What is a offline installer?
What does it accomplish?
where do you find it?

Downloadable Game installation files for individual games, drm free Installs the game Click your name at the top of the forum, choose Games to show your library of games bought from GOG.

Click one of your games

Scroll down and click the "Download Offline Backup Installers"

screenshot - https://i.imgur.com/8ucNf3a.png

You can also download patches if you already have the last version of the game installed .. Personally I just download the main game installers I need and overwrite the installation because I wish to keep the latest backup on an external USB drive in case of times I don't have internet.

The Offline Installers are hidden away because GOG want you to use GOG Galaxy instead to install / manage your games, but unless you need GOG Galaxy's features for any specific game (like multiplayer), you don't really need it to be installed. Some games need it, some don't, No Man's Sky can be played without any online connectivity, or with online connectivity. It's a personal choice really. If you do use GOG Galaxy instead, have a good look through all of its settings for things you may not need - GOG Galaxy by default has a game overlay, which can conflict with other game overlays (NVidia Geforce Experience/Steam Client Overlay/Win 10 Gamebar .. If you have any of these in use aswell then you are better using only one that you want to be active).

Anyway if you are old enough to remember buying games from a game shop which came with an installation CD or DVD, then the Offline Installers are like all the files you executed from that medium to install the game on your hard drive.

If you play NMS with the offline installer and not with GOG Galaxy, your quicksilver store won't get updated and you won't get any daily quests.
To solve this issue you can follow my tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhbQaX9f8AM&t=1s

If you don't want to use daily quests and just update your quicksilver store, you can also use my mod here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/1782?tab=description

The good thing about using offline installers is that you can stay with a specific version and you don't need to upgrade.
Cause updates also offer new bugs and especially big updates can be a real problem sometimes.

Not true. You can use offline installers and also use galaxy to connect online for online features.

What AlpakaDream said is true .. I see what you are saying, that both methods can be used, because if you use Offline Installers while you also have GOG Galaxy installed, GOG Galaxy will pick up the new game installation (if the game is installed in the same Hard Drive path as you have set in GOG Galaxy settings) and you can launch the game from GOG Galaxy as if GOG Galaxy had installed it, and use the online features if GOG Galaxy is running in the background.
But to say AlpakaDreams post was not true is incorrect.

Note to anyone new to GOG - Mixing installation methods can cause some minor confused installation issues, generally it doesn't but I have seen one case on a Discord topic where that was the case.

Maybe my psot was a bit unclear: I meant when you use the offline version only, wihtout using GOG Galaxy at all. You're right, if you play the offline version together with gog galaxy, you can use the online features.

Hello;

So, just to clarify, what features are dependant on the galaxy client?

Or in others words, what can't can't you do or what is unavailable when '"offline"?



I'm asking, as I'm thinking of buying the game, but galaxy doesn't work with my system, so if like to know how how much game I would be potentially getting, so to speak, when using the offline installers.

I'm just going to assume you're asking about single-player features, since it should be obvious that no multi-player functionality will work without Galaxy.

1) There is a system of "milestones" that you achieve by completing certain tasks - for example: earning money, walking on planets, learning words in an alien language, destroying sentinels (also pirates), surviving in harsh environments, and others. There are two NPCs in the nexus which will give you rewards for reaching these milestones and for discovering planets, minerals, plants, and animals. In past versions of these games, these bonuses were handles by Nada and Polo. After the nexus was created (in the Beyond update), these were moved to Ares and Helios. Without Galaxy, Helios will only work ONCE and Ares will never work. Note that these USED to work in single-player (offline mode), and there is no specific multi-player aspect to them, but it now requires an internet connection for them to function correctly.

2) There is a shop where you can purchase items with "Quicksilver". Without Galaxy, or editing your save game (or using a mod), this shop has virtually nothing in it, and even with the mod (or using the save game editor), there is virtually no quicksilver to be had, because the offline means of acquiring it are extremely limited.

