Part of the Base Building series:

Quick Answer

  • Glitch building is a set of input tricks that place parts the build menu refuses to place: scaled to arbitrary sizes, clipped into each other, or floating where nothing snaps.
  • Three techniques carry almost every build: the wire glitch (scale anything), the snap glitch (place a part centred where a different part would have gone), and adjacency glitching (use one part's ghost position to place another).
  • All of them come down to the same physical skill: pressing two inputs on the same frame. That is the whole difficulty.
  • Nothing here is a cheat or an exploit against other players. It uses the base editor's own placement rules against itself and stays entirely inside your own save.
  • Glitch-built parts are not guaranteed to survive updates. Parts have vanished, drifted, and become undeletable across past patches.
  • Build on a freighter or a flat, boring planet while you learn. Terrain regeneration will eat a glitch build sunk into a hillside.
  • If a technique stops working after a patch, that is normal. The community re-derives them every major update.

Overview

The build menu in No Man's Sky is a set of rules: this part snaps to that socket, this part scales between these two limits, this part cannot overlap that one. Glitch building is what happens when you find the seams in those rules.

It matters because the gap between a menu-legal base and a glitch base is enormous. Menu-legal building gives you cuboid rooms, prefab corridors and a handful of decorative props at fixed sizes. Glitch building gives you a hundred-metre-tall wall panel, a hab room buried inside a rock face, a floor made from stacked landing pads, and light sources hidden inside solid geometry. Every base you have ever seen a screenshot of and thought "how" was glitch built.

The techniques have a reputation for being fiddly and secretive, and that reputation is half earned. They are fiddly. They are not secret. What follows is what each one actually does, in the order you should learn them.

One honest framing before you start: this is the advanced end of base building. If you are still working out power and wiring, go and build a normal base first. Glitch techniques multiply what you can already do; they do not substitute for knowing what a Biodome costs.

The Skill Underneath Everything: Simultaneous Inputs

Every glitch on this page is the same move. You put the game into one state, then leave that state and place a part at the same moment, so the placement code runs against the state it was mid-way through leaving.

That is why the tutorials all say things like "press Y and RT together". They are not being vague. The window is genuinely a frame or two, and hitting it is a physical skill you build by repetition.

Three things make it far easier:

Use a controller if you have one. The two inputs sit under different fingers. On mouse and keyboard, the equivalent binds often want two keys on the same hand.

Rebind first. If your wire-mode key and your place key are awkward together, move one. There is no purity points system here, and the settings and controls guide covers where the rebinding menu lives.

Accept a low hit rate at first. Ten attempts to land one wire glitch is a normal first session. It drops to two or three attempts within an hour.

PC players do sometimes bind the paired press to a macro, and there is no in-game penalty for doing so. It changes nothing about the result: the same glitch, landed more reliably.

The Wire Glitch: Scaling Anything

This is the headline technique and the one worth learning first.

What it does: it lets you scale parts that the build menu will not let you scale, including wall panels, cuboid rooms, decorations and light sources. Scaled up, a single wall panel becomes a cliff. Scaled down, a Biodome becomes a table ornament.

How it works: electrical wire has a length. When you place a part while the game is still thinking about the wire, the part inherits that length as its scale.

The sequence:

  1. Select a part from the build menu that scales normally, and confirm it is showing green (placeable).
  2. Enter wire mode: the electrical wiring input, Triangle on PlayStation and Y on Xbox by default, with the matching bind on PC.
  3. Click to anchor one end of the wire on a surface, then draw the wire out to a visible length. The length you draw is the scale you get.
  4. Press the exit-wire-mode input and the place-part input on the same frame.
  5. You should see a scaled version of the wire sitting in the world. That scaled wire is now your reference object.
  6. With the scale captured, cycle to the part you actually want and place it against that reference.

The trap everybody hits: a scaled-down wire is almost invisible. Draw your first ones on a surface with high contrast, or drop a marker object next to the spot, because losing the wire means starting the whole sequence again. Do this over a flat metal freighter floor, not over grass at night.

What it is worth: enormous walls for cliffside builds, floor tiles sized to a room you designed rather than a room the menu offered, and prop scaling for detail work. The scaled part keeps its collision, so an oversized wall panel is a real wall you cannot walk through.

The Snap Glitch: Placing the Wrong Part on Purpose

What it does: it places the part after the one you selected, centred exactly where the selected part's ghost was sitting. Because parts in the build menu have different footprints and different snap behaviour, this lets a part with no valid snap point inherit the position of one that had a perfect snap.

The sequence:

  1. In the build menu, select the part immediately before the one you actually want, in menu order.
  2. Position it where you want the real part to end up, and let it snap normally. Green light.
  3. Press the cycle-to-next-part input and the place input on the same frame.
  4. The next part in the menu appears, centred in the space the previous part would have occupied.

Why it matters: menu order becomes a tool. Learn which parts sit next to which in the list and you effectively gain a snapping system for parts that have none. This is how people get corridors meeting rooms at angles the game never intended, and how decorative pieces end up perfectly centred in a floor tile.

Keep a note on your phone of the menu order for the two or three sections you build from most. It sounds excessive; it saves a great deal of scrolling.

Adjacency Glitching: Borrowing a Valid Position

What it does: it uses one part's legal, green-lit ghost position to authorise a different part in the same spot, when the second part would normally show red.

