Here's exactly when No Man's Sky unlocks on PC
No pre-loading available.
Intrepid explorers, No Man's Sky launches tomorrow on PC, but not until 6pm in the UK.
That's 10am for West Coast US folks and 1pm for their East Coast brethren.
Furthermore, pre-loading will be unavailable, so you'll have to wait however long it takes to download 2.6GB.
This all comes straight from the horse's mouth at the No Man's Sky support page.
Developer Hello Games noted that pre-order items will have different names in the actual game. To wit, the Alpha Vector ship is called the Domanish S84 and in the US the Rezosu AZ65 is named Final Shadow XIV.
A word of warning though: the pre-order ship can cause a possible game-breaking glitch as it allows you to skip part of the tutorial offering the blueprint for how to build a hyperdrive - an absolutely essential item in the game. Should you trade for a ship without a hyperdrive and don't have a blueprint to build one, you could be searching for a very long time before acquiring the required recipe.
Our advice: Go through the standard tutorial to get the hyperdrive blueprint, then switch to the fancier ship.
Hello Games seems aware of the game's teething issues. "If you've had trouble with the game, please know we are aware of some issues and will be working towards a patch for the PS4 version as soon as possible for the most common ones," the developer stated.
"If you haven't already, please email support@hellogames.co.uk so we can collect any issues to work on (again, small team, this might take time!). We understand how upsetting it is if you can't play but please don't send us repeat emails, it slows the process down."
For help getting started in Hello Games' procedurally-generated universe, check out our No Man's Sky guide.
[Editors note: We originally reported the download size as 10GB, the amount of hard drive space it says is required on Steam. Sean Murray since clarified the correct figure on Twitter. Apologies for the error.]