No Man's Sky developer pulls out the stops to fix player's bugged save, putting 611 hours of game time at risk: "I promise to hawk this bug and fix it"

What's your biggest save disaster? I still wake up with a cold sweat when I remember the cold April day of 2009, when I quicksaved the final level in Max Payne just a nanosecond before I was shot in the head. Was that my only saving? Yes. Was I an idiot, or not? Yes. What did I learn? No.

But I only lost eight hours of progress. This is a pittance in comparison to the 611 days or 25 hours that were at risk recently for a No Man's Sky user who submitted a damaged save to Hello Games to find a fix.

The problem wasn't caused by a faulty quicksave. No Man's Sky engine programer Martin Griffiths explains over on X that "I received a 611-hour save that reproduced a bug that's been reported a half dozen times here." Griffiths explained that "when a user has invested so much time and effort into our game, it deserves an engineering fix... This trickles down to our future long-term players," who promise to "hawk this bug and fix it". Below is a video showing the glitch in action.

The good news is Griffiths was able to save the save of the player. In a second update, he posted a video showing the game running without flickering in the same area and on the same save. Griffiths said that the problem was caused by a "general engine glitch/limit reached," so his fix "will probably help other large bases on Xbox that had this issue."

Good news for those who may run into this problem in the future. If you think that 611 hours is a rookie number, you are not wrong. Griffiths says that the record for a broken save received by the Tech Support team is 4,000 hrs. No word yet on whether they were able to fix that save. Gulp.