You’ve spent three hundred hours building a stasis device farm on a radioactive moon. You finally found that perfect S-class Interceptor with the folding wings. Then, you click "Load Game" and the screen just hangs. Or worse, the game starts you from the very beginning on a freezing planet, staring at a broken Radiant Pillar as if your entire journey never happened. It’s a gut-punch. Honestly, seeing no mans sky save corrupted messages is one of the few things that can make a veteran Traveler want to uninstall the game forever.
The reality is that Hello Games has built a universe that is technically infinite, but the file system holding your progress together is very much finite. It’s fragile. Between the massive "Worlds Part 1" updates and the constant stream of expeditions, the backend data structures for your save file undergo massive shifts. Sometimes, the game just loses the thread.
Don't panic yet. Most of the time, your data isn't actually "gone"—it’s just unreadable to the current version of the game client.
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Why your No Man's Sky save is suddenly unreadable
Most people think a corrupted save is a single broken file. It’s usually more complicated. No Man's Sky uses a "JSON" format for its save data on PC, which is basically a giant text file that tells the game where every base computer, multi-tool, and pet companion is located. If a single bracket is out of place because of a crash during an autosave, the whole thing breaks.
On consoles like the PS5 or Xbox Series X, the system is a bit more locked down, but the root causes remain the same. Memory leaks are a huge culprit. If you’ve been playing for six hours straight and your console is running hot, the handoff between the RAM and the SSD during a "Restore Point" save can fail. You end up with a file that has a size of 0kb. That’s the nightmare scenario.
Then there’s the "Discovery Buffer" issue. If you are an obsessive explorer who uploads every single rock and plant on a thousand planets, your save file size balloons. Eventually, it hits a local storage limit or a cloud sync cap. Steam Cloud and PlayStation Plus are notorious for trying to sync a file that is currently being written to, leading to a conflict where the cloud overwrites your local progress with an older, broken version. It’s a mess, frankly.
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Immediate steps for PC players using the GoatFungus editor
If you’re on PC, you have a massive advantage. You can actually look under the hood. There is a community-standard tool called the No Man's Sky Save Editor (often referred to as the GoatFungus editor).
Here is what's actually happening: when your save is "corrupted," it often just means the header information is mismatched.
- Go to your save folder. It’s usually in
AppData/Roaming/HelloGames/NMS. - Look for the
st_files. These are your actual saves. - If you see a file with a very recent timestamp but the game won't load it, open the Save Editor.
- Try to import that specific file. The editor can often "re-serialize" the data, essentially rewriting the file in a clean format that the game can understand again.
Sometimes the corruption is caused by a specific item in your inventory. I’ve seen cases where a glitched procedural tech module—the ones you get from breaking down Sentinel glass—causes the game to crash upon loading the player model. Using an editor to delete the last three items you picked up can miraculously "fix" a corrupted save. It’s tedious work, but it beats losing a 500-hour Permadeath run.
Console recovery: The cloud is your only hope
If you’re on a PlayStation or Xbox, you can't go digging through JSON code. You are at the mercy of the "Upload/Download Saved Data" feature.
The PlayStation Loop
On PS5, the console often auto-syncs your saves to the cloud the moment you close the game. If the game crashed and corrupted your save, there is a high chance the "bad" save was immediately sent to the cloud. You have to be fast. Check the "Date/Time" on your cloud storage versus your console storage. If the cloud version is even ten minutes older, download it immediately. You might lose half an hour of gameplay, but you save the character.
Xbox and Game Pass
Xbox is trickier because the sync is mostly invisible. However, there is a trick. If you suspect a no mans sky save corrupted error has occurred, immediately disconnect your console from the internet. This prevents the "bad" local save from overwriting the "good" cloud save. Delete your local save data from the "Manage Game" menu, reconnect to the internet, and let the console pull the last healthy version from the Microsoft servers.
Preventing the "JSON Bloat" and save death
Prevention is better than a week of troubleshooting on Reddit. One of the biggest reasons saves fail is "base complexity." If you have twenty bases, each with thousands of parts, the game has to track the "state" of all those objects.
- Stop using too many refiners. Seriously. Leaving items in a refiner and warping away is one of the most common ways to trigger a save state error.
- Clear your cache. On consoles, a full power cycle (unplugging the power cord for 30 seconds) clears the system cache, which can resolve "Ghost" corruption where the game thinks a save is bad because of cached data.
- Manual Backups. If you are on PC, literally just copy the
HelloGamesfolder to a USB stick once a week. It sounds primitive, but it is the only 100% effective way to survive a corruption event.
There is also a weird quirk with the "AccountData" file. This file tracks your Quicksilver purchases and Expedition rewards. Sometimes, your save is fine, but the AccountData.hf file is corrupted. If this happens, you’ll find you can’t access your Twitch drops or Golden Vector. Deleting just that file (after backing it up!) often forces the game to regenerate it from the server, fixing your "access" to your own save.
How the "Worlds" updates changed the stakes
Since the release of the massive 2024 and 2025 overhauls, the way terrain is generated has changed. If your save was created in 2018 and you haven't played in years, trying to load it now is a huge risk. The game is trying to place your 2018 character on a 2026 version of a planet that might not even exist anymore.
When you load an ancient save, the game performs a "migration." This is a high-stress moment for the engine. If it fails, you get the corruption error. The best advice for returning players? Start a new save to let the game shaders and assets cache properly, then try loading your old save. This "warms up" the engine and has been known to help old files bridge the gap to the new version.
Practical steps to take right now
If you are staring at a "Selection Failure" or an infinite loading circle, do these things in this exact order. Do not try to keep "forcing" the load, as this can sometimes overwrite your secondary "Restore Point" with the corrupted "Autosave" data.
- Check the File Size: Go to your save directory or cloud management. If the file is 0KB or significantly smaller than your other saves (e.g., 2MB instead of 15MB), it’s a write-error.
- The "Join Game" Workaround: This is a legendary fix in the NMS community. Have a friend start a multiplayer session. Join them from the main menu instead of clicking "Play Game." Sometimes, the game can successfully load your character into a different star system, bypassing the corrupted local data that was trying to load you into a "broken" spot on your home planet.
- Experimental Branch: If you're on Steam, right-click the game, go to Properties > Betas, and opt into the "Experimental" branch. Hello Games often pushes "save recovery" patches to the experimental branch weeks before they hit the main game.
- The Hello Games Zendesk: They actually read these. If your save is genuinely bricked, you can zip it up and send it to the Hello Games Support site. They have been known to manually fix player saves that were broken by specific patches.
Ultimately, the best way to handle a no mans sky save corrupted situation is to accept that the game is a massive, beautiful, and sometimes unstable simulation. Always keep a secondary backup. If you are a console player, turn off "Auto-Sync" for NMS specifically. This allows you to manually "push" your save to the cloud only when you know the file is healthy, giving you a safe restore point that the game can't ruin.
Once you’ve checked your file sizes and tried the multiplayer join trick, your next move should be looking at the timestamp of your last cloud backup. If it's recent, delete the local file and pull from the cloud. If you're on PC, get the Save Editor and see if the JSON structure is still intact. Taking these steps immediately gives you the highest statistical chance of standing back on the deck of your freighter rather than staring at a "New Game" prompt.