There was a mention in patch 1.07 (iirc) that the stats for size and mass had been inverted until that patch, which might explain the lack of hugest type creatures in general?

Anyone tried the Emma voice pack for the exosuit? Love it! Now I have a pleasant woman talking in my ears rather than Alien Bitchin Betty!

This and Bigger Things make a world of difference in NMS. I love how it really brings fantasy into the game!

Emma is lovely and so is:

http://nomansskymods.com/mods/exosuit-voicepack-andrastae-companion-all-languages-supported/

Link's messed. Here it is.

Not bad, but I prefer Emma.

For those who want to edit the textures.
NMS uses "Atlases", which are texture atlases, not to confuse it with the Atlas space stations.

Once you have unpacked the .pak files, within the texture folder, you gonna find planets/atlases subfolder.
Those .dds textures in there are texture atlases, not single textures. Photoshop will show you a row of 10 different images
once you open it. You CANNOT edit it, and re-save it with Photoshop. It will save it as a continuous row of textures and your game won't show it correctly.
The only way to edit it (what I've found so far) is using a special texture editor (Phaser) or by manually punching in into
code lines. Nvidia has a DOS command texture Atlas editor on their site, I had no luck getting it run right in Win10.
Only experienced texture modders should go deep into this, hence the lack of terrain texture mods on anywhere (none existent).

Edit///
If you got Photoshop , make sure you got Nvidia dds tools, and there is an Atlas maker plugin:
http://richardjdare.com/blog/2012/11/atlasmaker-0-7-make-texture-atlases-in-photoshop/

Thanks for that info pannonian75, i had wondered about the lack of terrain texture mods (i had assumed it was due to the procedural engine or something).

So after a few days with the game i have a modlist and load order that works well on my machine. FPS is around 30-40. Machine details:

i5 3350P @ 3.10GHz
8 GB Ram
2 GB Nvidia GTX 750 Ti

-------------------------

The list below is in the load order i gave it as outlined in the OP (using numbers preceding the mod name etc):

Asteroid Hits - by Lo2K

Asteroid Fields (Iron version) - by Lo2K, removes thamium from asteroids and replaces that with iron, for a harder game - (edit: note the less Asteroids mod does not function properly with these mods)

Resources Underground - makes your scanner a vital tool to find resources, no more towers of gold/aluminium etc on the surface (well much less often, rare indeed). Now you NEED those grenades to blow down to the resources, or maybe find the tip on the surface to mine down into. You seem to get less of the resource as well, but overall a good game improvement mod. I place it quite early in my mod list (currently just after Iron Asteroid Fields).

Explorer Reward x5 - not sure who this is by (NMS modders have a bad habit of not including a readme with their files for the most part!) or where it now is as i have not been able to find it on either of the mod sites just now! Basically it gives a bigger cash reward for completing to 100% the flora and fauna search.

EDIT: I found where i got it from! It was a tweak by TinyLittleBits to X3n0m0rph's 'Profession Explorer' mod. It reduced that main mods pay out to x5 instead of x10. I find this version a bit more balanced and here is the link (you can still get it in the discussion about the mod on the Nexus download page):

http://www32.zippyshare.com/v/tp2Upc3O/file.html

Milestone Pacing Fix - by SweetDaggerfall. Fixes the milestone achieved spam issue.

Reduced Launch Cost (25 version) - by Lexman6, with Low Flight and liking to explore planets the default cost of materials when taking off was a little too much i felt. This version feels about right if you like to land and take off as much as i do.

Busier Space - by Decky Doodles. Space is less empty of other craft now, without being too busy.

Disable Black Bars - by JustRuthless, makes a really nice difference to those 'achievement' moments. You still get the icons and text telling you what took place, just not the distracting 'zooming' effect of the black bars. It would be perfect if it also let you keep control during the events, but that is maybe for a later version?

Fast Actions - by Shadwar, one of my essential mods to make the game feel more like a PC game and less a PS4 port!

No More Blue Tutorial Hints - by CrimsonAegis, this might break my game for me at some point, but as this is just my early go at NMS i do not care so much. Why can we not toggle these message spam in game? Until we can this is my solution.

Steady Cam - by Rhesus_TOR. I sort of just want the standing idle movement gone, as it gives the game weird graphic movement that highlights the aliasing. Still this removes/reduces a bunch of other stuff as well and fits pretty seamlessly into my mod list.

SpeedWalkRun - from the No Man's Sky Expedition Mods by DarkM1. I just use the speed walk/run version.

Exosuit voicepack (female) by Eleanor - by RRaymoNDD

More Ships Per System (40 version) - by Rhesus_TOR

Smaller Debris - by Decky Doodles, not all mined resources fly at your face in huge blobs, many of them are much smaller particles now. nice.

