Greetings to all y'all anomalies, compliant and otherwise.  I come bearing a trove of ReShade presets with which to enliven and diversify your interplanetary adventures.  Quite a few lovely ReShades already exist for NMS.  I'm not out to recreate a "vivid", "cinematic", and/or "realistic" wheel that has been made and remade many times over already.  These here presets are neither realistic nor particularly cinematic, though the colors can be quite vivid.  Instead, I've drawn visual inspiration from analog still photography and the works of other shader artists like OhDeerSKR and L00ping (indeed, OhDeer is the one to thank for the lens effects and the color LUTs used in most of these).  If you have any questions about how to make it work, please read everything (and I do mean everything) as your question is probably answered somewhere in here. 


The NAVIGATOR ReShade series is named to commemorate some of Earth's most valiant explorers (who were not also, y'know, genocidal monsters- sorry/not sorry Columbus).  Some information on the individual presets and the amazing real-life Terrans who inspired them:


After much adventure and misadventure in the Caribbean, the absurdly named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca crashed his boat into Texas.  Over the course of the next eight years he and his crew walked to Sinaloa by way of the Gulf of California.  Along the way he worked as a hired hand for a succession of Indigenous communities, compiling in the process a prodigious volume of notes on the cultural practices of those he encountered.  Along the way Cabeza de Vaca showed aptitude for doctoring work, and was inducted into several medicine societies.  Eventually he made his way back to Spanish-occupied territory and spent the rest of his life advocating for Indigenous sovereignty and a cooperative colonial presence in the New World.

This preset provides warm reds and oranges and a broad tonal range.  A potent but lightweight depth of field effect helps to put the messy business of interstellar colonialism into some semblance of perspective.

Not actually a person, Hokule'a is a ship- a wa'a kaulua or double-hulled voyaging canoe to be specific.  The launch of the Hokule'a ("Star of Gladness") in 1975 came at a time of great reinvigoration of traditional Hawaiian culture.  The voyaging canoes of old carried the ancestral Hawaiians to Hawai'i, and it had been many generations since any had been built (in part due to restrictions on Indigenous cultural practices imposed by the US government on its Pacific colony-state).  Guided by traditional Polynesian navigator Mau Piailug, the Hokule'a sailed on trans-Pacific voyages to Tahiti, Aotearoa ("New Zealand") and Rapa Nui ("Easter Island").

This preset offers bright ruddy highlights, deep teal shadows, and a crisp viewpoint for the heroic past and vibrant future.



This preset is desaturated and cool as the glaciers of the Himalayas.


On June 16, 1904 Leopold Bloom ate a fried kidney, attended a funeral, bailed his buddy Steve out of a series of uncomfortable circumstances, and made love to his wife Molly.  The 1920 remake of the classic poem was pretty much the same as Homer's original, save for the change of Buck Mulligan's bathrobe from wine-dark to yellow.  Hello literature nerds.

This preset was based on a series I made for AC: Odyssey.  Mycenean oranges, Aegean greens, Phaiakian blues, and a soft, salt-worn Bloom effect.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.



This preset is bright and saturated, slightly softened by the fog of fictionalized memory.

Born into a Lemhi Shoshone family, the premonitorily named Saca-tzaw-meah ("Boat-puller") was abducted as a girl by Hidatsa raiders, who thought her name sounded like their Cagáàgawia ("Bird Woman").  The Hidatsas later sold her into slavery/marriage to a Quebecois trapper.  When Merriwether Lewis and William Clark's "Corps of Discovery Expedition" passed through her town, they engaged her husband as guide and forager.  He took Saca-tzaw-meah along as an interpreter and ambassador, despite her being pregnant at the time.  She delivered her son on the trail, and nursed the infant while bucking rapids, fighting bears, negotiating tense inter-cultural standoffs, like the consummate bad-ass she was.  At numerous points along the Expedition's long journey to the Pacific and back, the entire company would have starved/been eaten by predatory wildlife/killed by anti-colonial Indigenous folk/etc. were it not for the wildcrafting, doctoring, and negotiation skills of Saca-tzaw-meah (or "Janey"/"that Snake squaw" as Clark was fond of calling her).  Her and York, the other enslaved/not totally useless member of the Expedition.

This preset features bright skies, deep drop shadows, bold yellows and blues, and some snarky comment about American hypocrisy.


A man of great endurance, Ernest Shackleton participated in several voyages to the Antarctic in the early 1900's.  When the "Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition" went belly up in pack ice and seawater, Shackleton and his fellows engaged in a series of death-defying cold-weather survival and navigation feats, at one point crossing the Straits of Magellan in an open boat.  It was nuts.  Read Endurance, it's a great yarn and for all I know it really happened that way.

This preset was designed for frozen biomes, but its warm shadows and cool highlights look just as good when you finally escape from the icy wasteland.

A Ra'iatean priest and scholar of some note, Tupaia fell out of favor in high society about the time Englishman James Cook's expedition stopped at the island.  Seeing an opportunity to flee persecution for his discovered dalliance (real or imagined) with the queen, Tupaia sought shelter with the British.  As rector of Rai'atea's famous fare-'ai-ra'a-'upu (a sort of combination monastery, observatory, and finishing school) Tupaia was a renowned astronomer, linguist, artist, and historian.  Not knowing Tahiti from a hole in the sea, the British crew took him on as their navigator.  A bit like hiring Stephen Hawking to read a road atlas to you on a drive from New York to Chicago.  Tupaia was not well-liked by the crew, owing to his disconcerting habit of not instantly deferring to anything a White person said, refusing to run petty errands, and generally considering himself equal if not superior to his shipmates.

