"The tricks used to create this base means visitors only see a fraction of its sprawl."
https://www.pcgamer.com/no-mans-skys-very-own-rapture-is-too-big-to-visit
The creators of NMS knew that they would need to have the biggest game environment possible.
It's the game that keeps growing into a vast scale and vision.
"There's a robot that lives inside No Man's Sky that nobody outside of the development team may ever see, because its entire purpose is to fly to each of the game's 18 quintillion worlds, take short videos and document its interstellar travels as a series of animated GIFs.
Developer Hello Games built this probe because, at its core, No Man's Sky is so massive that its statistically insignificant team of four human artists can't control or oversee its creation. At best, they can audit some of what already happened and adjust accordingly.
So, instead of pure human oversight, No Man's Sky is governed by what art director Grant Duncan calls a team of thousands of "mindless idiots" — the computer code and algorithms that take the structure that he and his team created and turned that into a universe."
https://www.polygon.com/2015/3/3/8140343/no-mans-sky-space-probes-gdc-quintillion-worlds
August 2021 marks the 5th anniversary since the release of No_Man's_Sky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man's_Sky#Gameplay
