Hello Games has snuck out a pre-holiday update for No Man's Sky, letting you fill the normally fairly serene galaxy with your own loud musical creations. The ByteBeat is a synthesiser you can plonk down to turn even the dreariest desert world into the hottest festival spot in the system.  

The synth lets you access the game's new audio creation suite, and frankly it looks pretty damn intimidating. I listen to music and once used to bang on some drums, and that's about as far as my technical knowledge extends when it comes to music. Luckily, the ByteBeat handles the complicated stuff, procedurally generating presets for you to fiddle with to create your own tunes. 

If you're feeling bolder, you can take over from the AI and create music from scratch, starting with the maths used to create waveforms. Or you can be like me and let it generate something entirely random and hope for the best. For more complicated compositions, you can also build more devices, rows and rows of them, adding more tracks. 

Your music deserves an appropriate setting, and No Man's Sky already has a base editing tool that will help you make anything from a dance club to torture chamber that blasts dubstep into your victims' ears. You can sync the music to lights, too, letting you craft a light show to accompany the track. 

Along with the ByteBeat, the update includes a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks. Check out the patch notes here. 

Triangular base building parts were recently added to the free-flying sci-fi sim No Man's Sky as part of the big Synthesis Update. Compared to other new features, like starship upgrades and a new terrain editing system and a first-person exocraft, new floor tiles don't sound like a very big deal. But those three-sided bits are actually what enabled this very cool recreation of Doom's famed E1M1 map on a distant, dusty, radioactive world.

The map comes courtesy of JP LeBreton, a developer whose previous credits include BioShock, The Cave, Broken Age, and the OG Doom mod Mr. Friendly. Naturally, it's not an exact duplicate of the original: There are no explosive barrels, for instance, doors are kind of a compromise design that operate via separate switches connected to the power system, and the textures are obviously quite a bit different too, although the wall surfaces are a pretty good match overall. 

There are also no demons running around, waiting to be blown into Mephistophelian paste: There are a few creatures roaming around outside that you might want to stay away from, but otherwise this is strictly a sightseeing trip. There's no mistaking where you are, though. Even the planet is right: Red, radioactive, and rocky. 

If you'd like to see this No Man's E1M1 in action (and why wouldn't you?), enter the glyphs listed on LeBreton's NMS Bases page (he's made several) into a portal, then hop into your ship and fly to the marker—or just keep your eyes peeled for the big Doom logo carved into the hillside.

A few days ago Hello Games teased a new update for No Man's Sky, called Synthesis, without revealing what was in it or when it might arrive. Today we've got a few details, and they're pretty exciting. Not only is the Synthesis update arriving this week, on November 28, but it's making some pretty big and welcome changes to No Man's Sky.

Perhaps the coolest change is that players will be able to improve their starships by adding additional inventory slots. They'll even be able to upgrade their ship's class, which can increase various bonuses like maneuverability, warp distance, damage, and more, depending on what type of ship it is. These upgrades are done by spending nanites at the new starship outfitting terminals you'll find in space stations throughout the galaxy. This means if you find a ship you really love, you don't need to sideline it in the hangar just because you've found one with more cargo space. Nice! You'll also be able to salvage other ships you find for parts.

There are also some exciting changes to the terrain manipulator. Players will now have the ability to "make a permanent stamp on the world with your edits," according to the email sent to PC Gamer. That's a big deal. We're used to digging holes or transforming terrain, flying away, and returning to find the planet has 'forgotten' what we've done to it. It sounds like that will change with the Synthesis Update. Yes, that massive rock penis you carefully sculpted outside your base can apparently be locked into place and preserved. (Update: The Synthesis page reads "Terrain edits made within a base are now protected from regeneration." So your rock penis will need to be inside your base's borders.)

Jokes aside, being able to permanently alter terrain on a planet will be a huge boon to base-builders and will give our homes a more persistent feeling. Importantly, along with this change, an 'undo' feature has been added to the terrain manipulator, so you won't have to live with your mistakes.

And you'll no longer have to sell a beloved multitool when another one catches your eyes. "Players can own and customise multiple Multi-Tools," in Synthesis, says Hello Games. You'll also be able to "create multiple characters in the customiser to switch between," which sounds like you'll be able to save your character customization choices and quickly swap between the different looks you've created.

