While it’s taken quite some time, we’re finally ready to release support for No Man’s Sky in our Nexus Mod Manager.

Due to the complex nature of modding NMS, we hired on the help of modder “ObsidianMinor” early on in the process and his understanding of the more complex nature of No Man’s Sky’s modding systems has helped immensely. Obsidian has been the real brains behind the effort and has done almost all the real grunt work in this implementation. Our thanks go out to Obsidian for his long hours of work trying to come up with the best way to support NMS mods within NMM.

Like all games we support within the Nexus Mod Manager, you can now download and install mods straight from Nexus Mods using a simple click of a button. Our NMS implementation will allow you to install packed mods (paks) as well as NMS extensions. You can also clear your shader cache, if you need to or a mod requires it, from within NMM. You can do this by clicking on the “tools” button at the top and the option should be there to “Clear shader cache”.

We’ve programmed in the ability to change your mod load order from within NMM itself. If two mods you’re using, _mod.A and _ mod.B, contain the same file then _mod.A will load first because it comes before B in the alphabet. This also works with numbers, so we put a number after the underscore so the game loads lower numbered games first.

All mods in NMM start with no position in load order. You can move your mods up and down the load order at any time by clicking on the green up and down arrows on the left side of the main manager window. If you move mods in the load order that are already installed, you apply the new load order by clicking the save icon under the green down arrow.

Finally, you can launch the game from within the Nexus Mod Manager, and if you have No Man’s Sky Extender installed, we even have options to run the game with NMSE enabled.

While NMM can do a lot of things, there’s a few things it cannot do.

We dabbled (for a long time) with trying to make the mod manager work with unpacked files as well as packed files. This was because when NMS modding first began, there was a bit of a divide in the mod author community about what the best method was for mods. It looks like packaging mods won out, and hardly any mods are now released unpacked. As such, NMM only supports packed mods. Unpacked mods will need to be packed again manually by the user before they will work in NMM.

Similarly, NMM will not do any unpacking or save management at this time.

We’re all very happy to finally get this build out to the general public and I hope that it comes of use to those of you who are looking for an easier way to manage your No Man’s Sky mods. Please remember that NMM is in perpetual beta at this time, and to report any bugs you find in our bug tracker.

You can download the latest version of NMM, with the NMS support included, from our download page.