No Man's Sky's new device lets you design music for your base

According to Hello Games, players spend a lot of time designing their bases in No Man's Sky these days. They say a frequent player request was for the ability to add sounds or music to their planetary homes. Apparently one of the coders at Hello Games was quite into the idea and integrated a system for programatically generating music. Players can leave the algorithmic music as is or use the new ByteBeat device to edit it themselves. Now you can invite your friends over for a dance party set to spacey chip tunes and create an in-game light show to accompany it.

You can learn the blueprints for the new ByteBeat device from the Space Anomaly in No Man's Sky. After placing your first device and powering it, Hello games say it will immediately begin to play a generated tune. If you're not satisfied with its first output, you can use the device's interface to customize the track to your liking. The video below gives a quick demo of moving bits of tracks around inside the device's menu. You can change around the melody or drum track or change the octave, key, or tempo of the track.

To start a light show, you can use a new ByteBeat Switch in game that will sync devices like lights with the tempo of your music track. You can hook ByteBeat devices to one another as well to synchronize them or make more complicated arrangements of tracks.

For the even more experienced, Hello Games say you can use the Advanced Waveform interface to change up the programmatic operators controlling the track as well. They recommend this Vice article from 2012 as a jumping off point for understanding exactly what ByteBeat algorithms are.

You can read the rest of the changes from No Man's Sky free update 2.24 on Hello Games' blog where you can also find more about ByteBeat in their own words.