The Universe Of No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky is an upcoming action-adventure survival video game developed and published by the indie studio "Hello Games" for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows.
The game-play of No Man's Sky is built on four pillars - exploration, survival, combat and trading.

Gameplay

The Gameplay of No Man's Sky is simple. Players take the role of a planetary explorer in an uncharted universe. They are equipped with a survival spacesuit with a jetpack, a "multi tool" that can be used to scan, mine and collect resources as well as to attack or defend oneself from creatures and other entities while on a planet, and a spacecraft that allows them to land and take-off from planets and travel between them and engage in combat with other space-faring vessels. With this equipment, the player is then free to engage in any of the four principal activities offered by the game: exploration, survival, combat, and trading.

The player-character can collect information on the planets and the lifeforms and other features of these planets to upload to The Atlas, a galactic database as depicted in the game's cover artwork, which they are paid for with units, the in-game currency. Units are used to purchase new survival gear, tools, and spacecraft with more powerful abilities and defenses, allowing the player to explore more of the universe and survive in more hostile environments. Such upgrades can work in synergistic effects; the scanning feature of the multitool initially starts as a short-ranged directed beam, but can be upgraded to have much longer range, spanning all directions, and locating minerals and other resources buried in the ground.

Randomly Generated Universe

When the player first starts No Man's Sky, they will be placed on a random planet at the edge of a galaxy at the edge of the universe, from which point they are free to do whatever they want. The game does not have an explicit goal but does encourage players to attempt to reach the center of the universe through its lore: planets located closer to the galactic center will have more exotic and hostile environments with more valuable resources and means to improve one's gear, urging exploration of these inner galactic regions.

There are a huge amount of planets in No Man's Sky. The number being 2⁶⁴ or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616, based on the 64-bit seeding processed used in the game.

These many planets make the world of No Man's Sky a territory of Great expanse through which one faces randomly generated life forms on randomly generated planets. Exploring all these planets however is really time consuming. (Just five more minutes mom, Just gotta explore all the planets. NOT GONNA HAPPEN). It is estimated that if you were to peak at every single planet for just one second. It would take you FIVE BILLION YEARS. At which point our own (real) sun would have Burned out and you would probably be dead by then.

Hello Games' Sean Murray states:

One might spend about forty hours of game time to reach the center of the galaxy if they did not perform any side activities, but he also fully anticipates that players will play the game in a manner that suits them, such as having those that might try to catalog all the flora and fauna in the universe, while others may attempt to set up trade routes between planets.

Players participate in a shared universe, with the ability to exchange planet coordinates with friends, though the game will also be fully playable offline; this is enabled by the procedural generation system that assures players will find the same planet with the same features, lifeforms, and other aspects once given the planet coordinates, requiring no further data to be stored or retrieved from game servers.

Nearly all elements of the game are procedurally generated, including star systems, planets and their ecosystems, flora, fauna and their behavioral patterns, artificial structures, and alien factions and their spacecraft. The game's engine employs several deterministic algorithms such as parameterised mathematical equations that can mimic a wide range of geometry and structure found in nature.

Art elements created by human artists are used and altered as well within these generation systems. The game's audio, including ambient sounds and its underlying soundtrack, also use procedural generation methods from base samples created by Paul Weir and the musical group 65daysofstatic.