No Man’s Sky continues to grow and expand with the seemingly endless updates developer Hello Games continues to toss out for free. Lately, user-made ships have been all the rage. The range of options now available for a custom spacecraft has led to some stunning original creations as well as tributes to classic ships from other science fiction franchises. But Tosk, an NMS fan who’s been playing the game since launch, recently took to recreating not a ship, but a key location found in Studio Ghibli’s classic animated film, My Neighbor Totoro. Check out Tosk’s video walkthrough of his creation here:
I recently DM’d back and forth with Tosk to get a sense of the challenge of finishing a project like this in No Man’s Sky. Like any worthy endeavor, all it takes is time, perseverance, and, perhaps most importantly, inspiration. In this case, that was Tosk’s love of Studio Ghibli films. “Totoro is my favorite,” he told me. “It’s like a warm nostalgia blanket! Such a sweet innocent story of childhood wonders. It [also] has environmental themes but doesn’t hit you over the head with it.”
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Tosk kicked off the build in early 2025. The first challenge? Finding the right planet. Tosk scouted NMS’ procedurally generated universe far and wide for not just a suitable habitat, but one adorned with the right “Ghibli green,” he told me. That search alone took a month. “I did find about three or four sites that were possibilities,” he said, “but to find the right combination of color flora and a spot where I could build on flat land with a cave nearby a hill above it took a long time.” Just a random paradise planet wouldn’t do.
Once he found that picture-perfect world, Tosk said it took around 100 hours to put the base together, much of it made “using free placement, so it was put together by hand, which takes a long time. It came in at just under 3000 parts, which is the build limit for uploading in NMS.” As it was done on PS5, no mods were used but, as he describes in the walkthrough video, there’s some “scale and color glitching” at work. He also “used the film a lot as reference for the floor plan, but the layout changed a bit from shot to shot, so I had to take a few creative liberties.”
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Things were all going according to plan before a recent NMS update caused a few complications. “I was about 90-percent finished,” he said, “when [the last update] reset a lot of the colors of the building. So I had to go back and rebuild a lot of it. I nearly gave up on it then, to be honest.”
Thankfully, Tosk persisted. Unfortunately, due to an issue with the game right now, users can’t visit Tosk’s creation without him also being online and present in the area. But even when that issue is fixed, you’ll have to do some work to find Totoro’s location. The planet is in the Istentam galaxy, but Tosk has deliberately hidden the glyphs necessary to find it in his tour video.
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I was curious what project is next for Tosk. “I’ve been thinking about making the floating island from Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” another Studio Ghibli joint. “But to be honest,” he said, the Totoro build “has taken so long that I might just play for a while.”
