No Man’s Sky Steam Deck Settings: The Render Distance Fix for Stutter-Free Landings

Two of the most-cited No Man’s Sky Steam Deck settings guides disagree on three settings at once. One tested config keeps Textures, Reflections, and Terrain Tessellation on High and calls Shadows and Volumetric Effects ‘Standard.’ The other recommends Medium textures, Low shadows, and Low reflections across the board [1][2]. Neither guide explains why they landed in different places, and that gap is exactly where most players get stuck guessing. This guide reconciles both configs, verified against the current patch (The Swarm, 6.45.1) [3], and identifies the one setting most responsible for the stutter you hit during planetary landings — which isn’t the one most guides point to.

Quick Start: Stable 30 FPS in 5 Minutes

1. Open the Steam Deck performance overlay (three-dot button) and set the framerate limit to 30 FPS — leave the in-game cap alone
2. In-game, set Anti-Aliasing to TAA (Low), not plain TAA or FXAA
3. Leave FidelityFX Super Resolution turned OFF — this one is counterintuitive, see below
4. Set Resolution Scaling to 90%
5. Set Shadow Quality and Volumetric Effects to Standard
6. In Quick Access Settings, cap TDP at 9W and set GPU clock to 1100MHz with a Linear scaling filter
7. Leave Textures and Reflections on High for now — resource and terrain readability matters more on a 7-inch screen than most players expect
8. If planets still stutter hard on landing after all of the above, drop Terrain Tessellation to Standard — this is the actual fix, not render distance or shadows [4]

The Verified Settings Table

These aren’t really contradictory guides — they’re two different testing goals. SteamDeckHQ’s numbers come from sustained hands-on benchmarking with logged power draw (11-15W) and temperatures (62-67°C) at one fixed configuration [1]. JEU.VIDEO’s guide optimizes for the worst case: busy player bases, colonies, and space combat, where reflections and volumetric fog are more likely to spike frametime than in the open desert biome most benchmarks run in [2]. Start with SteamDeckHQ’s config as your baseline, since it’s the only one with measured thermal data behind it. Drop toward JEU.VIDEO’s Low reflections and volumetric effects only if you spend a lot of time in crowded bases or fights and notice frame drops there specifically — don’t apply both sets of downgrades at once, or you’ll be leaving FPS on the table for no visual gain.

Why Planetary Landings Stutter No Matter What You Set

Both SteamDeckHQ and JEU.VIDEO independently confirm the same stutter pattern: it happens roughly every minute during exploration, tied to loading new areas and generating procedural terrain meshes rather than to raw GPU load [1][2]. That distinction matters. Shadows, reflections, and volumetric effects are shading costs — they make each frame more expensive to render. Terrain generation is a different kind of cost: as you cross into a new chunk of a planet’s surface, especially during atmospheric entry, the game has to build the terrain mesh for that chunk from scratch. Lowering shading settings doesn’t touch that cost at all, which is why players report stutter persisting even at otherwise-stable frame rates.

Terrain Tessellation is the setting that governs how much of that mesh work happens: it dynamically subdivides terrain polygons to add surface detail in real time, which is exactly the kind of work that spikes during a fresh chunk load. That’s an inference, not a documented Hello Games mechanic breakdown, but it matches what players actually observe: multiple players in the same Steam Deck discussion thread report dropping Terrain Tessellation to Standard (its lowest setting, effectively disabled) as the single change that fixed stutter that survived every other adjustment, with one reporting roughly a 90% reduction [4]. Visually, the loss is limited to slightly flatter close-up terrain detail on vegetated planets — not something most players notice from a cockpit view during a landing sequence.

This creates a genuine trade-off SteamDeckHQ’s benchmarked config doesn’t resolve: their tested settings keep Terrain Tessellation on High and simply absorb the periodic stutter as a cost of terrain detail [1]. If landing stutter breaks your immersion or interrupts precision flying near cliffs and canyons, drop Tessellation to Standard. If you barely notice it and want the extra terrain detail, leave it High — this is a genuine preference call, not a case where one guide is simply wrong.

For players still hitting stutter after that change, one community-reported fix goes deeper: editing the TKGraphicsSettings file to set NumHighThreads to 0 and NumLowThreads to your CPU’s logical core count, enabling both UseTerrainTextureCache and UseArbSparseTexture, then marking the file read-only so the game can’t silently revert it. Pair that with enabling background Vulkan shader processing in Steam’s Shader Pre-Caching settings [4]. This is an advanced tweak — back up the original file first, since a malformed edit can affect launch stability.

