Ten Years, 40 Free Updates: Players Have Only Traveled 1% of the Universe

On August 9, 2016, a 15-person team shipped a universe with 1.8 × 10^19 planets. Media scores averaged 71 on Metacritic; player anger hit one of Steam's lowest tiers at the time. On September 9, 2026, the same team released its 40th major free update, named Cosmos, version 7.0. Ten years on, per official figures, players have explored less than 1% of the planets.

Why This Is Physically Possible

The planets don't exist on disk. With 2^64 seeds, every planet is the output of a deterministic function—the same seed always yields the same planet. Computed on demand, never stored. Fifteen people and a PS4 thus contain 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 stars. The 2^64 figure comes from Sean Murray's 2014 Polygon interview, repeatedly cited before launch.

Deterministic generation is the key phrase. It's a different species from today's ubiquitous AI generation: feed a large language model the same prompt ten times and you get ten answers; feed a seed generator ten thousand times and you get the same answer. That's why players worldwide can land on the same planet and give it the same name. You're never exploring *your* universe—it's one shared universe belonging to everyone.

What Cosmos Adds

The gameplay column is packed: run a space station and remodel its halls; join or found galactic alliances and contest territory; trade rare minerals from deep-space outposts; build floating bases anywhere in space; salvage ghost ships with structural collapse and explosion mechanics; and a spacewalk upgrade to true six degrees of freedom with roll. Stars themselves are now reachable—officially described as "ultimately lethal." Each milestone of the 10th-anniversary expedition corresponds to a historical update, with developer commentary read by Sean Murray. Among the rewards is a remade brachiosaurus pet revived from 2016 pre-release footage.

The engine column is for the professionals. Points of interest in star systems now spawn at revisitable fixed locations—the deterministic universe gains memory for the first time: the station you passed last week is still there this week. Asteroid generation was completely redone, with improved draw distance and distribution. Planetary terrain tessellation rendering got a major overhaul. The hardest item: for textures generated at runtime for procedural models, the entire block-compression encoder was rewritten, visibly reducing banding and artifacts and raising texture quality game-wide. Load times for procedural generation were significantly optimized.

As for AI—the only machine learning in the 2026 patch notes is XeSS 3 upscaling and DLSS 4.5 frame generation on the rendering side. AI sits at the very end of the pipeline, handling pixels, not content. Amid the generative-content wave, Hello Games keeps its universe in deterministic math.

Building Worlds with Math

Two 2017 GDC talks are this game's technical footnotes. Sean Murray's *Building Worlds Using Math(s)* covers noise, fractals, and L-systems—why textbook Perlin noise doesn't produce believable terrain. Engineer Innes McKendrick's *Continuous World Generation* covers the engineering trade-offs of runtime generation with LOD. One widespread rumor to debunk: in 2016 a company claimed the game used its "superformula"; Forbes' fact-check concluded it was not a core generation basis, at most one source of inspiration.

A Decade of Redemption

The PS4 version launched at 71 on Metacritic. 2018's NEXT added full multiplayer, moving Steam to "Mixed." In August 2024, Steam's overall rating reached "Very Positive" for the first time—eight years after launch. Confirmed sales exceed 10 million copies; the Steam all-time peak of 212,613 concurrent players was set on August 12, 2016—while the game was still climbing out of its review bomb.

The HN thread (293 points, 312 comments) reserved its highest respect for the redemption story and its sharpest criticism for breadth: "as wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle." Another top comment offered the field's conservation law: procedural generation is not gameplay—it only adds variety to a game that's already fun. Commenters even named the old problem the "oatmeal problem": procedural generation can hand you infinite bowls of oatmeal, but every bowl tastes the same. Some held up *Spore* as the counterexample: finite bowls, each made with care. That's arguably what 40 updates of deterministic generation still hasn't solved—scale can be generated; meaning cannot.

Closing

In his 10th-anniversary post, Sean Murray wrote that across 40 major free updates, with the universe rebuilt from scratch several times, players have explored less than 1% of the planets. A 1.8 × 10^19 universe, 1% walked in ten years, and the 40th update is still patching the remaining 99%. Taken together, these numbers are nearly the entire confession of procedural generation: building a world has become cheap enough for 15 people. Making a world worth walking remains the old price.

Sources

• Official Cosmos update announcement (full 7.0 patch notes): https://www.nomanssky.com/cosmos-update/
• PlayStation Blog 10th-anniversary post (signed by Sean Murray, 2026-08-10): https://blog.playstation.com/2026/08/10/no-mans-sky-developer-hello-games-celebrates-10-year-anniversary/
• HN discussion (293 points, 312 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628493
• 2^64 figure (Polygon, 2014-08-19): https://www.polygon.com/2014/8/19/6045933/its-impossible-to-visit-every-planet-in-no-mans-sky/
• GDC talk *Building Worlds Using Math(s)* (2017): https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024514/Building-Worlds-Using
• Superformula rumor fact-check (Forbes, 2016-07-27): https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2016/07/27/no-mans-sky-superformula/
• Official team-size statement (2018): https://www.nomanssky.com/2018/07/a-message-to-the-community/