When No Man's Sky misbehaves this way, the cause is usually one of four things, and they are worth checking in order.

Short answer

Rule out the platform-wide outage before touching a single setting on your own machine.

  • Clear the shader cache if the symptom is stutter rather than a crash.
  • Check the official server status before anything else.
  • Keep a save or backup from before you start — it costs nothing and occasionally saves an evening.

No Man's Sky has been rewritten by updates so many times that old guides describe a different game. A status page tells you in five seconds what an hour of troubleshooting will not. File verification is non-destructive and repairs a surprising share of these cases.

Is it you or is it them

The awkward part is rarely the step itself, it is knowing which step comes first. A crash that always happens at the same moment is a content problem, not a hardware one. Anti-cheat drivers are the one component where a plain reinstall genuinely helps. Screenshots age faster than text, which is why this describes rather than shows.

Changing several settings at once makes the cause impossible to identify afterwards. Overlays from chat apps, capture tools and storefronts all hook the same rendering path. What follows assumes you are on a current install and have not modified it.

Overlays, and why they cause this

Logs are usually more specific than the error dialog that pointed you here. Half the pages on this topic were written for a build that no longer exists, which is why they stop matching what you see. The short version is near the top on purpose; the reasoning is there if you want to know why.

  • Verify or repair the installation through the launcher.
  • Disable every overlay, then re-enable them one at a time.
  • If a menu path does not exist for you, your build is older or newer than the one described.
  • Run once as administrator to rule out a permissions problem.
  • Update the GPU driver, and clean-install it if this has happened before.
  • Read the whole sequence once before doing the first step.

The checks worth doing first

It helps to understand why a step exists, because then you can adapt it when your situation is slightly different. Do the cheap check before the expensive one — that ordering alone saves most of the frustration. Where two approaches both work, the one with fewer moving parts is the one to keep. Most of the disagreement you will find online is two people describing different builds.

If your result differs from what is described here, note what is different first rather than starting over. Everything below is framed around the current state of No Man's Sky rather than a launch-week impression. Treat anything stated without a version number as provisional.

When a reinstall is justified

Where something depends on your platform or region, that is called out rather than glossed over. Anything that behaves differently on console than on PC is flagged where it matters. None of this needs a paid tool, a third-party launcher or an account on a site you have never heard of.

If a step reads as obvious, do it anyway — the obvious ones are the ones people skip and then wonder about. Nothing here assumes a particular playstyle beyond wanting the thing to work. The community wisdom on this is roughly half right, and the half that is wrong costs the most time.

If it comes back

No Man's Sky is not shy about hiding useful information two menus deep, so some of this is simply knowing where to look. A single check up front replaces a lot of guessing later. The developers have changed their mind about this at least once, which explains the older advice.

Where people go wrong

  • Ignoring the platform-specific note and then wondering why the steps do not line up.
  • Rushing the last step, which is usually the one with the actual requirement in it.
  • Copying a setup wholesale from a streamer without understanding what each part does.
  • Changing five things at once and then not knowing which one helped.

No Man's Sky FAQ

Could my antivirus be causing this?

It can. Security software and anti-cheat both sit at the same level of the system and occasionally fight.

Is this still accurate after the latest No Man's Sky update?

The method is; individual numbers may not be. If a value on your screen differs, trust the screen and keep the sequence.

Do I need any mods or third-party tools for this?

No. Everything described here works with the base game on any supported platform.

How long does this take?

Minutes if it goes cleanly, an evening if you hit the edge case in the caveats list. Neither is unusual.

Work through it in the order above and online fix stops being a question you have to look up again.