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

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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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

As others have said, it’s about using some math to generate detail from a description of a thing rather than storing every detail.

To see this taken to the extreme, check out the [demoscene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene). The folks who are good at this can “write a description” that includes everything necessary to generate [cool space scenes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ6ZzJeWgpY) or [whole playable games](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036) with graphics, music and everything in less than 100K.

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