3) Almost an entire update (living ship) is meaningless without Galaxy, as you won't have access to the living ship egg required to make use of this update. With a save editor (or the mod), you can find it in the quicksilver store, but without using the editor to cheat yourself a large amount of quicksilver, you won't be able to actually buy one.

4) There are quests which cannot be solved - you can encounter NPCs that ask you to take actions (e.g. placing message buoys) which the game will NOT allow you to build unless you're online. Without the ability to do this, you cannot complete the quest, and you'll be stuck with it unless you abandon it. I wrote "quests", but in fairness I only personally know of that one, but there may be more. After getting stuck with a quest it was literally impossible to solve, I stopped interacting with crashed NPCs, so if there are more, I haven't run into them.

5) There are various quests available which do provide quicksilver, and although they are normally associated with online play, they are not explicitly associated with multi-player play, since many if not all of them can be completed solo. I have yet to find any of these quests, presumably because I'm not running the game via Galaxy.

While none of these individually is enough to seriously detract from the game, they are symptoms of a larger problem where Hello Games is trying to force the player to maintain an online-connection in order to play, even when the player is in single-player mode. GoG has responded to complaints by pointing at that it supposedly says somewhere on the game description page that some online features require an internet connection. This is untrue. The truth is that ALL online features require an internet connection, since that is LITERALLY the definition of an online feature. Anyone telling you that "some" online features require an internet connection is obviously either stupid or trying to hide the truth.

The truth that they're hiding is that certain single-player (non-multiplayer) features require an internet connection, and there is absolutely no logical reason that these single-player features should be online features... except that they're trying to push you into maintaining an online connection and force you into using either steam or GoG's steam wannabe - Galaxy. These features do not require an online connection because they were part of the game prior to the Beyond update and worked fine without one.

edit: To be clear, I mean that that while these features DO require an online connection, there is no inherent necessity for it, unlike the obvious necessity of an online connection if you want to play with other friends or visit other people's bases. The necessity is artificially added by Hello Games, and not an intrinsic aspect of the feature.

Thank you for taking the time to answer questions.
I'm truth, b it was not entirely obvious to me that some game features and no multiplayer features would work with out galaxy. I'm not a huge online player at all and my only point of similar reference is Elite Dangerous, which doesn't require a third party client to access it's features.

While I worked expect this from steam, I was really unsure how totally woven galaxy was into the game's function. I guess I was hoping it added more convienence than making the game fully functional. I understand that even single player games can have an online component (challenge levels, scoreboards, news, etc), so I really had no clue what to expect and reading the description on the game page was not very illuminating.

Thank you again for the help. I hope I did not detail the thread too much. You helped me immensely.

Excellent summary Toccatta!

@denyasis: most content (98%) is available in a completely offline game. Most notable exceptions are the living ship and quicksilver items

May i ask what system you have that Galaxy won't run on it?

Certainly, I'm currently running openSuse Tumbleweed. While the game is not "officially" supported, it is reported to run well and the dev is known to be s some what supportive, including apparent fixes that target WINE ( although I'm sure those fix windows issues as well).

I hope that helps, and I really appreciate everyone's information here.

I was able to run it on Linux Mint this year.
Only thing i had was that i needed to use the Vulkan driver by Wine because the one of NMS was not detected. But then it was good playble (maybe 10-20 Frames behind windows).

I made a mod so that Players who prefer to play offline can get quicksilver, too:

https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/1814

You can now get Quicksilver by doing these things:

KILLING DRONES
- 5% Chance to get 5 Quicksilver by killing drones
- 10% Chance to get 5 Quicksilver by killing Quads
- 20% Chance to get 10 Quicksilver by killing Walkers

NEXUS MISSIONS
- 25% Chance for Mega-Nexus Missions to give you 250 Quicksilver as Reward
- 20% Chance for Normal-Nexus Missions to give you 125 Quicksilver as Reward

DERELICT FREIGHTERS
- You can find Quicksilver in Derelict Freighters again (same Chance as in Halloween Update)


You can use this mod together with my Offline Shop - Mod to unlock things like the living Egg for the Quicksilver Trader:
https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/1782?tab=description