No Man's Sky Accessibility Settings: Difficulty, Comfort and Motion Options

Part of the Tips & FAQ Series:

No Man's Sky Tips & Tricks Hub: Core principles (Start Here).

Best Quality of Life Settings: The general settings pass everyone should do.

Game Modes & Difficulty Settings Explained: What each mode changes.

Quick Answer

No Man's Sky has no single "Accessibility" menu. Its accessibility lives in three places: Custom difficulty, Visual settings, and VR comfort options.
Custom difficulty is the most powerful accessibility tool in the game and most players never open it. It can remove hazard damage, combat, fuel management, inventory limits and death penalties independently.
You can change difficulty settings mid-save, at any time, with no penalty and no achievement lockout outside Permadeath.
Captions for voiced content are on by default, and effectively all narrative content is delivered as text.
There is a colourblind option in the visual settings.
Known limitations: control remapping is restricted on some platforms, and community reports on in-game text scaling are inconsistent. Both are covered honestly below.
For motion sensitivity, the biggest wins are turning off head bob, reducing FoV shake, and disabling the scanline/visor effects — not the VR comfort menu, unless you are in VR.

Overview

No Man's Sky is unusual among survival games in that almost every source of pressure is optional. Hazards, hunger-equivalents, fuel, combat, inventory scarcity and death penalties are all separately switchable. That makes it one of the more adaptable games in its genre — but only if you know the options exist, because Hello Games buried them under "Custom" on the difficulty screen rather than labelling them accessibility.

This guide treats them as what they functionally are. It also states plainly where the game has gaps, because a guide that pretends a game is fully accessible is not useful to anyone deciding whether they can play it.

Custom difficulty lets you set each pressure source independently. You can reach it when creating a save, and — this is the important part — change it later at any point from the options menu.

The settings that matter most for reducing friction:

Setting	What turning it down does
Survival / hazard damage	Removes the constant hazard-protection drain that forces you back to shelter. The single biggest quality-of-life change for players who find the game stressful.
Life support drain	Stops the timer on simply existing outdoors.
Combat / enemy strength	Reduces or effectively removes Sentinel and pirate threat. Useful if reaction-speed combat is a barrier.
Fuel usage	Removes launch-fuel and hyperdrive management, which is the most common source of early-game frustration.
Inventory / stack limits	Raises stack sizes so inventory management stops being a chore.
Death consequences	Controls whether you lose your inventory on death and whether a grave run is required.
Crafting costs / free crafting	Removes resource-gathering as a gate on building and technology.
Ground vehicle and ship damage	Stops incidental collisions from becoming repair sessions.

Two things worth knowing before you touch these:

Changing difficulty mid-save does not disable achievements in general. The exception is mode-specific ones — the Permadeath and Survival centre achievements require actually being in those modes. See the achievements guide.
Creative Mode is not the same thing. Creative removes progression along with the friction, and disables most progression achievements. Custom difficulty on a Normal save keeps progression intact. If your goal is a relaxed game rather than a sandbox, use Custom, not Creative.

For a player who finds survival mechanics actively unpleasant, the configuration that removes the most friction while keeping the game a game is: hazard damage off, life support drain off, fuel usage off, death consequences minimal, everything else left alone. That leaves exploration, building and story fully intact.

Visual and Display Options

Colourblind mode is available in the visual settings and adjusts the game's colour handling.
HUD elements can be individually reduced or disabled. Turning off the visor scanline and reducing HUD clutter improves legibility considerably.
Photo Mode doubles as an accessibility tool: it pauses the world and lets you freely position the camera to read something you could not read in motion. The Photo Mode guide covers the controls.

On text size: community reports about in-game text scaling are inconsistent, with some sources describing a font-size option and others reporting text size cannot be adjusted. We have not been able to confirm which is current across all platforms, and we would rather say that than guess. If small text is a blocker for you, check the visual settings on your specific platform before buying, or play on a display where you can sit closer.

Audio and Captions

Captions for voiced content are enabled by default.
Almost all narrative content in No Man's Sky is delivered as on-screen text rather than speech, which makes the game unusually workable without audio. Alien dialogue, terminal logs, monolith text and mission briefings are all read, not heard.
Audio sliders for music, effects and ambience are separate, so you can drop ambient noise without losing audio cues.

The practical consequence: No Man's Sky is one of the more deaf-accessible games in its genre almost by accident, because its storytelling is textual by design.

Motion Sickness and Comfort

Flat-screen play is where most players hit motion problems, and the standard advice to "use the VR comfort settings" does not apply unless you are actually in VR.

What helps on a monitor:

Reduce or disable head bob and camera shake in the visual settings.
Lower the field-of-view shake during pulse flight — the warp and pulse effects are the most common trigger.
Disable the visor scanline and screen-space effects, which add motion at the edges of vision.
Cap your frame rate to something stable rather than letting it fluctuate. A steady 60 is more comfortable than an unstable 90. The performance guide covers how.
Use an Exocraft instead of the jetpack for long-distance ground travel. Vehicle movement is smoother than jetpack-hopping.

In VR, the game exposes a separate comfort set including movement and turning options. The VR guide covers that in full.

Where the Game Falls Short

An honest list, because this is the section that decides whether the game works for someone:

Control remapping is limited. Community reports describe restricted rebinding, particularly on console. PC players have more flexibility, including through Steam's own controller configuration layer, which is often the practical workaround.
No screen-reader support. Menu navigation is visual.
Some interactions require held inputs rather than toggles, and toggle alternatives are not universally available.
Text scaling is unclear, see above.
The inventory interface is dense and involves a lot of small targets, which custom difficulty's stack-size settings mitigate but do not solve.

Where the game does well: no reaction-speed content is mandatory, no timed content is mandatory, and difficulty is fully adjustable mid-save. Where it does badly: input and interface flexibility.

FAQ

Not as a single labelled menu. The options are split across Custom difficulty, visual settings, audio settings and, in VR, a comfort menu.

Can I change difficulty after starting a save?

Yes, at any time from the options menu, with no penalty. This is the most useful thing in this guide. The only exception is Permadeath, which cannot be switched out of.

Will changing difficulty disable achievements?

Not generally. Only the mode-specific achievements. Reaching the centre in Survival or Permadeath. Require those modes. Creative Mode is the one that disables progression achievements.

Are there subtitles?

Captions for voiced content are on by default, and nearly all story content is text-based rather than spoken.

Is there a colourblind mode?

Yes, in the visual settings.

What helps with motion sickness?

Turn off head bob and camera shake, disable visor screen effects, cap the frame rate to something stable, and use Exocraft rather than the jetpack for ground travel.

Can I remap the controls?

Partially, and it varies by platform. PC has more flexibility than console, and Steam's controller configuration is the usual workaround for anything the in-game menu will not do.

Key Takeaways

Custom difficulty is the accessibility menu, and it works mid-save. Hazards, fuel, combat, inventory and death penalties are all independently adjustable.
Use Custom on a Normal save, not Creative, if you want low friction without losing progression or achievements.
Captions are on by default and the game is overwhelmingly text-led, which makes it strong without audio.
Colourblind mode exists; HUD elements can be individually reduced.
For motion comfort, kill head bob and camera shake and stabilise your frame rate before touching anything else.
The real gaps are control remapping and interface density, not difficulty, and text-scaling behaviour is worth checking on your own platform rather than trusting any single source.