No Man's Sky Beyond is no longer beyond our reach and reshapes the No Man's Sky universe with all the new features it holds.

From small changes, such as new cooking recipes and the ability to build bigger, more sophisticated, bases, to ones that completely change how you play the game, including No Man's Sky VR and multiplayer missions.

Most importantly, however, Beyond has brought crab racing to the galaxies of No Man's Sky. Here's the many No Man's Sky Beyond features you can expect.

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You can read the complete patch notes for No Man's Sky content update 2.0 here .

No Man's Sky Beyond was released on August 14th 2019 and is available on PC, Xbox One and PS4.

No Man's Sky Beyond update differences and changes - what's new in Beyond?

Beyond consists of three major updates that Hello Games refer to as the three pillars. Everything in No Man's Sky Beyond will be free for all existing players.

No Man's Sky Online

No Man's Sky Online will introduce a new social space called Nexus. Here you'll be able to visit new shops and interact with other players by sharing ships, showing off weapons and many other activities.

One of these new activities are Multiplayer Missions. You can be teamed up with between 16 to 32 players to complete a variety of different activities. This could be anything from fighting space pirates to helping out on an archaeology dig.

The Nexus is also home to the Base Teleporter. This will allow you to visit bases featured by the Hello Games team and ones created by your friends. You'll also be able to see how many people have visited each base and which players have been playing the most.

This social experience also won't be cross-platform and won't contain any microtransactions.

No Man's Sky VR

This isn't just a different mode or just a section of the game - the entirety of No Man's Sky is playable through VR.

In our preview, Martin describes VR as "the way to play No Man's Sky", saying: "It all conspires to create one of those great VR moments, not just when you're entering your ship for the first time - reaching out to lift the cockpit up, in a neat little theatrical flourish - but when you escape a planet's atmosphere for the first time and the scale of No Man's Sky hits home in a whole new way."

Certain aspects of No Man's Sky have been redesigned so that they are better suited for VR. Such as the cockpits that are now accessible areas, differing in design depending on your type of ship, where you can grasp the throttle in one hand and the flight stick in another.

The inventory has also been redesigned for VR, allowing you to swipe between different screens, hold items in your hand and throw them on the ground.

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Other No Man's Sky tweaks and changes

I don't like sand.

The third and finally pillar of No Man's Sky Beyond has a mysterious air to it, like all good pillars in science-fiction should. Right now, we know that the third pillar consists of a great variety of new features for No Man's Sky.

While we don't know the full list of new features, we do know that the third pillar includes:

A new galactic map

A new word-learning system

An improved base building system, including:

Bigger bases



Electricity and logic systems

A new discovery menu

New creatures, including:

Tamable creatures



Milkable creatures



Rideable creatures (crab racing!)

New, more varied, biomes

New cooking and recipes to discover

New NPC races, including:

New NPC encounters on planet surfaces

New construction options

New crafting options

We'll update this section to include the full patch notes for Beyond once they've been released, so you can find out exactly how far the universe of No Man's Sky has grown.