There are also some interesting changes that will let VR users and desktop players share some of the same features that are currently exclusive to each. First-person driving for planetary vehicles is being added for desktop players—until now, that was only available in VR—and VR users will be able to use the photomode and creature-riding features that desktop players enjoy.

There's more: a "whole new space map," a personal refinery you can use in your inventory for crafting, plus the addition of more base parts, and lots of bug fixes and other improvements. We'll post the complete patch notes when they arrive.

Ultrawide monitor owners, rejoice: the latest update to No Man's Sky's experimental branch correctly scales the HUD and "other visual elements" for 21:9 screens, and also better scales the HUD for 4K. 

I can imagine flying through space in ultrawide feels brilliant, and removing the annoyance of a broken HUD could make it all the more stunning. The update, which will be tested via the opt-in branch before rolling out to the full game, also lets you customize your HUD scale and adds support for custom resolution scaling in borderless mode.

It contains a huge number of fixes for crashes, graphical glitches and UI bugs. Most of the changes detailed in the lengthy patch notes are minor, and you can browse them all here.

If you want to activate the experimental branch, right-click on No Man’s Sky in Steam and select "properties". Then, go to the "Betas" tab, type "3xperimental" in the text bock, press "check code" and select it from the dropdown menu.

And if you haven't switched to Team Ultrawide but you're curious, there's a few 21:9 monitors on our list of the best gaming monitors.

There's a lot of gross stuff in No Man's Sky—misshapen creatures, whispering eggs, writhing plants, and alien poop—but thanks to the Beyond update, now you can cook and eat most of it. Lucky you! Combining things like alien eggs and milk, exotic vegetables and crystals, raw meat and organs, and other oddities in the nutrient processor can result in nourishing yet absolutely horrifying meals.

No Man's Sky players and data miners have been hard at work trying to discover all the cooking recipes added in Beyond, and they've put together several big lists and helpful spreadsheets I'll link at the bottom of this page.

Thanks to their hard work, your stomach can now rumble both before and after you eat. Here are the most nightmarish meals you can cook in No Man's Sky.

Itching, Creeping Honey Sponge

A honey sponge sounds delicious, something sweet and light and delightfully sticky. But if you put this in your mouth it might taste you back. The itching and creeping part comes from the batter (called Writhing Roiling Batter) which can be made by combining delicate meringue, refined flour, and a larval core. Larval cores, remember, come from Whispering Eggs, which spawn Biological Horrors. Hungry yet?

Jellied Fur Tart

Made with a pie casing and some jelly. The jelly is called Furball Jelly. Furball Jelly is made from sugar and Leopard Fruit, so I guess now we know why Leopard Fruit is called Leopard Fruit. It's not because it's got spots.

Flavoursome Organs

The name of this dish, made from Stewed Organs and Flavoursome Sauce, is just too vague for my liking. Organs—well, there are lots of different organs, and I'm guessing that goes double for alien creatures. Which organs am I eating, exactly? And flavoursome isn't a word I trust. Flavor could mean anything. I mean, gross things have flavors too, things like bile and sewage and bleu cheese dressing. I don't trust it this dish at all.

'Apple' Ice Cream

Apple Ice Cream doesn't sound bad, but 'Apple' Ice Cream makes me stop the spoon on the way to my mouth. Like the Saturday Night Live commercial for 'Almost Pizza,' you should be hesitant to eat something that is very nearly an apple but is not enough of an apple to the extent that it requires quotes around it. The dish is prepared from Frozen Tubers and Crab 'Apple'. I've found Crab 'Apple' and it came from a crab. But isn't quite an Apple. It's an 'Apple.'

Unbound Monstrosity

Be careful while baking the Fluffy Throatripper! It takes Cream, Writhing Roiling Batter, and Cactus Jelly. But if you mix Cream, Writhing Roiling Batter, and Anamalous Jam, you'll make an Unbound Monstrosity. You definitely don't want that. There's really no bigger faux-pas than when your guests are expecting to swallow the razor-sharp cactus needles in the Fluffy Throatripper and instead wind up eating an Unbound Monstrosity. The party will be ruined.

Iced Screams

Combine one Hypnotic Eye with one Frost Crystal. Serve Cold.

So very cold.

