No Man's Sky is an action-adventure survival game developed and published by Hello Games. It was released worldwide for the PlayStation 4 and Windows in August 2016, for Xbox One in July 2018, for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S consoles in November 2020, for Nintendo Switch in October 2022, for macOS in June 2023, and Nintendo Switch 2 in June 2025.
The game is built around four pillars: exploration, survival, combat, and trading. Players can engage with the entirety of a procedurally generated deterministic open world universe, which includes over 18 quintillion planets. Through the game's procedural generation system, planets have their own ecosystems with unique forms of flora and fauna, and various alien species may engage the player in combat or trade within planetary systems. Players advance by mining resources to power and improve their equipment, buying and selling resources using currencies earned by documenting flora and fauna or trading with the lifeforms, building planetary bases and expanding space fleets, or otherwise following the game's overarching plot by seeking out the mystery around the entity known as The Atlas.
Sean Murray, the founder of Hello Games, wanted to create a game that captured the sense of exploration and optimism of science fiction literature and art of the 1970s and 1980s. The game was developed over three years by a small team at Hello Games with promotional and publishing help from Sony Interactive Entertainment. The gaming media saw this as an ambitious project for a small team, and Murray and Hello Games drew significant attention leading to its release.
No Man's Sky initially received mixed reviews at its 2016 launch, with some critics praising the technical achievements of the procedurally generated universe, while others considered the gameplay lackluster and repetitive. However, the critical response was marred by the lack of several features that had been reported to be featured, particularly multiplayer capabilities. The game was further criticised due to Hello Games's lack of communication in the months following the launch, creating backlash from some of its players. Murray later stated that Hello Games had failed to control the hype and the larger-than-expected player count at launch, and have taken an approach of remaining quiet about updates until they are nearly ready to release. The promotion and marketing for No Man's Sky became a subject of debate and has been cited as an example of what to avoid in video game marketing.
Since the game's initial release, Hello Games has continued to improve and expand No Man's Sky to achieve the vision of the experience they wanted to build. The game has received multiple free major content updates that have added several previously missing features, such as multiplayer components, while adding features like surface vehicles, base-building, space fleet management, cross-platform play, and virtual reality support. This has substantially improved No Man's Skys overall reception, with multiple websites citing it as one of the greatest redemption stories in the gaming industry.
Gameplay
No Man's Sky is an action-adventure survival game played from a first or third person perspective that allows players to engage in four principal activities: exploration, survival, combat, and trading. The player takes the role of a specimen of alien humanoid planetary explorer, known in-game as a Traveller or Anomaly, in an uncharted universe. They start on a randomised planet near a crashed spacecraft towards the edge of the galaxy and are equipped with a survival exosuit with a jetpack and a "multitool" that can be used to scan, mine and collect resources as well as to attack or defend from creatures and hostile forces. The player can upgrade, change, repair, and refuel the ship, allowing them to travel around the planet, between other planets or in open space inside the local planetary system, as well as engage in space combat with alien factions, or make hyperspace jumps to other star systems. While the game is open-ended, the player may follow the guidance of the entity known as The Atlas to head toward the centre of the galaxy, following the main story line.
The defining feature of No Man's Sky is that nearly all parts of the galaxy, including stars, planets, flora and fauna on these planets, and sentient alien encounters, are created through procedural generation using deterministic algorithms and random number generators from a single seed number. This 64-bit value leads to there being over 18 quintillion (1.8×) planets to explore within the game. As of August 2026, the game's ten year anniversary, Murray said that players had visited less than 1% of the planets in the game. Very little data is stored on the game's servers, as all elements are created through deterministic calculations when the player is near them, assuring that other players will see the same elements as another player by travelling to the same location in the galaxy. The player may make temporary changes on planets, such as mining resources, but these changes are not tracked once the player leaves that vicinity. Until July 2020, the game used different servers for each platform; following a July 2020 patch, cross-platform play was enabled for all supported platforms.
