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

The procedural generation is deterministic. The area doesn’t exist till you go there and it gets generated. Once you leave, it stops existing, and gets regenerated if/when you come back.

In the case of Minecraft where one can make changes, it only stores the changes and regenerates everything else. Also for Minecraft, the changes are just which blocks are where. So, a single block is probably only like 4 numbers; x, y, and z coordinate plus another small number for what kinda block is there. So even if you destroyed or changed thousands of blocks in an area, that’s only like a couple kilobytes of changes.

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