How a tiny team generated 18 quintillion planets

Instead of hiring thousands of artists to draw trees, Hello Games just asked an algorithm to do the heavy lifting. The entirety of No Man's Sky—featuring 18 quintillion planets, bizarre mutant dinosaurs, and endless neon grass—stems from a single foundational mathematical equation. It is a stunning achievement in procedural generation, proving that a tiny team of nerds can out-scale God with the right lines of code.