This preset is bright and balanced, with a cosmopolitan sophistication, but serviceable enough for getting around to a diverse array of planetary pit-stops.

Alfred Russel Wallace was the other guy who (along with the array of crewmates, Indigenous guides, porters, colleagues, family members, and other people in the background who contribute to the development of the ideas that 'great men' are famous for) came up with the idea of evolution.  A frequent correspondent of Charles Darwin's, Wallace developed his own theory of evolution while working in the field, first in the Amazon, later in the Malay Archipelago.  While both Wallace and Darwin were inspired by the noxious Thomas 'Social Darwinism' Malthus, Wallace kept thinking and theorizing where Darwin pretty much stopped at the dog-eat-dog/selfish gene/war of all against all stage.  (Without getting too far down the mutating rabbit-hole, where Darwin assumed that the individual organism was the fundamental unit of nature, and thus natural selection, Wallace perceived that the community of organisms- 'ecosystem' in the modern parlance- was the basic unit of life, and that natural selection resulted in a whole made more harmonious and adaptive over time.  Imagine how different the field of biology would be today if this latter view had been taken seriously for the last hundred-odd years.)  Unfortunately Wallace's leftist political perspectives did not endear him to the sorts of people who see to it that scientific expeditions and publications get funded then (and now, for that matter).  And so we all remember Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' and not Wallace's 'transmutation of species'.  An unrepentent spiritualist, anti-militarist, and advocate for economic reform and women's sufferage, Wallace continued to work as an activist until his death in 1913.

This preset looks just like one of those old-timey photographs of a man with a waistcoat and muttonchops holding aloft Sulawesi County's 1893 prize-winning tree-shrew.


Born Ma He to a Muslim family in Yunnan, young Ma was captured by a Ming patrol, castrated, and pressed into service in the court of Zhu Di, the prince destined to become the Yongle Emperor.  A confidant of the young emperor, the restyled Zhang He was given command of a couple of spare armies, and later the imperial treasure fleet.  This fleet conducted a series of trade and diplomatic expeditions throughout southeast Asia and along the coastlines of the Indian Ocean, just past the part of the map where it says 'here be dragons'.  A widely derided historical account traces Zhang He's further voyages across the Pacific to the coast of North America.  Widely derided, because how could a country like China in the mid-1400's ever possibly develop ocean-crossing technology without that magical European big-genocide energy?  (See also 'voyaging canoes' above.)  Anyway the dude had no nuts and still kicked oceans of ass; cut him some slack.

This preset provides a rich, balanced visual image- a little soft around the mid-tones but unquestionably capable of great things.

Now that I've finished my dissertation in counter-colonial history, some information about what this thing does and how it does it.  First you put the thing in the thing and then you- what, you want more detailed instructions?  OK, I guess everyone's gotta start somewhere.  If this is your very first ReShade, thank you for your interest.  Here's how to do it:

1. Download the latest ReShade.  Use the installer and follow the directions therein.  Go ahead and tell it to download all the possible shaders; you never know what you might want to layer onto these down the line.

2. Install the content of the NAVIGATOR RESHADE folder into your game's 'Binaries' folder.  Allow it to overwrite.

3. In-game, hit the 'Home' key to open up the ReShade GUI.  At the top, you'll see a drop-down menu with all of these presets, plus whatever else you've installed.  Try one out!

4. The 'Scroll Lock', 'Pause', and 'Page Down' keys are all hotkeyed to toggle border, frame, and lens dirt effects.  If you want 'em on for fancy picture taking, hit the keys.  If you want them off for regular play, hit the keys.  You can invert the values and change the colors of the borders in the ReShade GUI.  If you ask me "how do i disabble the black bars k thx??!?" I will either refer you to this point or say something both of us will regret.

5. If you don't like the way things look- either fiddle with the settings or switch the preset.  All of these look flippin' awesome in certain circumstances, and all of these look like total garbage in other circumstances.  With the absurd diversity of palettes, image space modifiers, shapes, and so on that this game creates- even more so with mods thrown into the mix- no ReShade preset is going to look fantastic all of the time.  Hence why this is a series and not a single 'one-size-fits-all' impossibility.  But really, take charge of your experience and use the ReShade GUI to make your own changes and adaptations to fit your own unique vision of how you want your game-world to look.

6. Many of these presets feature depth-of-field effects.  Some are subtle, some are not.  All can be turned on and off in the GUI.  You'll save a bit of FPS if you turn them off, but less than you might think.

7. Performance is going to be so variable, depending on your computer, the way you treat your computer, where in the game you happen to be, and so on, that I really have no idea how many FPS you're liable to lose or gain with each of these presets.  Experiment for yourself- it shouldn't take long for you to figure it out.

8. If you would like to build on this and develop your own ReShade presets for release, go for it!  Please be so kind as to give credit where credit is due.  Especially to OhDeerSKR, the one who made all the nice LUTs, frames, and lens effects.

9. Feel free to add your images to the gallery here!  Please title your images with the preset used.

10. Thanks for reading!  Enjoy the new ReShade setup and best wishes on your long journey to the Center.