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

I find that the comparison to letters works well.
You have 24 letters in the alphabet. That’s your starting game size. Then you have a book. Which is just lots and lots of the same letters over and over again in patterns that we recognize as words and sentences.
There is an infinite amount of books that we can write from just two dozen elements. Games with procedural generation do the same thing. They take elements and combine them into larger elements you recognize as planets. Or trees. Or hills. They are still just the same pieces. But the way they are combined creates different elements.

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