No Man’s Sky continues to roll out updates to improve a game that was once so bad it forced Steam to reconsider their refund policy. After letting down the nation and practically setting records on how horribly a game can launch, No Man’s Sky has regularly updated and improved the game, turning it from a barely-playable disappointment to what is now a pretty decent space exploration game.

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Part of the fun of it is how much you can create with relatively little. While this wasn’t quite the case at the launch of the game, Hello Games has been diligent about adding more customization and creative options into the game.

The newest update to the game – update 2.24 – continues to build onto this theme. Rather than adding something to radically change the gameplay, Hello Games decided to give the players a little holiday fun. This update adds in a synthesizer for players to make their own music with, called ByteBeat.

ByteBeat can be used to make complex electronic songs to fill your game with music. The machine works as a full audio creation application, complete with everything you need to make a couple of tunes. It’s meant to recreate the sort of toys that the development team loves playing with in their own time, like Teenage Engineering Synths or FruityLoops.

The update comes without any sort of fanfare or foreshadowing, serving just as a fun little toy. It won’t further along any sort of progress other than simply making your game more enjoyable. Sean Murray, one of the founders of Hello Games as well as the face of the company, dropped a few joking tweets about adding in a feature that no one expected or thought to ask for.

Past that, there’s plenty of features to this toy. Sean Murray lists the following as the different features of ByteBeat:

  • Melody Sequencer
  • Envelope editor
  • Waveform editor
  • BPM/Key/Volume/Attenuation
  • Drum machine
  • Arpeggiator
  • Synchroniser
  • Link ByeBeats
  • Use audio to control objects

While you might not understand exactly what each and every one of those mean, per se, it shows how much effort the team put into a single fun toy for no reason other than to make the players smile.

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No Man’s Sky had one of the worst launches in recent history, but no one can take away the credit of the devoted development team that has spent the last few years devoutly adding in new features to make the game all that fans wanted it to be.