The community term for the setup step is greenlighting: you position the part you are glitching from until the game is happy with it. That green state is the thing you are borrowing. Everything after that is timing.

This is the least mechanical of the three and the most situational. It is what you reach for when the game insists a part cannot go somewhere and you are certain it can: clipping into terrain, overlapping another structure, or sitting inside a prefab wall.

In practice, most builders learn adjacency glitching by need rather than by study. You want a light inside a solid pillar; the game says no; you find a part it says yes to in the same position, and use it as the key.

Where to Practise

Not on your main base.

Freighter interiors are the best training ground. Flat floors, no weather, no terrain, no power grid to accidentally disturb, and a clean visual background that makes a scaled-down wire findable. The freighter base building guide covers how much room you actually have to work with.

On a planet, pick boring and flat. A calm, low-hazard world with no storms lets you spend an hour on inputs rather than on hazard protection. Our best base locations guide covers what makes a site worth committing to.

Build a throwaway practice base. Put a Base Computer somewhere you do not care about, glitch until the techniques land consistently, then delete the base and start the real one. The parts you burn through are cheap; the frustration of ruining a build you loved is not.

The Risks, Stated Plainly

Glitch building is not supported by Hello Games. That has consequences worth understanding before you spend forty hours on a build.

Updates can break glitch builds. Parts placed through unintended states have, across the game's history, come back from a patch moved, missing, or in a state where the game will not let you delete them. Major updates are the risk point. This is not a reason to avoid glitch building; it is a reason to take screenshots.

Terrain regeneration is a separate and very real problem. The game only tracks so much terrain editing at once across all your bases combined. Push past that budget and old edits get forgotten, which means the hillside you carved out grows back through your floor. If your build depends on a hole you dug, you are building on sand. Use the Terrain Manipulator's Restore mode to undo edits you no longer need, and prefer builds that sit on terrain rather than inside it.

Part limits still apply. A base has a finite part count, and glitch builds burn through it fast, because detail work means many small parts. Check the counter in the build menu before you commit to a design.

Other players may not see it as you do. Complex glitch geometry can render differently for a visitor. Test with a friend before you promise anyone a tour, using the multiplayer guide to get them into your session.

What Changed, and Why Guides Go Stale

Two forces keep this topic moving.

The first is patches. Hello Games occasionally tightens placement rules, usually as a side effect of fixing something else, and a technique that worked last month stops. The community re-derives it, often within days, sometimes with a slightly different input order.

The second is that the base editor keeps gaining legitimate features. Some things that once needed a glitch are now buttons. Before you learn a technique to solve a specific problem, check whether the build menu simply does it now. Several updates have quietly added scaling and snapping options that made older tutorials redundant.

There is one area where we would rather flag uncertainty than guess: exact input pairings drift between platforms and patches, and we could not verify every binding against the current build. Treat the sequences above as the shape of each technique, confirm the two inputs in your own control menu, and expect to spend a few minutes finding the timing rather than getting it first try.

FAQ

Is glitch building bannable or against the rules?

No. There is no ban system attached to it, it does not touch other players' saves, and Hello Games has never treated it as cheating. Builders have used these techniques openly for years, including in community build events. The only real cost is that unsupported placement can behave unpredictably after updates.

What is the easiest glitch technique to learn first?

The wire glitch, despite being the most famous. It has the clearest feedback, either a scaled wire appears or it does not, so you know instantly whether your timing landed. The snap glitch is arguably easier on the fingers but harder to diagnose, because a failed attempt just places a normal part and looks like you fumbled the menu.

Why does my scaled part disappear after I reload?

Most often it did not disappear, it scaled to something near zero and is still there at a size you cannot see. Before assuming a part vanished, try deleting in the area and see whether a delete prompt appears. If parts genuinely go missing across a session, that is the unsupported-placement risk showing up, and it is the reason to screenshot progress on long builds.

Can I glitch build on a freighter?

Yes, and it is the recommended place to learn. Freighter interiors give you flat surfaces, no weather and no terrain to fight. The one thing to remember is that freighter builds are tied to the freighter, so a build there travels with you rather than sitting at a fixed address.

Does glitch building work the same on console and PC?

The techniques are identical; the inputs are not. Console players generally find the paired presses easier because the two inputs fall under different fingers. PC players more often rebind, and some use a macro for the wire glitch specifically. Nothing about the result differs between platforms.

Will my glitch base survive the next update?

Probably, but nobody can promise it. Small patches almost never disturb builds. Major updates that touch the base editor are where problems have historically appeared. Take screenshots of anything you would be upset to lose, and avoid making a glitch build the only home for storage you depend on.

Key Takeaways

  • Learn the simultaneous-input skill first. Every technique on this page is the same physical move applied to a different menu state.
  • The wire glitch scales anything, and it is the technique that changes what your bases can look like. Learn it before the others.
  • The snap glitch turns build menu order into a positioning tool. Note the order of the sections you use most.
  • Adjacency glitching is the one you reach for when the game says no and you know better. Greenlight the source part, then borrow its position.
  • Practise on a freighter floor or a throwaway base, never on the build you care about.
  • Respect terrain regeneration. A glitch build inside a carved hillside is a build with a timer on it, and Restore mode is how you buy back budget.
  • Screenshot long builds. Unsupported placement is stable most of the time and occasionally is not, and updates are when it shows.