No Man's Sky dev pulls out all the stops to fix a player's buggy save with 611 hours of playtime at risk: 'I promise to hawk that bug and fix it'

What's the biggest save disaster you've ever had? I still wake up in a cold sweat remembering the cold April day in 2009 when I quicksaved in the final level of Max Payne a nanosecond before a bullet took my head clean off. Was that my only save? Yes. Was I an idiot? Yes. Did I learn anything from it? Absolutely not.

But I only lost about eight hours of progress. That's a pittance compared to the 611 hours—or 25 days—that was recently at risk for one No Man's Sky player who recently submitted a broken save to Hello Games in search of a fix (via GamesRadar).

Their problem wasn't a mistimed quicksave, though. As No Man's Sky engine programmer Martin Griffiths details over on X: "Today I received a 611 hour save that reproduced a flickering bug that has been reported half a dozen times on my posts here." Naturally, said Griffiths, "when a player has put that much into our game it deserves the engineering fix… and this then trickles down to all our future long term players," who promised to "hawk that bug and fix it". You can see a video of the glitch in action below.

The good news is that Griffiths managed to save the player's, uh, save. In a further update, he posts a video of the game running flicker-free in the same area on the same save. Per Griffiths, the problem was a "general engine bug/limit being reached," which means that his fix will "probably help other large bases that had this issue on Xbox."

So good news for whoever it was that almost had to start from scratch after nearly a month of playtime, and also for anyone who might have run into the problem in future. Oh, and if you're thinking '611 hours is rookie numbers,' you're not exactly wrong. According to Griffiths, the record length for a busted save received by the tech support team is 4,000 hours. No word on if they managed to repair that one. Gulp.