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

You’re seeing a rendering of something that is absurdly simple.

With no man’s sky much of the game is based off a set of randomized factors. The terrain, placement of certain buildings, and even animals is all randomly generated. So it tells your computer, “This animal is head number 8, legs number 2, and body number 13.” Your computer finds those texture files and loads them.

It’s the same reason a bunch of people can play battlefield in a big city setting and not have insane lag. The data the computer is transferring is related to coordinates and simple polygon hit boxes, not actual visible things.

Essentially, your computer does all the heavy lifting.