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No Mans Sky is a massive game but it doesnt take to much space on hard disk, how? They say planets are randomly generated. How does this algoritham work.

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  • We don't know, and we have no way of knowing.
    – Frank
    Commented Aug 13, 2016 at 13:21
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    We do have ways of knowing or at least making good guesses, but that's not something on-topic here. I believe it's also not on-topic for GameDev.SE, since "what technology some particular game used" is off-topic there.
    – Sterno
    Commented Aug 13, 2016 at 13:34

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Procedurally generated worlds are created on the fly so there is no need for them to be stored in the game files. We can't really answer how the algorithm works but we can describe what it does or is supposed to do.

For example in Minecraft, along with most procedural games, worlds are generated using "seeds" (you may have heard about the number 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 which is the number of seeds or planets in this game). When each planet has a different seed they will all technically be different since the algorithm will spit out different results for each seed.

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