The best No Man's Sky creatures we've seen

Yesterday we looked at some weird discoveries players have been finding while playing No Man's Sky Next, but today we want to celebrate some of the alien creatures we've spotted on our travels as well.

Such the enormous crabby monstrosity above. I like him because it looks a bit like he's got a bushy moustache below his beak.

That's definitely a moustache, right? I hope so, because I named it Mr. Moustache.

Below are the rest of the best creatures we've discovered since No Man's Sky Next was released.

Above is probably the biggest boy I've spotted so far: if you enlarge the image by clicking in the upper right corner, you'll just be able to make out my Gek character standing by the creatures rear right foot. He's a biggun! Got a little armor plating and some fins, too. For style or aerodynamics? Only he knows for sure.

On the other end of the size spectrum is this little fella. He's so short I couldn't even see him while he was hopping through the orange grass, but he eventually made it to a clearing and posed for a picture. I think he evolved from a space potato.

Speaking of small, I found a little herd of two-legged antlered aliens being hunted by a much larger critter. I killed the predator and started feeding the little joggers, who began following me around on their wee little hooves. A storm was brewing so it was eventually time to go.

Above is one of Andy Kelly's finds, a creature which looks prepared for just about anything. I see a beak, I see feathers, I see flippers, and it's bipedal. That about covers all the bases.

I feel like crab monsters are a bit overdone in No Man's Sky—I see some version of them on nearly every life-supporting planet—though it's enjoyable when they're quite large. As a bonus, this one had a wolf-like pal at his side.

Winged creatures, once known in No Man's Sky for being a massive pain in the ass to scan, haven't seemed to change much in Next, though this four-winged bat was pleasantly smiley.

This is perhaps my favorite creature because it looks perfectly reasonable. It's got a few feathers: perhaps I've caught it mid-evolution from dino to bird or vice versa. Or maybe it just uses feathers for keeping cool and looking good.

Another of Andy's finds, if it held real still and closed its eyes you might think it's a weird rock formation. That's not a bad survival skill to have, though visitors do have a habit of shooting rocks with mining lasers, so maybe it's best to keep moving.

Crabs, crabs, crabs. Like I said, they're everywhere. These are flying, though, sort of, or at least doing an air-scuttle. I don't know what they're doing up there when all the food is (presumably) on the ground, but hey, I'm not gonna tell 'em to land.

This plant monster is like a bag of eyes that sprouted some leaves. It doesn't get any prettier, either, as after I shot it and rolled it down a hill I found another disturbing feature. Some things are best left undiscovered.

Finally, this beauty that's a bit hard to puzzle out. It's got a long neck, a weird horn on its head, and legs that have about six too many joints (or perhaps the perfect amount of joints for whatever it happens to be) and a tail that looks like a spoiler flipped vertically. When I fed it, it stuck its head in the sand. Maybe it's trying to diet.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.