Through exploration, the player is credited with units, the main in-game currency, by scanning planets, alien bases, flora and fauna in their travels. If the player is first to discover one of these, they can earn additional units by uploading this information to The Atlas, as well as having their name credited with the discovery to be seen by other players. Players have the opportunity to rename these features at this point within limits set by a content filter. No Man's Sky can be played offline, but interaction with The Atlas requires online connectivity.
The player must ensure the survival of the Traveller, as many planets have dangerous atmospheres such as extreme temperatures, toxic gases, and dangerous storms. Though the player can seek shelter at alien bases or caves, these environments will wear away at the exosuit's hazard protection module and can kill the Traveller. Thus the player must collect resources necessary for survival. By collecting blueprints, the player can use resources to craft upgrades to their exosuit, multitool, and spacecraft to make survival easier, with several of these upgrades working in synergistic manners to improve the survivability and capabilities of the Traveller. Each of these elements have a limited number of slots for both upgrades and resource space, requiring the player to manage inventories and feature sets, though the player can either gain new slots for the exosuit or purchase new ships and multitools with more slots. The player may also buy additional slots for his starship or use storage augmentations. Many features of the exosuit, multitool, and spacecraft need to be refuelled after prolonged use, using collected resources as a fuel source.
While on a planet, the Traveller may be attacked by hostile creatures. They also may be attacked by Sentinels, a self-replicating robot force that patrols the planets and takes action against those that take the planet's resources or attack peaceful fauna. Players may also be attacked for taking special resources, such as gravitino balls, or directly assaulting sentinels. The player can fend these off using the weapons installed on the multitool. The game uses a "wanted level". Low wanted levels may cause small drones to appear which may be easily fought off, while walking machines, such as the Walker or Quad can assault the player at higher wanted levels. While in space, the Traveller may be attacked by pirates seeking cargo, or by alien factions with whom they have a poor reputation. The player can use the ship's weapon systems to engage in these battles. Should the Traveller die on a planet, he'll be respawned at his last save point without his exosuit's inventory; the player can recover these materials if the player can reach the last death location. The player cannot respawn if playing on Permadeath mode. If the Traveller dies in space, they will similarly respawn at the local system's space station, but having lost all the goods aboard his ship. Again, these goods can be recovered by travelling to the point at which the player died in space, but with the added uncertainty of pirates claiming the goods first.
Most star systems have a space station where the Traveller can trade resources, multitools, and ships, and interact with one or more aliens from three different races that populate the galaxy as well as other travellers. Trading posts on planets offer similar functions. Each alien race has its own language, with word-for-word substitutions which initially will be nonsense to the player. By frequent communications with that race, as well as finding monoliths scattered on planets that help in translating, the player can better understand these languages and perform proper actions when interacting with the alien non-player characters, gaining favour from the alien and its race for future trading and combat. Consequentially, improper responses to aliens may cause them to dislike the Traveller, and their space-bound fleets may attack the Traveller on sight. The game includes a free market galactic store accessible at space stations and trading posts, where some resources and goods have higher values in some systems compared to others, enabling the player to profit on resource gathering and subsequent trade.
The game has deep crafting capabilities, allowing players to craft technology upgrades, components for more complex items, tradable resources, base construction parts, food and ammo. Crafting requires blueprints, which are unlocked by digging up data modules and trading them in at space stations. Resources are stored in inventories in the player's exosuit, ship, freighter, exocraft, nutrient processor, and storage containers. Resources can be processed into other resources using refiners or nutrient processors, allowing all kinds of food to be created.
No Man's Sky is primarily designed as a single-player game, though discoveries can be shared to all players via the Steam Workshop, and friends can track each other on the game's galactic map. Hello Games's Sean Murray stated that one might spend about forty hours of game-time to reach the centre of the galaxy if no side activities are performed, but he also said that he fully anticipated that players would play the game in a manner that suits them, such as having those that might try to catalogue the flora and fauna in the universe, while others may attempt to set up trade routes between planets. Players can track friends on the galactic map and the system maps. Due to limited multiplayer aspects at launch, Sony did not require PlayStation 4 users to have a PlayStation Plus subscription to play the game online.
Post-release updates