FSR Off: The Setting Most Guides Get Backwards

On most handhelds, FSR upscaling is close to a free FPS boost, so it’s easy to assume turning it on is always correct. No Man’s Sky at 90% resolution scaling is the exception. SteamDeckHQ’s testing found that enabling FSR at this scale introduces visible screen-tearing artifacts that aren’t present with it off [1] — a real cost for a marginal gain, since 90% scaling is already close enough to native that FSR has little upscaling work left to do. Leave it off unless you drop resolution scaling meaningfully below 90%, at which point it’s worth testing again on your own hardware.

Settings by Player Type

Battery Life and TDP: What You’re Trading For Frames

At SteamDeckHQ’s benchmarked 9W TDP cap and 1100MHz GPU clock, No Man’s Sky draws 11-15W total and runs 3 to 3.5 hours on a full charge, with the Deck holding 62-67°C under sustained load [1]. That’s a realistic exploration-session number, not a best-case menu-screen figure. Raising the TDP cap buys you more headroom for High settings across the board, but the return is small in practice: this game’s frame-time cost comes more from terrain streaming than from raw shader throughput, so extra wattage mostly goes to heat rather than meaningfully smoother landings. If you want to stretch a session further, the bigger lever is Terrain Tessellation on Standard plus the 9W cap together, not raising the TDP limit. For a full breakdown of how TDP, refresh rate, and screen brightness each affect Deck battery life independent of any specific game, see our Steam Deck battery life guide.

Fixing the ‘Starts in Mouse and Keyboard Mode’ Control Bug

No Man’s Sky gained full Steam Deck support and dedicated touch controls back in the 2022 Sentinel update [5], but a recurring bug still has the game boot into Mouse/Keyboard input mode on Deck instead of recognizing the built-in controls. Three fixes are reported working, roughly in order of how much effort they take: hold L2 during the main menu to force the game to re-detect controller input; if that fails, open the Steam overlay’s controller settings and manually select a ‘Recommended’ template instead of whatever layout is currently active; and if neither works, go into the game’s own Settings menu, open the Developer tab, select both ‘Clear Selected Controller Layout’ and ‘Delete Proton Files,’ then restart the Deck entirely [6]. Try them in that order — most players don’t need to go past the first one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I trust SteamDeckHQ’s config or JEU.VIDEO’s?

Start with SteamDeckHQ’s, since it’s the only one of the two backed by logged power and temperature data rather than general recommendations [1]. Move individual settings toward JEU.VIDEO’s Low reflections and volumetric effects only for specific scenarios — crowded bases, space combat — where you’ve actually noticed a drop, rather than applying their full config wholesale. Swapping the whole config for a lower-fidelity one when your problem is only in bases costs you image quality everywhere else for no benefit.

Is lowering render distance the fix for planetary landing stutter?

Not exactly — No Man’s Sky doesn’t have a single setting simply labeled ‘render distance’ the way some games do. The setting player reports actually tie to roughly a 90% stutter reduction is Terrain Tessellation, which governs how much detail the game adds to terrain geometry in real time rather than how far it draws. Set that to Standard first before assuming you need to sacrifice a different setting entirely [4].

Why does FSR make things worse instead of better here?

At the recommended 90% resolution scaling, the game is already rendering close to native resolution, so FSR has almost no upscaling work to do — but SteamDeckHQ’s testing still found it introduces screen-tearing at that scale [1]. FSR earns its keep when you’re upscaling from a meaningfully lower internal resolution; at 90% scale here, it’s mostly downside.

Does the 40 FPS mode on Steam Deck OLED actually work well?

Cautiously, according to JEU.VIDEO’s guide — the OLED’s higher refresh ceiling can sustain 40 FPS in lighter areas, but the same guide warns against chasing it everywhere, since it’s prone to breaking in colonies and space fights specifically [2]. Test it in your own save rather than assuming the OLED model removes the trade-offs entirely; if it isn’t holding steady in the areas you actually play in, revert to 30 FPS.

Sources

• SteamDeckHQ — No Man’s Sky Steam Deck Review
• JEU.VIDEO — No Man’s Sky Steam Deck Settings Guide
• Hello Games — No Man’s Sky Official Release Log
• Steam Community — “Stuttering on planets” discussion thread
• ScreenRant — No Man’s Sky Gets Full Steam Deck Support in Sentinel Update
• Steam Community — Controller/Mouse-Keyboard mode fix thread

Looking for the same reconciled-config treatment on a different Steam Deck game? Our Best Terraria Steam Deck Settings and Controls guide covers a lighter, 2D-rendered game where the trade-offs are simpler. For the broader principles behind every setting change in this guide — what shadows, anti-aliasing, and resolution scaling actually cost on any PC or handheld — see our complete PC game settings optimization guide.

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.