No Man's Sky Beyond has launched, but it's also been crashing

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Players reporting crashes to desktop, a few broken features, and issues with VR.

No Man's Sky
(Image credit: Hello Games)

Update: A patch for some of the issues below are in the works for PC.

No Man's Sky Beyond launched today, bringing with it VR support, 32-player multiplayer on PC, and lots of other new features I've gotten tired of summarizing at the beginning of these articles. Unfortunately, Beyond also brought a few bugs and glitches with it.

It's hardly a surprise that not everything is working immaculately with an update this big, but some of the issues are pretty serious. Players have especially been reporting a lot of crashes, most notably while entering The Nexus, the brand new player hub where astronauts can hang out, socialize, and crew up for multiplayer missions.

I can confirm. My first visit to The Nexus went smoothly, though the player I joined for a mission crashed out of the session when we reached our target planet (they rejoined a couple of minutes later, but then I crashed shortly after that). My next visit to The Nexus, however, resulted in screen freeze and a crash to desktop while flying into the entrance. And the time after that, I got inside The Nexus okay, but it was completely barren of players. I got another CTD when I tried to leave. When I restarted I was still in The Nexus, in a T-pose, and crashed three more times: once while trying to fly out and twice while running through place looking for a teleporter to escape with. At one point I fell through the floor of the hub and sort of bobbed around. So, there's clearly a few issues with the multiplayer space.

VR is proving a bit spotty as well for a number of players, particularly on the Valve Index. Multiple people have reported that they can't see one of their hands while in VR, and some have said they've been experiencing laggy performance (which can be especially difficult to stomach while wearing a headset). A number of crashing issues have been reported both while in The Nexus and at other times while using VR.

Keyboard controls are also oddly blank. They're mapped and they work, but on the menu screen no keymapping is displayed and there's no way currently to customize the keymapping at all. There are also a few other issues being reported, like freighter storage rooms being completely inaccessible.

Hopefully there will be some quick patches applied and these issues will be fixed soon. In the meantime, if you're having problems, you can report bugs here.

Despite the crashes, I did have some fun extended sessions with no problems. I even manged to feed some creatures with the new craftable food pellets, and while they've haven't paid me back with milk (yet—though I vow they will) they certainly are pooping a lot.

Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.