This quick guide has the goal of quickly introducing fundamental aspects to modding No Man's Sky without going into many specifics, starting with setting up your game client for the possibility of making your own mods and get you familiar with some core tools involved with modding.
You will be using three tools for the time being:
- PSARCTool
- MBINCompiler
- Any text editor of your choice
Accessing 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 your /PCBANKS/ folder, the general directory you also install mods into and have the extension *.pak.
In order to extract assets from the archives, you will depend on using the PSARCTool. The PSARCTool is mostly command line based for now but is very easy to use. Download the tool and place this into your PCBANKS folder for now.
Different PAK files host different files for the game. While some modders who wish to save disk space will simply unpack specific files, it is preferable to unpack your entire game's archivse for now. Reserve at least up to 7GB of space on your game install directory. (this is if you have the 1.1 Foundation Update)
In order to begin unpacking, drag all of the .PAK files inside your /PCBANKS/ folder into PSARCTool. The extraction process usually takes anywhere between 15-25 minutes on a standard HDD.
After Unpacking: The MBIN Format
After PSARCTool has finished unpacking, your directory should now expose completely new folders where all the files of the game are sorted into. It is preferable you move these folders to a new directory such as "/PCBANKS_extracted/" preferably in the same folder as the original /PCBANKS/.
The most common filetype you will see are *.MBIN files. These are basically serialized XML files. These files contain the bulk of configurations the game reads such as controls for procedural generation, the behaviors of in-game objects, and so on.
Since MBIN files are encrypted, you will still need to decompile these files into a more human-readable form with the use of the MBINCompiler. Download the MBINCompiler and preferably place this on another directory as you will come back to this tool very frequently.
Much like the PSARCTool, you can simply drag an .MBIN file into the MBINCompiler executable. You will get a completely readable human-readable EXML file that can be opened with any text editor of your choice. Dragging an EXML file back into MBINCompiler does the reverse, and recompiles into an MBIN file.