No Man's Sky has 18446744073709551616 planets- Mind Boggled!

No Man's Sky is a new game that is just getting ready to launch on the PlayStation 4. It has been promising an entire universe on a single shiny disk, and it seems they've pretty much delivered.

The word is that No Man's Sky features 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets. That's more than 18 quintillion worlds which are completely unique and have their own flora and fauna and biospheres and landscapes and skies and masses of space in between to fly through.

It's a hard figure to process but the gist is that if you were to discover a new planet every second it would take you 585 billion years to find them all...

This has a bearing on how the game works in terms of its multiplayer. Essentially all players will be exploring the same universe but the place is so vast that the chances of them running across eachother will be incredibly slight. Sort of like if we all scattered ourselves out into the vastness of real space from different starting points.

You might see another players ship flash by in the distance or even land on the same planet but actually meeting face to face sounds nigh on impossible. Though given the things that players manage to achieve all the time in games we're willing to believe that they'll find a way.

Instead the main interaction will be by seeing a planet which has been discovered by another player. Hello Games has also included some kind of system for leaving messages for fellow travellers, sort of like Dark Souls, but that is a mystery so far.

No Man's Sky is out in Ireland on the 10th of August, 2016.