Beyond saddle sores: No Man's Sky update will let you ride spacecrabs in VR

Hello Games' next big update for No Man's Sky - coming August 14th - introduces virtual reality support and a new multiplayer social space called The Nexus, where players can convene with fellow space-farers to show off their gear and feasibly do other fun space-related activities. Finally, you will have a built-in audience for all that pent-up space-comedy material you've been saving ("What's the deal with space monoliths?" you will crack with Seinfeld-like emphasis to your audience of 14 year olds from Bournemouth) and a means for trading tips on how best to get that space-dinosaur fart smell out of your exosuit.

But the latest launch trailer for Beyond shows off something in passing that I'm frankly a lot more excited by: Rideable space crabs and space pigs. Video after the jump.

Exocrafts are so yesterday. The future is rideable crabs.

Beyond's launch trailer offers a glimpse of its new Weird Alien Animal mounts, including chubby frolicking pigs and giant crabs that look vaguely like a tripod from War of the Worlds. You can catch the pig-riding about 40 seconds into the trailer, and the crab-mounts at 1:18.

Originally planned as three separate updates, Beyond is the single behemoth-like result. "The more we got into development however, the more those individual pieces started to coalesce and become interdependent on each other," Hello Games' Sean Murray wrote in a post on the official No Man's Sky blog. "Virtual Reality is cool and a major undertaking for a procedurally generated universe, but virtual reality becomes all the more enjoyable and immersive when you’re playing with friends, be they VR players or not."

Beyond is the most recent large-scale update from the team since last year's No Man's Sky: Next, which introduced multiplayer to game - although it was limited to four players.