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A little perspective on the size of Starbound

Discussion in 'Starbound Discussion' started by greenskye, Jul 30, 2013.

  1. greenskye

    greenskye Pangalactic Porcupine

    Edit: We have an official response! See Omni's explanation of how it really works here. Spoiler: It's actually 422.22 quadrillion possible planets.

    Ok I've seen a lot of people worry about sharing the same "universe" with everyone else. They seem to feel like their experience in Starbound will not be unique enough. Or that everything cool will have already been discovered. And quite frankly I just can't understand that. So I thought I'd give people some perspective.


    Based on this video the coordinates for planets are 8 digits each. 12345678 x 12345678

    Now this could have changed, but using that as an example that gives us 10^16 or 10,000,000,000,000,000. 10 quadrillion possible planets.

    According to the preorder page 70,000 people have bought starbound already. I'm not sure if this includes the 4-packs or not. Just to be safe, we'll assume everyone bought a 4-pack. So 280,000 potential Starbound players.

    If the entire Starbound community wanted to collectively visit every planet at least once, each player would be responsible for visiting 35,714,285,714 planets. According to the video above, it takes about a minute for the FTL travel animation to complete. Lets assume we could shorten that to a single second. It would take 1131.74 YEARS for the ENTIRE 280,000 strong Starbound community to visit each planet if they worked 24/7. If we couldn't shorten the animation, it would take us 67,904.5 years.

    If we got all 7 billion people on the planet to play starbound that would still be 1,428,571 planets per person.

    If every planet visited creates a 1 kilobyte save file, the entire Starbound universe would require 9.3 EXAbytes of space (1 exabyte = 1 million terabytes). For reference you could store every word ever spoken by humans on 5 exabytes.

    Provided each person starts out in a random location, it is VERY likely that you will never *accidentally* visit the same planet as someone else. For all intents and purposes, each player will have his own 35 billion planet universe of his own. Honestly, if you could find a server that would support it, every Starbound player could play in the same universe and almost certainly never stumble upon anyone else.

    So yes. You will be sharing the same 16 quadrillion planets as everyone else, but provided you don't share your seeds on the internet, chances are, no one else has ever been to that particular planet.

    Now of course there are some caveats. Not every seed represents a planet. But I think we can all agree that the numbers are high enough here for that to not matter.
     
  2. Johan

    Johan Phantasmal Quasar

    it´s HUGE :eek:
     
    Jonesy and xboy777 like this.
  3. Bartwe once said in the IRC about 5 Quintillion possible planets.
    BUT BEWARE, most of the coordinates are Empty Space, we can't then, make any accurate counting.

    The number that interest me most is more about the Download size of Starbound, said once early this year about +500MB, what sounds with a lot of content. :alien:
     
    Beaumort and FluffyRabbit like this.
  4. BastianHawk

    BastianHawk Aquatic Astronaut

    Any number reaching into the millions, billions and beyond in video games may as well be defined as infinite.
     
    Zanzabarr likes this.
  5. greenskye

    greenskye Pangalactic Porcupine


    Interestingly, if there are 5 quintillion possible planets and 99% of them are empty space that still leaves 50 quadrillion possible planets.
     
  6. Yup, in any way it will be more than enough for non-repetitive content. :alien:
     
    Ketoth likes this.
  7. Fyreflyte

    Fyreflyte Pangalactic Porcupine

    I think the main concern of the people you are referring to is not that their experience will not be unique, but that wikis have a chance to spoil their multiplayer experience once coordinates with particular benefits are discovered (ie. people sharing the coordinates of easy to reach loot hoards).
     
    GrumpyMcfart and LastDay like this.
  8. Flameofice

    Flameofice Pangalactic Porcupine

    Also, take into account that coordinates point to star systems, not planets. Nearly every star system we've seen so far has at least 5 planets, and many of them have one or more moons. We also have three different sectors planets could be located in.

    So, by this information, the game has at least 30 quadrillion possible planets. If they add new sectors, which could be quite easy, there could very likely be more.

    So, in a nutshell, exploring everything in-game to find every possible environment, gun, and monster is literally impossible. If you happened to live for 200 years, didn't need food, rest, or water, could instantly travel to planets, and started playing from birth to death, you still couldn't do it.
     
  9. I wonder how long is it going to take me just to establish my first working base of operations, populate the area, explore the whole planet and discover what lies beneath the surface...
    Then we have the instruments, singing, tech, fossils, vehicles, guns, melee weaponry, shields, pets, aliens, quests, civilizations, lore, building and crafting, space travel, pet system, 6 playable races and dungeons and much much more I forgot about !
    I don't think I'll discover even the 5% of the game or what it allows me to do in the first month of playing it.
    The math has spoken, the numbers are just smashing.
    ImageUploadedByTapatalk1375221099.044002.jpg
     
    Chibi likes this.
  10. greenskye

    greenskye Pangalactic Porcupine


    If they're playing single player or with trusted friends, the only thing standing between them and ruining their experience is there own will power. No one has to look up seeds if they don't want to.

