4) Nothing Happens At Random
Bear with me, because I’m heading into Hawkins territory here. No Man’s Sky relies on a deterministic system. In layman’s terms, that means that nothing happens at random.
According to Wikipedia, “a deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system. A deterministic model will thus always produce the same output from a given starting condition or initial state.”
[zergpaid]That means you can visit a planet, explore it to death, and return hours later to find the same fauna and flora in place. It’s all there, as if it’s always been there. But how is it possible to have 18 quintillion planets, with none of it saved anywhere, and yet have it in place when you return to it hours later?
It’s the math at work. To paraphrase the tech website MakeUseOf.com, the system ensures that at a particular point in space/time, the game will produce the same result irrespective of the person making the request, or when it’s made.
Mind. Blown.