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No Man's Sky's 18 Quintillion Planets Take Up Just 6 GB on Disc

"A lot of that is audio."

365 Comments

No Man's Sky, a game that its developer says has 18 quintillion planets to find and explore, takes up just 6 GB of data on the PlayStation 4's Blu-ray disc.

That figure was provided by Sean Murray, founder of No Man's Sky developer Hello Games and a programmer. Posting on Twitter, Murray explained much of that 6 GB is actually taken up audio.

This is likely achieved thanks to the fact that much of the content in No Man's Sky is procedurally generated, which means there's less space taken up on disc. Or it could all be witchcraft.

Continuing, Murray revealed on Twitter that No Man's Sky had passed certification in Europe, United States, and Asia. It is currently being submitted for certification in Japan.

Additionally, the studio is "already busy on Update 1" for the space exploration game. Details on what it will include were not discussed.

No Man's Sky went gold on July 7 and Hello Games celebrated with a selfie.

No Man's Sky is scheduled to launch on August 9 in North America, followed by August 10 in Europe, and August 12 in the UK. Hello Games recently settled a three-year legal battle over the No Man's Sky name, allowing the title to stay the same.

For more on No Man's Sky, you can check out GameSpot's "Making Sense of No Man's Sky's Massive Universe" feature.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

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Tsuchikage

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This game runs on "maths" (re: magic). The largest game ever has no loading screens and takes up only 6 GB?

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Dark_Mits

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Edited By Dark_Mits

@Tsuchikage: Think of it this way:

a) I can have 50 giant floor textures for 50 stages in a game, with each texture being specific and the same every time the stage is accessed. The game just loads it.

b) I can have 500 small floor textures (about 0.1% of each giant texture) that the game randomly uses to generate a giant texture in real-time. This stresses the **** out of my CPU (because it has to synthesize the result in real time and not just read it ready from the hard drive), and unless the same seed is used every time it will be a totally new texture each time the stage is accessed.

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elleclouds

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@Dark_Mits: So if you left and returned to a planet, would it look different?

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Dark_Mits

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@elleclouds: If the initial conditions (known as RNG) that generate the planet aren't saved, then yes.

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Skittymiao

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Edited By Skittymiao

@Tsuchikage: Maybe years of compression and optimizations by the most sophisticated tools were carried on.

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mattcake

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I'll probably get bored after the first 17 quintillion or so to be fair and ignore the rest.

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Skittymiao

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@mattcake: By that time, you will be what, great great great great great great great great great great grand father?

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Kyelo

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@skittymiao: You on about? You think they will have time to have children?!

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the-games-masta

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@kyelo: actually you could lived the life of every human that's ever lived, playing the game constantly the whole time. And still have only seen a very small percentage of the total

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Mickpunx

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Get ready for planet after planet of boringness or just too toxic with slight variations. I might be wrong and I hope I am.

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Skittymiao

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They may have compressed 600GB to 6 GB via KGB Archiver.

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unrealmp3

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@skittymiao: Why compress when you can calculate them on-the-fly and store them in RAM when needed? :0

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deactivated-5ebc942967df5

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Prepare for no AA, draw distance about as far as my dick, low res textures etc.

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Domiddian

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Edited By Domiddian

@Prats1993: A two inch draw distance? I agree it won't be huge, but two inches? That's just being pessimistic.

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dmblum1799

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@domiddian: He walked into that one.

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deactivated-58a78a043e9d4

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@Prats1993: The PS4 allegedly did have those issues last year, but they've apparently been solved. Luckily the AA isn't an issue on PC since you can just force 8xSSAA through the driver.

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Belz

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@Prats1993: haha

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