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

In Minecraft the save file does increase actually the more of the world you explore. 2b2t an old anarchy server in minecraft that has been running the same world since like 2010 has a world size of several TERA bytes. And the owner supposedly spends thousands a month on servers to run it and store the massive world save file.

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