It’ll Take You Five Billion Years to See Every Planet in No Man’s Sky

no man's sky 08-16-14-1

It’s obvious how enormous and almost immeasurable the world in No Man’s Sky is, but a recent blurb from the team at Hello Games has basically made us collectively soil ourselves.

Hello Game’s Sean Murray revealed to IGN that it would take players 5 billion years to visit every, single, potential world in the game. That’s a really long time, and probably a number that the majority of human beings can’t even really wholly comprehend in its enormity.


Here’s the more awe-inspiring statistic for you to whet your appetite with – that number is calculated with a visit of a whole whopping second, on every planet. That obviously doesn’t factor in how varied and intricate each world can be, and what kind of surprises you’ll experience in your travels.

This staggering achievement is made possible by the team at Hello Games using 64-bit numbers in their algorithms instead of traditional 32-bit numbers. They previously used 32-bit numbers in their earlier builds, but they found that it limited their projections to a measly several thousand years.

After they moved to 64-bit numbers, this enabled them to compile astronomical sums of numbers to the 2^64 value, which is way, way more than the previous totals at 2^32.

While we’re still sitting here basically frothing at the mouth for new footage of the game, Sean Murray promised that they “will have something big to show soon.”

,

About

Owner and Publisher at Niche Gamer and Nicchiban. Outlaw fighting for a better game industry.


Where'd our comments go? Subscribe to become a member to get commenting access and true free speech!