Early No Man’s Sky players face progress wipe

There are plenty of No Man’s Sky copies already out in the wild, but those who already have the game should think twice before putting in a serious number of hours.

Hello Games has confirmed that a huge patch will go live for the game on launch day – which is Tuesday August 9th in the US, Wednesday August 10th in the UK and Friday August 12th on PC worldwide – the changes of which won’t be applied to any existing saves.

Furthermore, the developer will also wipe the game’s servers, rendering any discovered planets forgotten.

For 99.9 per cent of people, all you have to do is install the update before you begin to play,” Hello boss Sean Murray said. If you had an early copy somehow, your save game will technically work post update, but you will miss out on new content and experiences if you don’t delete your save before updating (should be obvious why from notes below).

We highly recommend deleting your save if you have played before updating your game (we won’t do this in future, but it’s a day zero update). Servers will be wiped on Sunday and again Monday in the lead up to launch.”

The number of changes being introduced by the patch is extensive. These include new narrative paths, alterations to the universe generation algorithm, increased ship diversity and inventory space, improved lighting and texture resolution, combat tweaks, the removal of exploits and reduced pop-in.

The full list can be found on Hello’s site.