NoMansSky:The Modding Basics

 

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Introduction

This quick guide has the goal of quickly introducing fundamental aspects to modding No Man's Sky without going into many specifics. Primarily this focuses on accessing your game files and introducing some core tools involved with modding.

You will be using three tools for the time being:

• NMS Modding Station
• MBINCompiler
• Any text editor of your choice (however, Notepad++ is recommended).

These tools will help you unpacking, decompiling and editing the game files (as well as the opposite process). While NMS Modding Station will allow you to do the initial unpacking of all the game assets, in the future you will also be able to pack/unpack single files by using PSArcTool. For the scope of this tutorial, though, we will only use the other tools.

Edit 12/2018: You can now also use the "auto mod builder - updater - lua mod script definition all in one system" by Mjjstral, that automates every single step of NMS modding and comes with an easy to use new mod defintion file system.

Unpacking the Game Assets

No Man's Sky stores all of its assets, from textures to models, shader code to entity behaviors, in the PSARC archive format used in general for PlayStation games. All these archives can be found under No Man's Sky/GAMEDATA/PCBANKS/ and have the extension *.pak.

In order to extract assets from the archives, you may use the NMS Modding Station. NMS Modding Station is easy to use, simply download it, unzip the folder and extract the .exe and readme anywhere you like, and follow the instructions. However, you may also continue reading and this will guide you on how to use it.

Upon double-clicking the .exe it may initially appear dysfunctional, but this is because you first need go to Setup-> Settings and configure the paths to the PCBANKS folder and a folder for where you want to unpack its contents (i.e. the aforementioned .paks' content).

Different PAK files contain different files for the game. While some modders who wish to save disk space will simply unpack specific files, it is preferable to unpack all of the game's archives for now. Reserve at least up to 25 GB of space on your game install directory. As of the 2.41 Update, about 23.2 GB of space is used when everything is unpacked.

NOTE: remember to re-unpack all the game assets whenever Hello Games releases a new patch for No Man's Sky.

In order to begin unpacking, you first have to setup few directories from the Setup menu:

• Set Path to Unpacked Game Files - This is a folder you will create, and in which all the No Man's Sky files will be unpacked. It is preferable to have made your unpacked directory in the same folder as the original /PCBANKS/, so /GAMEDATA/ but it is not essential.
• Set Path to MBINCompiler - The folder where you stored MBINCompiler, one of the tools you downloaded. It is preferable to place this in a different directory as you will come back to this tool very frequently.
• Set Path to PCBANKS - The path to the source files of No Man's Sky. Its location differs if you got the game on Steam (\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man's Sky\GAMEDATA\PCBANKS\) or GOG (\GOG Galaxy\Games\No Man's Sky\GAMEDATA\PCBANKS\).

After you are done with these steps, simply select Unpack Game Files from the Setup dropdown menu in NMS Modding Station. The unpacking process usually takes anywhere between 15-25 minutes on a standard HDD. Template:NMSPageClose