No Man's Sky Beyond will add 32 player support, powered bases, cooking, and alien milking

(Image credit: Hello Games)

No Man's Sky Beyond will arrive in just a few days, on August 14. We've known for a while now that VR is being added, and yesterday's trailer teased us with a few treats like like The Nexus, a massive new social hub for the more expansive multiplayer features of No Man's Sky. Say goodbye to the days of four-player co-op: Beyond will support up to 32 players in a session.

There was also the glorious sight of players riding a variety of alien creatures around like mounts. But that's not all you'll be able to do with alien creatures. You'll also be able to milk them.

Yup. Get Luke Skywalker on the phone, because you'll soon have access to a bunch of weird alien milk. I don't know how the process of milking a tamed alien creature will work, but I can guess what it might be used for because cooking and recipes are also coming to No Man's Sky. If you've always wanted to be a space farmer and space chef, you're about to get your chance.

If your interests are more keyed to construction than milking alien monsters, there's still good news: Beyond will bring more complex base-building including electrical systems for power (a power grid was glimpsed briefly in the trailer), and industrial base-building for automated resource gathering and mass-production of crafted items. A little touch of Factorio is coming.

With multiplayer expanding to support 32 players, The Nexus is will act as a player hub and meeting point where you can interact with other astronauts, show off your ship, gear, and emotes, go shopping, and put together crews for multiplayer missions.

When I tried out VR back in March, which I called a perfect match for No Man's Sky, I noticed alien NPCs actually walking around in the space stations instead of just standing and sitting in one spot. It made the stations feel more lively and active, and Beyond will bring further enhancements to our alien friends with added depth for the language system. No word on if you can milk the Vy'keen, but I wouldn't advise trying it.

Recipes and cooking, taming and riding (and milking) creatures, automated factories, 32-person multiplayer, virtual reality... for these reasons and more, Beyond isn't just the biggest No Man's Sky update ever. It's also ushering in what Hello Games is calling No Man's Sky 2.0, and I don't think anyone can really argue with that designation. No Man's Sky has changed and grown a lot over the past three years, and while the core of resource management and exploration of a procedural universe is still intact, in many ways it's an altogether different game than it was at launch.

Just like the rest of the updates that have appeared for No Man's Sky since 2016, Beyond is completely free. We'll update this article with the complete patch notes when they're available.

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.