No Speed Lines and Particles in Space - by ScottATaylor, adds to the realism of space flight.

No Strangely Shaped Heavy Air Particles - by ScotATaylor, gets rid of the weird looking lines that float around everywhere, while keeping the other particle effects.

Spaceflight Overhaul - by 03woodm, this has replaced the awesome Low Flight mod in my list. It offers the same functionality as Low Flight (on planet) AND a HUGE improvement to the way spaceflight feels. You have some inertia now, you can drift in one direction while facing another etc. A very different (and improved) feel from game default.

Bigger Creature Icons - by Decky Doodles

Half Sized (default) Icons - by SweetDaggerfall, a new icon pack i like, keeps the default games icons just makes them 50% smaller. Was using Less Intrusive Icons by Tiny Little Bits for this kind of thing before.

RemoveLensFlare - by PatrickJr, large reduction in that effect to make it a bit more natural imho.

Planet Sky Light (50) - this reduces that outer glow from planets by 50% In the default game setting they could look a little over obvious and unnatural.

Blue and Finer Traderoutes - by diabLo2kx, makes those lines in the sky nice and subtle, my favourite of the mods that change these lines.

Dark Warp - by Damanique, compliments the other mods i have that make space darker and less 'busy' in terms of graphical wiz-bang.

Dark Skies v1.2 - by Weezedog, no noise on the horizon and no 'extra' stuff beyond making space dark. Works well with the other mods in my list.

Realistic Storms - by UR3, packed by Dpalme. makes the weather changes more noticeable on planet.

-----------------------------

Cockpit Freelook - by wes47, uses a third party software to emulate a controllers second stick. Not a 'mod' in the same way as the others above (nothing goes into your PCBANKS folder for example).

It can be a bit hard to manage on the PC's mouse+keyboard setup, but finally being able to look around the cockpit like PS4 owners of NMS can do by default is great. Can be a little tricky to set up and get working (give the Vjoy.exe administrator rights etc) but totally worth it imho.

I have 20 odd mods currently, some of the heavier mods (like Big Things etc) would hit my performance too hard on my system, so those are all worth considering if you have a top end rig, but i hope this working mod list provides a good base for your own mod list building efforts :)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some optional ones i'm testing:

Immersive Space - by Edson. I've placed this right after Dark Skies in the mod load order. It's an experimental thing, and not supported by the mod (to run these two mods together). It adds more mist/fog to the distant landscape (which might reduce FPS by a 1-2?) which can look great. It also makes the planets in the sky appear that 'too white/foggy' looking. So i'm not 100% sure on this combination just yet. Having Dark Skies removes the horizon noise, even with the other mods like this that add that, so it might be a good combination?

Edit: Updated list and load order :) Loving it!

I've recently compared game data files of 1.07 vs 1.09 and discovered both GCSPACESHIPGLOBALS.GLOBAL.MBIN and GCUIGLOBALS.GLOBAL.MBIN were updated.
Two popular mods, LowFlight by Hytek and Fast Actions by shadwar are still using older versions of these files, which means they're basically hiding the fixes/tweaks introduced with latest patch.

I suppose it could be the same for other mods too...

Yeah, always a possibility of that. Mods are just changes to the code like patches, so will over-ride stuff etc. Still what a mod 'adds' to the game is often worth more than a code tweak, so you have to try stuff out and see what you like in your games.

Unless patch 1.09 added the ability to fly without that silly ground barrier, then i would see no reason to not use Low Flight. :)

Edit: and as little update i edit and change my running mod list in the post on page 2. As new mods come along that list will be edited to reflect what i'm running (once i've play tested it a bit).

And another little adjustment to the current running modlist.

Low Flight has been put aside! Wait, wait. It's ok. That is obviously one of the best mods we have had for NMS so far, and in it's place is a mod that improves the spaceflight part of the game in equal amounts, it also includes the changes Low Flight makes.

Space flight overhaul by 03woodm. Really an incredible mod and as you can have only one of these two mods active at one time, Space flight overhaul is my new choice.

Link to Spaceflight Overhaul: https://nomansskymods.com/mods/spaceflight-overhaul-v2-4/

(So just to be specific here, so people will understand how hilarious this actually is: in the vanilla game, there is an anti-ground autopilot, that suspends you in the air 100m above sea-level. This is hardcoded in on top of the control schema more or less. And removing this basically exposes a completely workable guidance system with speed-levels depending on height over the planet. This "function" has clearly not been there until the last week before release. But it supplants that entire system completely.

In addition to that, there is a constant forward thrust hardcoded into the settings-file. If you are in space and reverse thrust, you suddenly fly backwards, since there is also a constant thrust continuing to push your ship backwards.

