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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Minecraft and NMS rely on procedural generation. They don’t generate the whole world, only the immediate area around you, and they use a relatively small list of assets to do so. But because the generation algorithm is procedural and predictable, it can fill in the map as you go. If you don’t take or leave anything in a chunk, it can just forget it’s ever existed when it’s unloaded and regenerate it identically from scratch when you visit it again.
This next part is conjecture, but it makes sense
If you do do something in a chunk, Minecraft can store just a differ of that chunk, ie only the changes made to it. Then when you return, it’ll generate the chunk, apply the differ it’s saved, and it’ll be just as you left it.
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