Highlights

• Modding has played a crucial role in improving No Man's Sky, allowing players to tweak and enhance various aspects of the game.
• Mods like "Better Rewards" and "Better Ships" provide players with a more rewarding and diverse gameplay experience.
• Other mods, such as "Start With TARDIS" and "Deep Space," add unique and immersive elements to the game, enhancing the overall enjoyment for players.

No Man's Sky is a game that had a rough start. Its launch version was far from being the game that players were so excited about playing. To fulfill what they wanted from the game, or to at least improve it a bit, many players started modding it early.

To everyone's surprise, No Man's Sky never stopped releasing new content. Today, the game is everything that it was meant to be and much more, but it did not stop the mod community. There are even more mods that are responsible for tweaking and improving the newer aspects of the game, as well.

Updated on January 11, 2024, by William Quick: No Man's Sky is a game that has truly come a long way on a rollercoaster of response. It started as an ambitious game in waiting, then launched to a chorus of disappointment and ridicule before making a comeback after being fixed based on community comments. It's now a game that people enjoy playing and can even play together as they explore the expanding and generating universe. Despite all the work and content that can be found in the game, there are ways to alter the gameplay in efficient and creative ways. That's why you can add mods to No Man's Sky and these are our recommendations.

13 Better Rewards

Work Hard And Get A Better Payout

Just looking at No Man's Sky fills you with a sense of weight, since you know that you have a full universe to explore. You could spend hours traveling and doing various activities and never get anything worthwhile. The creator of Better Rewards, MrTracki, feels the weight as well and has worked to give you a more rewarding experience... quite literally.

Just add this mod to your game, and you'll find that all your opportunities to get rewards will be changed for the better. You'll end up picking among more quality items and more as you feel a greater sense of accomplishment for all the effort you've put in to get you that well-deserved loot.

12 Better Ships

Only The Best Ships For You

No Man's Sky without ships would be like Minecraft without a pickaxe: it just wouldn't be playable. You're not going to experience an important chunk of what the game has to offer without getting and piloting a ship. You may be stuck with common quality models for a while, but JJhookah shows that it doesn't have to be this way.

By messing with the laws of generation, this mod changes the kind of ships you'll find on your travels. Say goodbye to all the C-Class ships and look forward to encountering the B-Class or even better. S-Class ships will become more commonplace, so make use of them wisely.

11 Start With TARDIS

It's Smaller On The Outside!

The longest-running sci-fi show goes to the fast-talking, hyper-intelligent ancient alien with a flying blue box, Doctor Who. Whether you're a fan or couldn't care less about the show, it's no doubt iconic with a lot of its influence felt across gaming. The most notable aspect of the ship is that blue box, the Doctor's special time-travel ship called the TARDIS.

Thanks to the efforts of RemingtonRyder, you can pilot this unique ship through the No Man's Sky Universe. Aside from adding a whole new roleplay element to the experience, this mod adds some extra flavoring by removing the tutorial (when playing on Normal difficulty) and gives you the fluorescent blue-green trail to streak across space. Doctor who? Doctor you.

10 Deep Space

Put Yourself Under A Dark Sky

A lot of work went into making No Man's Sky and even more went into redeeming it in the eyes of the public. However, it has always had an expansive universe. However, despite all the technical efforts, it's not the most realistic space experience. For those who want a more real space-exploration affair, TheEMMETTBROWN has you covered.

This mod bumps up the realism of space, making it darker and less colorful. It bumps up the emptiness of the universe with the main goal of overall reducing the noise and making the atmospheric elements more detailed and less stylized. Bring the harshness of our universe to this universe.

9 No Man's Connect -- Online Location Manager

Figure Out Where You Are

Trying to revisit places in a procedurally generated game is like trying to find a minnow in the ocean. This mod, created by user jaszhix, has received regular updates, works offline, and allows for teleportation to manually registered locations on a PC.

It's a great addition for those who want more options when it comes to retracing the steps and trying to find the perfect pet or starship.

8 Fast Actions

Speed Up Your Interactions

When crafting, clicking an item will trigger a quick animation. It doesn't take long, but when too many items are needed for any reason, it adds up. Other things in the game take an unnecessary second to be completed. Transferring resources, entering a ship, and gathering small plants are a few examples.

This mod is a very simple quality-of-life mod that everybody should try out. It just removes the time it takes to realize some actions. It makes crafting faster, but players who do not know much about it might still need some pointers.

7 Better Planet Generation

Encounter More Interesting Worlds

User WoodyMontana created this mod to assist with creating better, more interesting planets. Think of it as a supplemental resource to make your game more enjoyable rather than scoff at the developers' hard work on the game.

This mod is a no-brainer for people whose favorite part of NMS is simply seeing what the engines can create randomly.

6 HD Clouds

Fill The Skies With Nicer Clouds

Although some patches came with an update on cloud textures, it was not a complete overhaul. The game uses atmospheric cloud textures for distant planets. The dynamic clouds will not appear unless players are close enough to a planet. When that is the case, the game will switch to dynamic clouds.

This mod increases the quality of the textures for mid-range and distance ranges. That way, space looks consistently nicer and planets might feel more alive and less repetitive by far.

5 Fine LOD

Bump Up The Details

No Man's Sky is an awesome game, but it is far from perfect. When traveling around on foot, ground textures might take a while to load. Sometimes the fps might drop because of it, since the game might be constantly loading it. Besides all that, there is this well-known issue with the water height. For some reason, the water will show up much lower than it is.

Fine LOD fixes all that, though. This mod makes textures load from further away, increasing the beauty of the game. This is a must-have mod for PC Gamers who can run it.

4 Exosolar's Expanse

Expand The Universe Even More

The sci-fi fantasy of exploring new systems throughout space is amazing as it is, but there is room for improvement. Some would enjoy a more accurate feeling of space itself. There are a lot of colors, stars, rocks, and nebulas in No Man's Sky that might cause space to feel busy and sometimes even bright.

Exosolar's mod changes the appearance of space in No Man's Sky. You can have a completely dark space with distant nebulas. There is also the option to add distant nebulas to contrast a bit with the never-ending blackness.

3 Argh Water

Make The Water More Inviting

Thanks to the graphical updates by Hello Games, NMS is looking prettier than ever. But some of the textures and motion animations still don't feel quite right for some players. This mod by user Argh seeks to fix that with new water shaders.

The mod adds tons of stuff for wave generation; water color, reflections, highlights, and foam. Along with mods like the Better Planet Generation mod or graphical update mods, this will make NMS an even more beautiful sandbox to explore.

2 Exosolar's Beyond Base Building

Build Even More Base

No Man's Sky made players very happy with the base-building system. It provides more than 400 different pieces for players to mix and match to create their dream outpost. However, the game many times considers the position of those parts invalid, frustrating a lot of creative minds.

This mod is meant to fix that, and nearly all parts can be placed in almost any way players want. Building a base with this mod is significantly more fun since it allows the most creative base designs to take form in the game. Many nice things can be done to create an outstanding base.

1 Dud's Sky Colors

Paint The Skies Red And More

The procedurally generated planets of No Man's Sky have enough variations for the whole galaxy, but they can have even more. Dud's Sky adds new colors to grass, plants, sand, water, snow, and much more.

For instance, icy planets will no longer need to be all white. There will be plants with colors never seen before. That only adds variety to the experience, making some planets stand out and have this truly unique feature. This is one of those mods that makes you wonder why it had to be a mod, since it would be very nice if it was a standard feature of the game.