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

Minecraft does work like you suggested, once a chunk of the world is generated it stays in the world file forever and heavily-explored worlds will take up a lot of space. But Minecraft has a limited block palette on a strict grid, so these chunks don’t take up too much space anyway.

I haven’t put as much time into No Man’s Sky, but if I remember right, changes are only saved in bases. So if you put down a base computer it’ll save what you put down in the area and how you edit the terrain, but most things outside will be regenerated eventually to keep your save file small.

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