No Man’s Sky patch fixes tons of bugs, helps recover corrupted saves

The latest patch for No Man’s Sky includes a host of fixes for bugs both innocuous and severe, developer Hello Games announced today.

Hello Games released the update, which brings No Man’s Sky to version 1.09, earlier this week for both the PlayStation 4 and Windows PC versions of the game. If you check the update history on PS4, all it says is "bug fixes," but the studio posted full patch notes online.

At the top of the change log is a crucial fix: "The game is now much more robust at recovering corrupted save files," says Hello Games. Another big one is an issue affecting players who never received the Antimatter blueprint — they were left stranded in their second solar system, unable to use their hyperdrive. As of update 1.09, it’s "no longer possible" for that to happen, according to the patch notes.

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Patch 1.09 also addresses a few crashes, and makes some elements of No Man’s Sky tougher. For instance, it isn’t possible to take out a Gek factory door with a single grenade anymore, and your wanted level is now guaranteed to rise when you destroy a door — regardless of your multi-tool’s power. Other pieces of the patch make it far less possible for you to lose resources, whether by preventing you from opening crates if your inventory is full, or by fixing an issue in transferring items between your exosuit and starship.

The patch is important and necessary, but it’s also unfortunate: More than six weeks after the release of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games is still spending its time fixing bugs instead of adding content to the game, as the studio said it planned to do. Players are still waiting for promised features such as the ability to build bases and own giant freighters, and they haven’t heard updates on timing for those additions.

In the meantime, it seems that players have made up their minds about No Man’s Sky. If you head to the game’s Steam page, you’ll see red text at the top signifying that the user reviews are "mostly negative" — 64.8 percent of the nearly 70,000 reviews that players have posted are unhappy with the game. Sony and Valve have had to specify that they are not offering exceptions to the PlayStation Store and Steam refund policies, respectively, for No Man’s Sky.

Correction: Players were stranded in the second solar system, not galaxy. We’ve also clarified the publishing timing for the patch notes.