How do games like Minecraft and No Man’s Sky have seemingly “infinite” world expansion, yet their files are not only tangible but quite small?

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I was playing Minecraft the other day and went very, very far from my spawn point and eventually returned home. When I retraced my way back, I couldn’t wrap my head around how the game not only generates the environment but remembers the placement of everything as I return to the same places I had already been. With that in mind, wouldn’t the game be required to remember… an absurd amount of information as the user explores their world? How are the file sizes of these worlds not crazily big?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Games like that contain the *instructions* of how to build an infinite world. And then the world gets generated as the player explores it.

A brand new world might only be a few MB in size because you haven’t explored it.

If you explored billions of square blocks in a world, then the world file would be much bigger because then all that space would need to be saved as you interacted with it.

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