Since the announcement of No man’s sky there has been endless the debate, primarily on the scale of this game. Since it revolves around space and exploration and as we all know (or as space physics and science state) the universe and space is infinite. So is No man’s sky infinite? Well the answer is yes. And no… Let us explain.
Some numbers
- There are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets in No man’s sky. That’s ~ 18*1018 , while our observable universe has about 1*1024 Numbers that are hard to comprehend, but No man’s sky is not too shabby with a very high number also. Even though most of these planets aren’t rendered at the same time, they’re still real.
- To fully explore the game in its whole entirety, you would need ~585 billion years, more than 40 times exceeding the lifespan of the entire universe. Or make 8.4 million people play this game for 70 years straight…Simply ridiculous.
- Some people said (before launch) that the game should be about 30 hours long… Yeah, right… Even to reach the center of a galaxy takes around 50 hours.
- Some planets in the game take 24 hours to walk around. One player spent 12 hours just walking in No man’s sky, he proved that the scale is almost beyond our comprehension.
- During a day, around 60 000 players turn on the game, spending 30 minutes in the game (on average). That means, that every day, 0.000000103% of the universe is explored. It would take the current player base more than 9000 years to fully explore the universe. That would be if they play the game non-stop. Now, since the average time is 30 minutes, the years required jumps to around 500 000… Amazing.
- The numbesr lead to the conclusion that No man’s sky will never be fully explored. Unless the player count rises to tens of millions and they play for hours straight, for a number of years, but that’s very unlikely to happen. In fact, the developers said that when creating a scale, they tested out an algorithm that showed a possibility for full exploration (without any glitches or errors in the system included) and the chance was 190 - a hundred and ninety digits after a comma. They were satisfied with the result and started producing the game.
- During its peak, No man’s sky attracted up to 880 000 players daily, but has since fallen off to ~60 000. This number was as low as 12 300 in February of 2017.
This article will surely help you better grasp and understand the sheer scale and size of No man’s sky. How big is it really? No one can say, but we can dream and speculate to create topics for fun and juicy discussions.