And this sounds a bit weird, right? I mean, why wouldn't they just let the ship come to a halt? You can't really come up with a gameplay reason for it either, like any of the other tweaks you find in the game.

But the actual reason why this constant forward thrust is put into the game on the top, on a tweak in a settings-file is this: the flight-system in the game is really inertia-based, or it has somewhat newtonian physics. So that if you push the ship forward and release the throttle, you continue to drift, as you turn - until you hit the throttle again.

In other words. Some knuckledragger decided to "fix" the lack of pointlessly arcade controls in No Man's Sky - before release, before anyone outside [our wonderful friends at] Sony [who we all love and wish a happy and long life] saw the game - by hardcoding in a constant forward thrust factor in a settings-file. The ship moves forward at a constant rate in space, in planetary flight, while the nose is grinding through a space-station, while punching through the insane number of asteroids in the planet-systems - because some [amazingly talented] person at Sony decided to remove the inertia-based flight in the dog-fights. [Flowers!]

So if you remove that constant forward thrust from this settings-file, you suddenly you can fly just like those pirates are flaunting it in front of your face all the time.

After looking at things a bit more, it also turns out that there are remnants of procedural systems for several other elements in the actual code that is deployed. And that for example the "e3 scan" effect is also actually in the code. It's just been replaced with something else that looks like shit.

So now you also know why Hello Games are staying quiet: they have had some kind of spat with Sony, and ended up losing. And then having had to replace, systematically, pretty much all individual effects and systems with something similar that has been tweaked /slightly/. Just a little bit, to turn the game from the aesthetic HG wanted, and into gritty space-marine vaseline smear. And the game we have here is, like I've suspected all along, the ps4 build, tweaked to shit by some process of adjusting it to players who have a single-digit IQ, way below the required score in the 30s that is needed to play the game normally. And Hello Games can't do anything with any of those "minor" tweaks now. And are of course locked in by having to keep the ps4/single digit IQ tweaks in all versions of the game.

"Moving forward" with the ps4pron and the "hd patches", etc., is just not going to change any of that. The final build contains the idiot-tweaks like the one that cripples the flight-system, and they can't change that without Sony accepting that the princes and princesses at Sony (the kids of the higher-ups who apparently populate a lot of the positions downwards in the company) actually does an incredibly bad job that costs the company money. In that they force their moron-conventions on people and ruining their hobby for them. Even when it's a game that isn't even published by Sony on PC. To the point where people don't want to play games again, they want refunds, and throw up in their space-visor.

Seriously, how long did it take to get all these effects changed? How many man-hours have been involved here to tweak the game to be less impressive than it was on gamefloor demos a year ago? It's unbelievable.

I've explained this before - but this is not the first time shit like this has ended extremely talented studios involved with Sony. And I'm talking disbanded studios that lose the right to use the tech, publish titles in the future based on the even the concept of the original game, etc. Either via "title and type of game is associated with the playstation brand", or any other amount of "we own you and you owe us for your existence, bow down and pleases us or else" legal arguments.

Let's hope that Hello Games doesn't have the same luck here. Also, I personally hope that Sony goes out of publishing forever. In all areas of electronics and games. But at least if you buy something with the Sony label on, know what you're supporting).

It's not just Sony in the AAA publishing industry that regularly makes games less interesting/awesome than their devs wanted them to be. I guess NMS just had the misfortune of being that cooler game we all saw for a good few years before the issues getting it on PS4 took over?

But back to the mods, and the one you mention. You can get it from the Nexus site also here:

http://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/238

I use that site the most as it is (still!) faster than the original mod site for NMS, and i didn't link it directly as sometimes those links can change down the line.

Anyway the mod, as with Low Flight by HytekGaming, is not without it's quirks, so in general the very straight forward and (it could be said) slightly boring handling of the original game is changed. You will still sometimes lose control when flying over land (a bug remnant of the default release version?), or experience a difficulty in keeping flight level and controlled. You might boost backwards when trying to land (just override that by pressing 'w' and pointing your nose down) or other little odd behaviours.

I suspect it is because of the changes added late to the game before release that nipsen mentioned in his post, that is probably clashing with the tweaks the mod makers have made to that system.

Having said that i still can not recommend Low Flight or Spaceflight Overhaul enough. If you prefer to play with very few mods or even no mods most of the time in your games, either one of those will add a lot of fun to the default game and should be the real game default (preferably without the odd behaviour i mentioned) imho.

I recently uploaded this mod on Nexus:
http://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/300/?

It basically updates LowFlighy by Hytek for 1.09 and reduces lowest speed on surface.
The idea behind it is to make as little changes as possible, so don't expect any flight model overhaul.

Just to share something I'm using since last week...