    For public servers... There is talk of loot being randomized separately from the seed. Honestly I'll be surprised if they don't implement that. Even so, they're planning on providing robust moderating controls for server owners. It's the players job to find a server who's moderator's ideals align with their own. Set up some server rules about seed abuse and ban those that don't follow them.

    Otherwise mods. Mods can solve everything! (Almost)
     
  11. RizzRustbolt

    RizzRustbolt Existential Complex

    Get to know the people you play with. Only play with people that you can trust. Multi-pass solved!
     
  12. Johan

    Johan Phantasmal Quasar

    Chest loot not dependant of seed, only mobs and ores :iswydt:
     
  13. Fyreflyte

    Fyreflyte Pangalactic Porcupine

    Very true, but playing with friends presents another problem: friends can often be highly competitive. Once your buddy gets a bit ahead of you, it can become tempting to consult the wiki to get an edge. Granted you cannot stop this altogether, but allowing a server to host a unique world seed would help save them from themselves.

    I plan to host my own server, so not a problem there, but I do want to play with all of my friends. Unfortunately a few of them can't seem to help looking info up as soon as it is available. They aren't prone to cheating, per say, but wikis posting planet locations with specific difficulties and specific tiers of ore will give them a huge edge. More importantly, it will take a lot of the fun out of exploration. Again, a simple option to insert an additional seed into your universe would help solve this. I see no reason not to include it as an option (it certainly doesn't have to be the default).
     
    GrumpyMcfart likes this.
  14. Adinxs

    Adinxs Big Damn Hero

    Don't you people see?!
    This game is Star Boundless!
     
  15. OmnipotentEntity

    OmnipotentEntity Code Monkey Forum Administrator

    I currently have *no idea* how many planets are possible, so I'm going to do a quick calculation based on the information currently in the game. Subject to change of course.

    The celestial hierarchy works as follows:

    You have sectors. Sectors take a 64-bit seed. Currently, we have 3 sectors defined, for release we're planning on 10.

    Each sector contains systems (currently only star systems). There is a 1 in 100 chance that any given XY coordinate contains a system, and the coordinates range from -100 million to 100 million. Meaning there are on average 200 million ^ 2 / 100 systems per sector, or 400 trillion. (Z coordinate also ranges from -100 million to 100 million and is calculated as a checksum of the first two numbers iirc).

    Each system can contain up to 12 planets, the exact probability depends on the type of the system, but average number of planets in a system is currently (2.0 * 0.2 * 12 + 3.0 * 0.6 * 11 + 1.0 * 0.4 * 10 + 1.0 * 0.4 * 10) / 7.0 ~= 4.657

    Each planet could either be a terrestrial planet or a gas giant. And may have up to 12 moons (I believe?). Each moon is a terrestrial body and landable, gas giants are not.

    The average number of moons for a planet is ( 2.0 * 0.1 * 12 + 1.0 * 0.2 * 12) / 3 = 1.6 moons / planet. And the probability that the planet itself can be landed on is 2/3.

    This gives 3 * 400 trillion * (4.657 * 1.6 + 4.657 * 2 / 3) = 12.667 quadrillion planets in the game currently. 422.22 quadrillion planets expected for release. And if you're into modding the game and unlocking arbitrary sectors you can access up to 77.88 decillion different worlds.
     
  16. Katzeus

    Katzeus Chucklefisherman Chucklefish

    OMG math!!

    I'm updating my seed post with this, thanks Omni
     
    SpaceVixen likes this.
  17. OmnipotentEntity

    OmnipotentEntity Code Monkey Forum Administrator

    It should be mentioned that there is a very very real probability that some (many) planets are identical. Because of limitations in our RNG and because applying PRNGs to a system multiple times tends to make things less, rather than more, random. But in actual practice, you'll probably never run across any identical planets, and I'll be very surprised if any pairs are found.
     
    LastDay, Leak, Thanel and 2 others like this.
  18. Katzeus

    Katzeus Chucklefisherman Chucklefish

    Challenge...accepted
     
    DaJoe85, Zanzabarr, PSS and 7 others like this.
  19. hit9

    hit9 Orbital Explorer

    mind = blown
     
  20. ZangooseSlash

    ZangooseSlash Black Hole Surfer

    You aren't downloading every single planet already generated, you're basically downloading the tools, and the game will save planets once made.
     

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