No Man's Sky Will Take Players Billions of Years to Explore

While it might sound unbelievable but Hello Games is adamant that players will not be able to see the entirety of No Man's Sky's procedurally-generated universe without a fountain of youth, and another galaxy to go to after the sun dies.

Speaking to IGN, Hello Games' co-founder Sean Murray revealed that it would take a player up to 5 billion years to see every planet the game can generate if you spent one second on each. No, that wasn't a typo. 5 billion.

Murray explains that when the 10-person studio started working on No Man's Sky, it was originally using a 32-bit number to generate each of the in-game planets, which would have meant players wouldn't be able to see everything in the game for four to five thousand years.

However, the studio grew unsatisfied with that number, and after seeing many claims on message boards that the game couldn't possibly have that much to offer players, switched to a 64-bit number that makes the game's procedurally-generated universe so expansive that it would take longer than the Sun has life to explore.

So while No Man's Sky certainly isn't an "infinite" universe, it is still big enough that you'll never find the same planet twice.

Hello Games recently released a video explaining the history of both the studio and No Man's Sky.

No Man's Sky is coming to PlayStation 4 and PC sometime in 2015.