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

They have a small amount of actual assets that they have to load. When they procedurally generate new environments, they’re just picking from a box of assets and remixing them. So when you save a file, they don’t have to save the entire environment. Just the instruction manual for which parts from the asset pool to load into specific spaces in the game world.

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