Want to See Everything in No Man’s Sky? Got a Spare 5 Billion Years?

No Man’s Sky is already shaping up to be a truly stunning game, but the developers wanted to make it bigger and better than ever, and they have! When the game was first developed it used a 32-bit number to generate all of the planets in the game’s universe, that is to say they have a fully realised universe with galaxies, stars and planets in this game. This meant that it would have taken you four or five thousand years to see every planet in the game, so long as you only spent a single second on each!

Now the scale has been ramped up exponentially, the team are now using a 64-bit number to generate the universe (the’s two to the power of 64 planets) and at the same rate of 1 second on each planet you’ll be looking at 5 billion years of gameplay just to take a glimpse of each. That’s longer than our own Sun will last, which is expected to fizzle out in about 4.6 billion years, long after Earth and the human race has either been wiped out of existence or moved on to populate other star systems.

The game didn’t have much new to show at Gamescom, other than this dazzling fact, but the developers are teasing that they’ve got something big to show, although what their idea of “big” may be (given that their game is already on such a vast scale) remains to be seen.

Thank you IGN for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of RockPaperShotgun.