No Man’s Sky Is Getting an ‘Impossible’ Port, Thanks to Light No Fire

A full 10 years after its release, No Man’s Sky is coming to a new frontier: mobile. Hello Games’ open-world sci-fi game is coming to iPhone and iPad in October, with preorders open today. The port will include all updates released over the past decade, and it will run on a range of devices as old as the iPhone 11.

The technological feat was possible thanks in no small part to Light No Fire, Hello Games’ in-development No Man’s Sky follow-up. Ahead of today’s reveal, Polygon attended a virtual roundtable with Hello Games founder Sean Murray, who explained the ins and outs of the project. Development of the port began roughly three years ago, which would put it around the same time as the release of No Man’s Sky’s Mac port in 2023.

While Murray said that a "sensible game developer” would conclude that the game couldn’t run well on a phone, the team at Hello Games were excited about taking on an “impossible” challenge. The end result certainly does sound impossible. The mobile version features every update the game has gotten up to this point, including September’s Cosmos DLC.

The only concession is that it doesn’t feature settlements and multiplayer, two features that the game also launched without on Nintendo Switch, though Murray implied that they could potentially come to the port later depending on community feedback. The port features full touch controls, redesigned menus, controller support, and mouse and keyboard support on iPad. More shocking is the range of devices it runs on.

Murray says No Man’s Sky can be played on anything from an iPhone 11 upwards for phones, and the iPad Air generation 3 and up for iPads. The entire game, with all of its content, also comes in at under 5 GB. Murray chalks it up to Hello Games’ need to optimize over the years to keep the game running well on PlayStation 4, where the game first launched.

But while the team’s multiplatform strategy is part of the equation, some of the optimization needed to get the game running on mobile was born from Light No Fire. Because we have had to think really hard about where are we going to get this performance from, and how are we going to fit in our memory profile better,” Murray told Polygon. Things that we’ve been doing there where we’ve had to make things more performant, we’re going, oh, we can carry that across to all of this.