Eli5: How can games like minecraft or no mans sky be essentially infinite, yet take up a very small amount of storage?

Question

No mans sky is like 18GB or so on my PS4, yet there are 256 galaxies and literally around 18 quintillion planets. It can be played completely offline too, so it isnt coming from some server somewhere

I understand they’re procedurally generated, so they dont even exist until you pass through that area, but even after playing for countless hours and crossing thousands of miles of landmass, the save file is still extremely small

In: 1323

Answer 1

Well it’s like baking 10 cakes or having the ingridents to back 10 cakes. The ingridents will take less storage that the 10 cakes will do and now consider also the cook book. Thats it. The game is a cook book with ingridents from that you can bake infinite amounts of worlds