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

It’s kinda like scripted comedy vs improv. If you’re scripting 2 hours of comedy, you need many pages of dialogue, sets, cues, etc. If you’re improvising, you just need to know the rules, not the details. You fill in the details as you go. Kinda like procedural generation for games like this. They focus on the rules and make up the details as needed.