DISABLEMODS.TXT
Open it and read it if you want. Basically, it asks you not to delete any files and to create a new folder called MODS where you will place all of your downloaded files into. Once you do that, you need to either rename or delete that text file or the mods won’t load.
If everything is fine, next time you start NMS, the game will notify you that you have mods enabled.
Important to Remember
After every update, no matter how small or big, the game will re-add this text file and you need to delete it again. Many people overlook this and think that mods don’t work anymore. And they are right, they don’t. But they would!
Now if after all that a certain mod is misbehaving or prevents the game from starting, then it’s likely outdated and you need to determine which one it is.
This can be painful to test, so just take all those files out of there and start putting them in one by one to test (but first check the mod’s pages because people will often report which ones need updating).
My Recommended Mods
Here are some mods (at the time of writing this guide) that I use and recommend:
- Clean Space Origins (everything except ‘dark space‘ option).
- Fleet Time Reduce (speeds up your fleet’s mission times).
- BEYOND Change Intro Logo (simply re-textures starting menus).
- No Mans Drunk (removes various shaking effects from cameras, and I use the centered 3rd person camera option as well).
- HD Clouds 1.2 (self-explanatory, makes the clouds look much better).
- Daz’s Ship HUD (changes the ship’s cockpit HUD color to blue).
There are many other great mods out there.
I’m kind of conservative with the ones that I use, and I definitely recommend you do not go too crazy with them or troubleshooting later on might be a bit of a problem.