Cake of the Lost

You know those office birthday parties for an employee who hasn't really been with the company long enough to get to know anyone, and maybe three people signed the card and there's lots of empty space because they left room for everyone else to sign but no one else did, and the breakroom was out of plastic forks so most people are using plastic spoons, and the only drinks are cans of room temperature Diet Cherry 7-Up and there aren't enough so it's divvied up in dented little foam cups, and during the off-key rendition of Happy Birthday one person gets the guy's name wrong, and the only conversation is when someone asks "So, got big plans for your birthday?" and the birthday boy says "Not really, no" and then its just dead silence while people stand around until someone is finally brave enough to make an excuse for leaving?

This is the cake for that party. It's made with Monstrous Custard and Writhing Roiling Batter.

Solidified Grease Pie

Made with a Pie Case and Regis Grease (I don't know what that is and at this point I don't want to know), it probably looks tasty from a distance. I mean, it's in a pie casing, all nice and crispy, and maybe you'd think it's cream or something in there. 

But it's not. It's grease. Solidified grease. Enjoy.

Hungry for more? Here's some helpful sources of No Man's Sky cooking recipes via Reddit:

This massive list of (presumably datamined) recipes by RogerHN on the modding Discord. It's a monstrously huge jpg so I'd suggest you download so you can zoom in.

This huge work-in-progress spreadsheet by ItsSpiffy on Reddit with an additional tab for Nanite data.

The No Man's Sky modding community is relatively small, but full of important tweaks to the space-faring sim to change the game's UI, controls, and visuals. It's easy to rely on even the smallest changes to games when they get locked into your muscle memory and being suddenly without them is an annoyance. Fortunately, modders for No Man's Sky seem to be updating to Beyond (the latest 2.0 version of the game) extremely quickly. 

The recent uploads on the Nexus Mods hub for No Man's sky are full of images proclaiming mods that are updated for the newest version. Most are quite small changes, like changing the icon for summoning a freighter, replacing the game start logo with the Beyond logo, and changing the frequency of planets that generate as "lush."

One particular modder, Lo2k, who has updated several of their mods for Beyond so far, has a page tracking the status of each one. So far, it looks like they've updated five of their mods to Beyond, with a big list of others still yet to make the jump.

So far, a few other options have all been updated for Beyond, including giving yourself max inventory slots and stats for ships, and removing the blue tint from the analysis visor. 

A couple of our own favorites on the best No Man's Sky mods list have already been updated for Beyond as well.

If you've been playing No Man's Sky Beyond and you've visited the new multiplayer hub, you may have already run into Cronus. He stands at a kiosk on the right side of the multidimensional space station, waiting to taste your food and spit out insults. He's Space Gordon Ramsay: Rude, picky, demanding, and easily the best alien in the entire game.

No Man's Sky Beyond added a nutrient processor you can use to create advanced bait, which not only allows you to tame and ride creatures but gather edible resources from them. Eggs. Honey. Milk. Other assorted goops and glops you can scrape from an alien when they view you in a positive light after you've charmed them with their favorite bait.

Refining, re-refining, and combing those edible secretions in your nutrient processor, along with gathered plants and hunks of meat (from creatures you, um, didn't make friends with) will produce various foods.

The food can be basic: putting raw meat in the nutrient processor will produce processed meat. Eggs will become baked eggs. Alien milk will become butter. Honey, for some reason, will become synthetic honey, which definitely doesn't sound like an improvement.

Keep refining and combining and you'll be able to cook actual complete meals. And once you've cooked something, you can bring it to Cronus, and he'll taste it and then mock your cooking skills. In fact, he'll eat and insult just about anything you've got.

The first time I met Cronus, the only food I had in my inventory was creature pellets, the most basic type of creature bait, which is fed to aliens simply to make them poop. I gave one to Cronus. He didn't poop, but he did—metaphorically—shit on my offering.

"I do not believe anything more unpleasant has passed my lips. How did you ruin creature pellets?" he said.

I also had carbon nanotubes in my pocket, which I didn't consider to be food—and neither did Cronus.

"I... I have eaten your carbon nanotubes," he said. "I have never regretted anything more."

Clearly, to impress Cronus I would have to do more then just rummage through my pockets for any technically edible items. I left The Nexus, flew to a nearby planet, gathered a few items and scraped some gunk off a few alien critters, and started using my nutrient processor in earnest. When I had a few more culinary creations and a few spare ingredients, I went back to Cronus to get his expert take.

"Well... You have created the most average fresh milk imaginable," he said. "Quite some achievement."

