No Man's Sky dev pulls out all the stops to fix a player's buggy save with 611 hours of playtime at risk: 'I promise to hawk that bug and fix it'
Hello Games simply can't stop fixing No Man's Sky.
What's the biggest save disaster you've ever had? I still wake up in a cold sweat remembering the cold April day in 2009 when I quicksaved in the final level of Max Payne a nanosecond before a bullet took my head clean off. Was that my only save? Yes. Was I an idiot? Yes. Did I learn anything from it? Absolutely not.
But I only lost about eight hours of progress. That's a pittance compared to the 611 hours—or 25 days—that was recently at risk for one No Man's Sky player who recently submitted a broken save to Hello Games in search of a fix (via GamesRadar).
Their problem wasn't a mistimed quicksave, though. As No Man's Sky engine programmer Martin Griffiths details over on X: "Today I received a 611 hour save that reproduced a flickering bug that has been reported half a dozen times on my posts here." Naturally, said Griffiths, "when a player has put that much into our game it deserves the engineering fix… and this then trickles down to all our future long term players," who promised to "hawk that bug and fix it". You can see a video of the glitch in action below.
Here s a video of the 600+ hour save that showed the horrible flickering. I’ve debugged the issue and have submitted a fix. pic.twitter.com/3b6ut3c9wxOctober 26, 2024
The good news is that Griffiths managed to save the player's, uh, save. In a further update, he posts a video of the game running flicker-free in the same area on the same save. Per Griffiths, the problem was a "general engine bug/limit being reached," which means that his fix will "probably help other large bases that had this issue on Xbox."
So good news for whoever it was that almost had to start from scratch after nearly a month of playtime, and also for anyone who might have run into the problem in future. Oh, and if you're thinking '611 hours is rookie numbers,' you're not exactly wrong. According to Griffiths, the record length for a busted save received by the tech support team is 4,000 hours. No word on if they managed to repair that one. Gulp.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.
Terraria dev won't have staff crunch to get its next big update out before the end of the year: 'Apologies for this one taking so long for sure, but it will be well worth it'
Tencent's big new survival game looks like Palworld wrapped in Horizon Zero Dawn, but it does have an interesting premise: 'Why can't human beings kill God?'