In brief: this game is an actual universe, and you can literally be the first person ever to discover new planets, or plants, or creatures. You will discover things that even the developers have yet to see. i will post an explanation below. The limited-time PS4 exclusive space exploration game (which will later arrive on PCs) uses procedurally generated worlds to create one of the largest video game environments that we’ve ever seen. The developers can’t really begin to explain exactly how many worlds exist within No Man’s Sky’s massive universe, but they did offer IGN an estimate as to how long it would take to visit every world in the game. Hello Games co-founder, Sean Murray, explained that the development team started out using 32-bit numbers to generate the planets in the universe. Using the 32-bit formula, it would take somewhere between four and five thousand years to visit every planet in the game for just a one second stop on each. That sounds pretty massive to us, but the team wanted to go bigger. By stepping the scale up to 64-bit numbers, the number of planets is increased roughly to 2 to the power of 64. That exponentially increases the scale of things and means that it would take roughly five billion years to visit each planet for one second. That may not be the traditional definition of infinite (as promised in the trailer), but it is likely closer than any other open-world came has come in the past. As IGN pointed out, the Earth’s sun is due to burn out in 4.6 billion years, so even if you happen to be immortal, there doesn’t seem to be enough time left on our planet to reach every destination this game has to offer.