No Man's Sky Companions update will let you tame alien critters

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It's a whole new world of furry (and scaly) friends

No Man's Sky
(Image credit: Hello Games)

The No Man's Sky Companions update will allow players to tame, train, and even breed the various alien critters that they discover on their travels.

The new update, announced in a trailer below, lets you get up close and personal with the universe's diverse fauna. The creatures you meet can be tamed and trained to travel at your side, communicating with you via your exosuit, allowing you to detect how they're feeling as you feed and play with them.

Your excellent animal handling skills will be rewarded with more than companionship, however. Adopt a creature and you can train it to hunt for resources, scare away more dangerous monsters, dig for buried treasure, or even mine for minerals with a shoulder-mounted harness. 

If properly looked after, your new friends will lay eggs which you can collect and incubate. And if you fancy playing god, you can use the Space Anomaly and its new Egg Sequencer to rewrite the genetic code of those unborn creatures, bringing brand-new forms of life to the universe as they hatch and grow.

From the trailer above, it looks like there's a whole bunch of creatures you'll be able to befriend, although it seems to me that size could easily turn out to be something of a limiting factor - it'll be no use befriending a massive space-giraffe if it can't fit inside your ship, for instance. You'll be able to find out for yourself very soon, however, as the Companion update goes live today, with full patch notes available on the No Man's Sky website.

Sadly, not all of the best space games let you breed aliens.

Ali Jones
Ali Jones
Managing Editor, News

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.