"I do not know what to tell you. I did not gag. That is the only positive of this Heptaploid Wheat."

"Consuming this creature egg is an insult to my body!"

"The primary sensation is not taste. It is blandness. Utter blandness."

"You dare to call this refined flour? Pah!"

Eventually, though, I did manage to win him over.

"Acceptable. Technically, this is synthetic honey. But it did not move me." 

It was the closest thing to a compliment I'd gotten so far. Then I fed him a concoction I'd made from refined Star Bulbs, called Pilgrim's Tonic.

"Pilgrim's Tonic... this is not Pilgrims' Tonic," he said, and my heart sank.

"This is art. This is life!"

A twist! He actually likes my weird alien drink!

And I'd saved my best for last. My honey tart, which I'd made using milk and wheat to make butter and flour for a pastry, which I'd then processed into a pie crust, which I then filled with synthetic honey and cooked again.

Finally! Cronus not only approved of my alien honey tart, but he liked it better than any other alien honey tart he'd ever had. I was walking on air, and not just because I have a jetpack.

All those hours of squeezing secretions out of alien cows and slaving over a hot nutrient processor were worth it. Clearly, it's time to begin construction my alien restaurant. Just call me BlasterChef.

Tired of traveling on foot, by jetpack, in a spaceship, or bumping along a planet in an exocraft in No Man's Sky? Well, No Man's Sky Beyond introduced a new way to get around: creature riding. 

With just a few short steps, you can be perched on the back of your favorite alien creature, galloping across the landscape or even flying around above it. 

Here's how to ride creatures in No Man's Sky Beyond.

Buy the Nutrient Processor blueprint

The nutrient processor is a new item in No Man's Sky. It lets you mix ingredients to create food items, which you'll need to make advanced bait so the creatures become friendly enough to let you ride them.

The nutrient processor blueprint costs 10 salvaged data. Salvaged data can be found buried on No Man's Sky's planets: just use your visor to look for look for an icon that looks like a wi-fi signal, then use your terrain manipulator to dig up the buried technology module. They're not hard to find, though each module only holds 1-4 salvaged data.

With 10 salvaged data, leave the planet and head to the space anomaly, which you can now summon from your quick menu (X). Enter it, and your ship will land in The Nexus. Head up the ramp to where Nada and Polo are standing, and then move toward the back of the station, directly in the middle, where you'll find several vendors.

At the construction research station, cycle through the tech trees until you find the technology modules section. There you'll be able to purchase a blueprint for the nutrient processor.

Back on a planet's surface, build the processor, which requires metal plating, a hermetic seal, and sodium. You'll find the nutrient processor in your build menu under portable technology. It doesn't require an external power source.

Scan creatures to learn their bait preferences

You can make creatures friendly and get them to poop by feeding them the new craftable creature pellets—more on the poop in a minute— but if you want to ride them you'll need to find out what food they really love. Use your visor to scan a creature, and in the display you'll see their bait preference.

Be sure to ignore the Diet information—what you want is the Bait information, which is at the top of the creature's info panel and highlighted in yellow. The fellow above likes Fermented Fruit, for example, so that's what you'd need to make (not NipNip buds, which to be fair, do sound delicious).

Make the advanced bait

Making advanced bait in the nutrient processor will require mordite (which you can gather by killing creatures) or faecium, a new element that you'll find in creature poop as the result of feeding them food pellets.

You'll also need an ingredient from harvestable plants. Again, use your visor to look around the planet's surface until you see a plant icon. Harvest the plant (by holding E, not by using a mining laser). There are a number of different kinds of plants that will result in different types of bait, so gather as many different kinds as you can.

Put the mordite or faecium into the nutrient processor, along with one of the plants you've gathered. The processor will preview the resulting bait for you. If it's the one you're looking for, go ahead and cook it. If you want something else, just remove the plant and try another (or cook it and save it until you find a creature that likes it).

Feed 'em and ride 'em!

Once you've got the bait cooked and you've removed it from the nutrient processor, it'll appear in your quick menu (X). You can even bind it to a numpad key if you want. Find the creature you want to ride, and if you toss the correct bait, it'll rush over and eat it. When they're close enough to you, you'll see a prompt to ride them using the spacebar (as well as a prompt that lets you gather resources from them).

Not all creatures are rideable—the smaller ones will still enjoy the bait and you'll be able to gather resources from their friendly bodies, but you won't be able to ride around on itty bitty creatures.

