No Man’s Sky is Hello Games’ huge open-world exploration game where players will embark on a quest to reach the center of the galaxy. While players have already been teased with clips of a zoomed-out view of the map, many are wondering just how many planets there are in the game.
The answer is staggering and pretty hard to believe. In a post on PlayStation Blog, Hello Games Founder, Sean Murray, revealed that there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets for players to go out and explore. Just in case you were wondering exactly how you’d say that number, well… that’s over eighteen quintillion planets!
Murray goes into just how the team has managed this on PlayStation blog and how the procedurally-generated system works.
“The cool thing is that every planet has a single number, a random seed, that defines everything about that planet. A single random seed generates every blade of grass, tree, flower, creature.” He said. “Really this seed defines how many planets you can discover before things start to go a bit crazy and undefined. For us, we chose a big number. We’re working to a 64-bit system, which is 2 to the power of 64… or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible planets. Even if a planet is discovered every second, it’ll take 585 billion years to find them all!”
Looks like you won’t be discovering every planet in No Man’s Sky anytime soon, but at least you know how many are out there now. If you need any more help with No Man’s Sky, check out our robust wiki full of guides and tips.
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