No Man’s Sky at Ten: 18 Quintillion Planets, Less Than 1% Visited, and a 7.4/10 That Feels Right

No Man’s Sky has spent a decade promising a universe and delivering a spreadsheet. That is not a knock. Hello Games built something stranger and more durable than the 2016 launch suggested: a survival game where the four pillars — exploration, survival, combat, trading — hold up a galaxy of over 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets.

Trailer, via IGDBcom.

The Traveller Wakes With Amnesia

You start on a randomised planet near a crashed starship, wearing a survival exosuit with a jetpack and carrying a multitool that scans, mines, collects and fights. The ship needs repair. The hyperdrive needs fuel. An unknown force pulls you toward the centre of the galaxy.

The plot is thin by design. The Traveller has amnesia. Three alien species — the Gek, the Korvax and the Vy’keen — populate the systems, trading or fighting depending on your approach. A space anomaly houses Priest Entity Nada and Specialist Polo, two beings who speak without translation and point you toward a black hole and a being called the Atlas.

Then there is Artemis, another Traveller trapped on a sunless world after stepping through an ancient portal. You triangulate the position. It does not exist. The transmission ends. That thread, more than any Atlas reveal, is the game’s best writing.

18 Quintillion Planets, Less Than 1% Visited

Everything runs on procedural generation: deterministic algorithms and random number generators seeded from a single 64-bit value. Stars, planets, flora, fauna, sentient encounters — all calculated when you get near them, not stored on servers.

Sean Murray, Hello Games’ founder, wanted the sense of exploration and optimism of 1970s and 1980s science fiction literature and art. He got the scale. As of August 2026, the game’s ten-year anniversary, Murray said players had visited less than 1% of the planets.

That number is the whole argument. The galaxy is not content. It is a surface.

What Ten Years of Free Updates Built

The launch version had no multiplayer, no base building, no fleet management, no VR. All of it arrived free. The full platform run now looks like this:

On Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation VR2, PlayStation 4 and Switch 2, the game is now a different object than the one that shipped. VR support changes the scale most — standing on a planet you mined by hand hits harder than a flat screen allows. Base building and fleet expansion give the trading pillar somewhere to land. Multiplayer and co-op turn a lonely simulation into something you can share.

The combat remains the weakest pillar. Shooting creatures and hostile forces works, but it never rises above functional. Space combat with alien factions is the same story.

The Atlas Choice Is the Real Game

The ending asks whether to reset the simulation or reject the Atlas and keep exploring. That is the honest question No Man’s Sky has been asking since 2016, and the free updates answered it in the player’s favour. Reject the reset. Keep the galaxy.

The score sits at 7.4/10 across 38 outlets, and that feels right for what this is: a game whose ambition outruns its moment-to-moment texture, kept alive by a developer that refused to abandon it. The procedural generation is a marvel of engineering and a limit on surprise — you will recognise the seams within hours. The story of Artemis lands harder than the Atlas because it is about absence, and absence is the one thing this galaxy cannot generate.

Worth playing now, especially in VR or co-op. Worth playing for the ten-year arc as much as the game.

Game Reviews · Hello Games · No Man's Sky · procedural generation · PSVR2 · survival games