Here's When No Man's Sky Unlocks On PC

No Man's Sky [official site] officially launches on PC today, 12 August, but if you're desperate to get your space exploration on (or want to know if you have time to bake a cake or attend an afternoon garden party before it pings into your game library) here are the exact timings for the Steam launch:

RIGHT:

6pm BST (so UK people will need to evaluate their evening plans and do a pro/con list for any post-work pub trips)

1pm EST (so East Coast US people will need to evaluate the relative appeal of their afternoon Powerpoint presentations)

10am PST (so West Coast types might as well just "work from home" if they're into No Man's Sky)

7pm CEST (so mainland Europe can probably fit in a swift half at the pub beforehand if they want)

N.B. These are the times that the game becomes available for download as pre-loading is not available - so confirms the support page. That (obv) means that your actual start time with the game will be linked with how happily your PC will download anything. If I was still in London I imagine this would put No Man's Sky's release date for Pip somewhere on Sunday morning. SICK BURN, LONDON INTERNET.

If you're curious and simply can't wait, John's got some preliminary No Man's Sky thoughts and impressions based on two days with the PS4 build.

One of the upshots of No Man's Sky releasing, by the way, is that we can finally get some new screenshots from the game in our regular rotation. So that's a smidge of good news even if you have no intention of playing the thing.

ACCOMPANYING NEWS:

Sean Murray has put up a blog post on the official NMS site to acknowledge a number of issues, bugs and crashes which the team are working to fix. Obviously we have no idea to what extent any of those will affect the PC release but I'm adding the information here anyway because it also explains a bit more about support system changes that might be relevant if you encounter any nonsense.

We’ve brought a new QA team on board today (larger than the entire Hello Games team!). This will complement the existing Sony QA team.

We are working on fixes for the most critical issues, which will be in a patch in the near future.

We will be moving to a ticketed support system next week, and have hired someone to manage this starting Monday.

Some information will be posted in the Sony forums here http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/Games-Services/bd-p/22190

Or contact Hello Games here http://www.no-mans-sky.com/support/

And here are some workarounds that might end up proving useful:

Here are some workarounds for some known issues:

Here's a section about the pre-order ships. I can't actually remember which ships it was for PC and CLEARLY no-one on RPS will have pre-ordered so this is only here as a hypothetical scenario ;)

It has been reported that some players have not received a pre-order bonus. In most cases so far, the player has either not redeemed their bonus correctly from the PS store or from the Options Menu. Also sometimes players have received the bonus, but the name displayed in-game was incorrect. The Alpha Vector ship is named Domanish S84 in-game, and (in the US) the Rezosu AZ65 is named Final Shadow XIV in game.

Finally, here's he part addressing a problem that was happening on PS4 where switching to a pre-order bonus ship would skip the part of the tutorial that gives you the blueprints for a hyperdrive (on account of you already having one in the pre-order ship). I believe you can find them through other means but it's less than ideal so here's that bit too:

It has been reported that using the pre-order bonus ship will leave some players stranded, if they purchase or transfer to a new ship that does not have a hyperdrive (if done very early in game). In most cases the player is actually able to continue (107 of the 135 reports emailed so far). The game already detects the player needs a hyperdrive and directs them to a nearby NPC who will give the player the hyperdrive they need. Some other players were able to resolve this issue by restarting their console.

Disclosure: Our Alec did some last-minute writing for No Man’s Sky. He won’t write about the game for us anymore.