The Traveller (the player character) wakes up on a remote planet with amnesia and must locate their crashed starship. After finding their starship, its computer guides the Traveller to make the necessary repairs and to collect the resources needed to fuel a hyperspace jump to another planetary system. En route, the Traveller encounters individual members of three alien species, the Gek, the Korvax and the Vy'keen, that inhabit the galaxy. During their voyage, the Traveller is compelled by an unknown force to reach the centre of the galaxy.
The defining feature of No Man's Sky is that nearly all parts of the galaxy, including stars, planets, flora and fauna on these planets, and sentient alien encounters, are created through procedural generation using deterministic algorithms and random number generators from a single seed number. This 64-bit value leads to there being over 18 quintillion (1.8×1019) planets to explore within the game. Very little data is stored on the game's servers, as all elements of the game are created through deterministic calculations when the player is near them, assuring that other players will see the same elements as another player by travelling to the same location in the galaxy. The player may make temporary changes on planets, such as mining resources, but these changes are not tracked once the player leaves that vicinity.
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