No Man's Sky now has an audio creation tool that lets you make cosmic beats

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

Fraser Brown
Online Editor

Fraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he's been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer. Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings. He's also been known to set up shop in the latest MMO and likes to wind down with an endlessly deep, systemic RPG. These days, when he's not editing, he can usually be found writing features that are 1,000 words too long or talking about his dog.