No Man’s Sky has been out for a little while now, and players around the world have been busy naming millions of newly discovered animals, plants, and planets.
However, it would appear that our custom names aren’t quite as permanent as we’ve been led to believe, with some players reporting that their discoveries are being erased.
I pray to God that my precious Poopybuthole galaxy remains in one peace for the cosmos to see.
In a post on the No Man’s Sky subreddit, user Dark_Nexis reported that when they went back to some of the planets they discovered early on in the game, the majority of their named discoveries were gone, reverting back to their original names.
The galaxy and planets in question still credited Dark_Nexis as the discoverer and still had their custom names, but nothing else on the planet had retained the names that were given to them.
Another Reddit user by the name of Ultrasilvanus also reported experiencing the same issues, with a bit of a twist.
When Ultrasilvanus revisited past planets after a few days, animal discoveries had gone back to being listed as “?????????”. This user then went to the trouble of doing a little digging, and worked out that the discoveries were being erased by oldest to most recent.
What’s troubling about this is the strong indication that No Man’s Sky can only retain a certain number of discoveries/names per individual player.
Developer Hello Games has yet to comment on the matter, but hopefully it’s an issue that’ll be fixed in a new patch – I’ve named too many animals after funny penis slang to see it all go up in smoke.
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.