NoMansSky:The Modding Basics

From Step Mods | Change The Game

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Introduction[edit | edit source]

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:

These tools will help you unpacking, decompiling and editing the game files, as well as the opposite process.

Unpacking the Game Assets[edit | edit source]

No Man's Sky stores all of its assets, from textures to models, shaders code to entity behaviors under the No Man's Sky/GAMEDATA/PCBANKS/ folder, in the form of .PAK files.
These files are encoded using the PSARC archive format designed for PlayStation games.

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 anywhere you like, and follow the instructions - or continue to read as 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 assets from .pak files.

Game files are grouped inside different .PAK files. 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. Be sure to have at least up to 25 GB free on your hard drive though. As of the 2.61.1 Update, about 24.1 GB of space is used by all unpacked assets.

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

  • Set Path to Unpacked Game Files - This is a folder you will create, 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/, like /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 No Man's Sky .pak source files. 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. Template:Warning Small

Decompiling MBIN files[edit | edit source]

After NMS Modding Station has finished unpacking, your unpacked directory should now show completely new folders and files where all the files of the game are organized.

The most common file type you will see throughout these new folders are .MBIN files. These are basically serialized XML files. These files contain the bulk of configurations the game reads such as global settings, procedural generation rules, item databases, behaviors of in-game objects, and so on.

Since .MBIN files are in a raw format, you will need to decompile these files into a more human-readable form with the use of MBINCompiler.

To decompile .MBIN files, just drag them onto the MBINCompiler executable. This will create a completely human-readable .EXML file with the same name that can be opened with any text editor. And dragging an .EXML file back onto MBINCompiler will do the reverse, including any change you made.

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To start with NMS modding, the most impactful files are the GLOBALS. Globals are configuration files editing all NMS global settings and you will find them all at the root of your unpaked files. Pick a file with a name that points toward a theme you would like to change in NMS, like SkyGlobals or AISpaceShip. Then you can decompile it, observe the name of each setting and make your first changes. Do not forget to recompile the edited .EXML into a .MBIN. Then recreate the .pak from the .mbin file and test your changes in game !

Where to go next ?[edit | edit source]

A good place to begin after this is to try adding existing objects to the build menu in the game. This is a relatively simple process that gives you a sense for how to mod the game, and helps to introduce you to the way the game files tend to be interconnected. Template:NMSPageClose