Folk who pre-ordered No Man’s Sky are discovering an entirely unexpected bonus in the form of a glitch that leaves the player stranded in one galaxy – forever.
As reported via a number of Reddit threads, players who pre-ordered a copy of the sci-fi exploration/survival game get themselves a slightly better starting ship.
In the spirit of naff pre-orders, this bonus ship comes with one extra inventory slot and a built in hyperdrive. The latter item is essential for warping between galaxies and actually exploring the universe, but is easily attainable after following a few story missions.
The fact that this ship already comes with a hyperdrive means players will miss out on the early section of the game where they track down the blueprint that allows them to actually build one.
If a player were to then trade their spaceship for a better one later on in the game, and if that new ship didn’t have a hyperdrive, they would have no way of getting the blueprint to craft a new one, and would effectively end up stuck in the galaxy they’re in.
Of course, there is a chance that these unlucky explorers will stumble across a hyperdrive blueprint, but starting with the pre-order ship doesn’t even give you the option to find one, so it’s entirely down to chance.
In a universe of 18 quintillion planets, that’s a pretty slim chance.
It’s been suggested that this all boils down to a bug, as some players report that every ship they find has come bundled with a hyperdrive, while other players report not being able to find one anywhere.
Hello Games is the type of studio that will doubtless look into and resolve this issue speedily, but in the meantime: Pre-order players should make sure they have the hyperdrive blueprint before cashing in on the bonus ship.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.