Ship customization is literally impossible in No Man’s Sky. Now hold on and let me explain. As long as you conform to the possible parts, colors, and the rules that govern them, your dream ship already exists. Yep, it’s out there, somewhere.

I say that because literally every combination exists already. There are at least 64 billion of each type out there as a matter of fact. They’ve all been built, procedurally. That ship has a unique identifier (so do trees, rocks, planets, animals, Gek, everything) that’s called a seed. It’s an ungainly hexadecimal number that can be up to 24 digits long. I’m not even sure how big that is, because my calculator goes into scientific notation and my eyes glass over. 😜

When you, or anyone else, sees your ship, the game sees it’s seed and shows you the decoded ship. Because of that you can’t change the wing, the color, or the thrusters without changing the seed. But that seed already exists, it belongs to another ship out there, somewhere. So, you can’t customize your ship, you have to get a new ship, that’s just the way the game works.

Did I mention how many billions of ships are out there? When you change that wing, the game then would have to search each and every one of those billions and billions of seeds, unpacking each along the way, until it found a match. It takes a long time and, mind you, the game cannot create a new seed, there aren’t any left that conform to the rules.

How do I know? We do it every day. It’s called seed-swapping. By editing your saved game and putting in a new seed, you change the appearance of your ship (and two of it’s stats, damage and maneuverability.) How do we find the seeds, just like I said in the paragraph above. Some perspective here.

​

An example of a custom fighter being \”created\”, but really the program searches the game for it.

If you have a red fighter and you want it white, not a problem. We built a program that can do that, it will break down the seed of your current ship and go look for a white one. Takes about 90 seconds. That’s just one color of 5. So if your ship is red and blue and you want it white and yellow, you may get lucky and find it in 3-5 minutes. Want green decals with that? Want to change a wing as well? Heh, forget about it. Now we’re up to a half hour or longer search and we’re only got the one bot to do it. As it is that thing runs constantly most days.

So that’s your problem. The ships exist, they are already assigned to a particular system and they’re in the game. The only way to change it is to literally get a new ship (seed).

Now, we’ve gotten clever and pre-unpacked a couple of billion fighters and haulers and put them in a database. If what you are looking for is in the database, sweet, you can do a 3 color search in a couple of seconds. It’s HUGE! We’re talking tens of of gigabytes already (and took a week just to get that many unpacked).

For HG to go the database route and allow you to freely customize your ship, your PC or Console would have to hold 2 or 3 TERRABYTES or more of database just for ships. The genius of procedural generation is that only the rules and the seeds have to be stored, not all the data.

Anyway, that’s it in a nutshell. I know it seems so simple, you’ve seen all the parts and colors why can’t you just swap them out? It comes down to procedural generation. As it is, the game only has to store the rules in code, and the key (seed) to unlock an asset according to those rules. If it had to store the full definition of each asset, it would simply be orders of magnitude to big. Remember the numbers we’re talking about here, 18 quintillion planets and every rock, plant animal, etc has to be defined somehow (as well as 21 ships for that star system).

If you’d like to have a look at what we’re doing you’re welcome to join the Discord, try out the bot, and ask questions.

No Man’s Sky Creative and Sharing Hub