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Welcome to the No Man's Sky Modding Wiki

This is a community collaboration effort to document the technical aspects of No Man's Sky's internals as well as assist aspiring mod authors to get acquainted with all the possibilities you can do with the game!

Modding No Man's Sky is also an on-going research effort and, as such, many pages will change overtime as Hello Games, creators of No Man's Sky, release new patches and various mod and as tool authors will publish new ideas and techniques.

Beginner Topics

If you are completely unfamiliar with modding, try the Getting Started topic!

Advanced Topics

For more advanced modders, individual files and descriptions will be listed below!

Game Assets and Objects (SCENEGRAPHS)

• SCENE files - similar to a prefab and holds information about in-game objects all the way from models, behaviors to audio, particle effects and more.
  • ENTITY files - the MBIN that defines interactions and behaviors of objects.
    • Actions and Triggers
  • GEOMETRY files - the format in which 3D models are stored in
  • MATERIAL files - defines the texture maps and shader flags to be used
  • DESCRIPTOR files - handles the nested heirarchies of procedural generation in-game
  • ANIM (Animation) files - (no research on this yet)

• TEXTURES
  • NMS texture formats
  • TEXTURE MBINs
• AUDIO
  • WEM format

Engine Configurations and Tools (METADATA)

• Spawning SCENE files
• Terrain generation parameters

Adding Additional Content (METADATA/MODELS)

• Adding new products/substances
• Adding new buildable objects
• Adding new technologies
• Referencing another SCENE from a SCENE
• Assigning functions to an object

Tools and Tutorials

• PSARCTool - this handy tool will allow you to extract the PAK files No Man's Sky stores all of its assets and data in.
• MBINCompiler - the quintessential tool for decompiling the encrypted serialized XML files No Man's Sky formats all of its configurations in!
• No Man's Model Viewer - explore the original models shipped with the game!
• NMS Blender Export Plugin - the only tool that makes importing custom models possible!

• NMSE (No Man's Sky Script Extender) - similar to script extenders in games like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, new functionality can be added through NMSE via external scripting

Tutorials

• Importing your own custom models in-game!

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