But medium and large creatures are rideable. You can even ride flying creatures, like this giant horrifying hovering crab I tamed! Yee-haw!

You can 'suggest' which direction the creature should go using the WASD keys, which seems to work much better on ground-based creatures than it does on flying ones. To dismount, use the spacebar again.

Unfortunately, your new alien steeds aren't summonable and their kindness toward you is only temporary. If you want to ride them again after dismounting, you'll need to feed them the correct advanced bait again.

No Man's Sky Beyond launched yesterday, and while some astronauts have been socialising in space and playing in VR for the first time, others have been getting booted out before they get to the good stuff. A new update, released today, aims to tackle some of these stability issues. It was tested on the experimental branch last night, but it's now live for everyone on PC. 

Most of the bug fixes tackle crashes, including rendering, memory and VR-related issues. One of the main problem areas, the Space Anomaly that houses the Nexus, should also be less likely to cause your game to crash. I've not been able to spend more than 30 seconds in the Nexus before No Man's Sky freezes and dies, so I'm looking forward to finally doing whatever it is I can do in there.  

Here's the full list of fixes:

• Fix for crashes occurring in the Space Anomaly.
• Fixed a number of issues causing some players to experience low framerate after visiting the Space Anomaly.
• Fixed a rendering related crash.
• Fixed an out of memory crash.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a crash when manipulating inventory in close proximity to a high number of players.
• Fixed a crash affecting VR with supersampling enabled.
• Fixed a situation where network connectivity issues could prevent players from speaking to NPCs aboard the Space Anomaly.
• Fixed an issue where storage containers could not be accessed.
• Fixed a crash affecting unsupported VR hardware.

We got our first look at the No Man's Sky Beyond patch notes this morning, and to be perfectly honest, we're still looking at them. To put it in scientific terms, the patch notes are "Like, super-big."

We've known about No Man's Sky VR, expanded multiplayer, creature riding, industrial base building, power and logic for bases, and most of the major stuff in Beyond, and we learned yesterday that Beyond won't reboot the universe and mess up your bases. But it's the quality of life changes that somehow feel the most grand and world-shattering. For example, in normal mode, inventory slot capacity for resources has changed from 250 to 10,000.

That's major. 10,000 units of resources in a single slot! You'll be able to mine and gather for days without having to dump your payload. The total number of slots may still be limited, but I feel like the strain of resource gathering has been almost entirely lifted.

Speaking of quality of life improvements, check out this small selection of beauties that jumped out at me:

• Technology can now be moved after installation.
• Added ‘Warp Hypercores’, a large hyperdrive fuel unit with five times the capacity of a regular Warp Cell.
• Increased the base mining speed of the Mining Beam.
• Added the Launch System Recharger, a starship upgrade that automatically recharges the Launch Thrusters over time.
• In normal mode, allowed some planets to never spawn Sentinel drones.
• Increased the base energy levels of the Mining Beam and the Terrain Manipulator, allowing for less frequent recharging.
• The Mining Beam now has a much higher base heat capacity.
• Added the option to remove button holds and make all non-destructive clicks instant.
• Many graphics settings no longer require a restart to apply.
• Improved the UI for comparing and purchasing ships, Multi-Tools and freighters.
• The Galaxy Map has been totally overhauled for clarity and visual style.
• Added a new photo-mode style building camera to allow easier placement of complex structures.
• Increased the tolerance of trader ships participating in a freighter battle so that they do not report friendly fire as a crime unless the shot is fatal.
• Made butterflies and other flying creatures much easier to scan with the Analysis Visor.
• Added Short-Range Teleporters. These pads may be placed around your base and wired up to create a network of near-instant transportation.

That's just a sprinkling of what's actually in the patch notes. I didn't even mention that you can sit in chairs. All those empty chairs in space stations and trading posts? You can sit in them. And if you're a Gek, your stubby little legs will occasionally swing while you're sitting. 

That's actually in the patch notes.

NPCs will sit in chairs, too, they'll walk around, and pilots will actually leave their ships when they land in a space station. They'll respond to gestures the player makes, they'll interact with their environments, and they'll have "a range of biome specific interactions." Oh, please, if there's toxic rain, please let them take out little alien umbrellas. Please.

Is there more? There's lots more. Here's the full list of patch notes. See you in a week when you're done reading them.