So yesterday u/Viloneo made This post suggesting No Mans Sky ditch the current noise based generation for a more hand crafted template based procedural generation approach. While I appreciate the enthusiasm for addressing the issues with proc gen in the game I don’t think this approach would really work unfortunately. After commenting there that I thought it wasn’t likely to be the fix they imagined it to be and getting a response I went to reply and ended up writing a lot more than I had intended to.

I’m a game developer and while I’ve never done anything quite on the scale of NMS I have implemented a lot of different types of procedural generation (I can provide links if you’d like but I’m not here for self promo I just love this game :3 ) and while templates can work great (here’s a great interactive walkthrough of how Spelunky generates with templates) they have some major downsides such as making grid structures more obvious and massively increasing dev time.

(If I have some time I might see if I can add some diagrams into this post if people are interested)

I’m curious about how this suggestions practicality so I’m going to do some math and see how it might work out in detail.

Part One. Setting up our example area:So you want a chunk full of randomised patterns and you likely want minimal repeats, lets say you’re working in a 32×32 km area and each template defines a 1×1 km chunk of templated terrain using noise to add some degree of variation. That’ll be 1024 chunks to be filled in. Lets be generous and say we can get away with repeating the same structure 8 times across that and hoping the noise will differentiate things enough that they won’t be noticeably the same (this is likely to break down regularly and create very noticeably similar results) we’ll need a total of 1024÷8 or 128 unique chunks to fill in that area.

Part Two. The logistics of designing templates:so lets think reasonably about how long it would take to create these templates. For a 1km² area I’ve spent multiple days in the past to create maps with the unity terrain system. However this only deals in height values without the possibility for caves or overhang that the NMS terrain allows (I believe it uses marching cubes). One positive way in which this isn’t entirely comparable is that creating a template isn’t necessarily filling in every single detail just laying out the rough forms of the landscape. We can assume that the talented team at Hello games could make a tool suited to this workflow(I’m not going to guess how long making the tool would take but if it’s being used on a massive scale you want a pretty robust tool built from scratch) allowing the designer to define the landforms and areas where certain detail objects will be placed (eg. where forest goes). With this tool we can say the developer will take maybe half a day to make one template and another half to test it in engine with all the different biomes it can appear in and make any necessary tweaks (there’s 11 major biomes in the game so I think this is a fair if not generous estimate). So for just this 32km² chunk with templates possibly repeating 8 times within it that makes it 128 days worth of work. This can obviously be split up between a team but it will still cost the same amount in wages.

Part Three. Stitching the seams:Cool so now we have a relatively varied 32km² area of template based generation. But hang on how are we even blending these chunks together. We don’t want the edge of one chunk to just be a massive wall against the edge of the next. One thing we can do is to apply them to a larger height map and make sure all their edges are flat and line up this means the edges inherit the height from the heightmap but would need to be relatively featureless. Now the edges have less detail which is a problem because if you play enough you’ll likely start noticing the chunk grid, so maybe we should try to define a set of rules about which chunks can go together? We could use something cool and cutting edge like Wave Function Collapse (it’s really cool you should definitely read up on it here’s a neat open source implementation) well okay now we have a consistent level of detail across everything. But hang on I’m playing our new template based NMS with chunks that match up nicely but what’s that?! I’ve seen roughly that sort of mountain beside roughly that sort of lake 5 times while exploring this one planet? Hmm turns out there’s a sacrifice you have to make if you’re going to take an approach where certain chunks can go beside each other and others cant. each chunk now has a limited amount of other chunks it can actually appear beside and the reoccurrence of these patterns of chunks beside each other will become much more noticeable than if any chunk can go beside any other.In the end I don’t quite know what the best solution for this would be but remember every piece of hand designed content can take a lot more time to develop than you might expect so it’s unlikely merging the edges by hand is the right way to go.

Part Four. 32km² would be a very small planet:Lets assume we get over our chunk boundary issues and we have a lovely 32km² area of procedural generation with only minimal repeats and some variation applied to the repeats. now we need to fill 18 quintillion plus planets with this stuff. I did some searching and found this post about estimating the sizes of planets in NMS. For the planet they use in the example they get a total area of 478,000,000,000m² or 478,000,000km². That’s a lot bigger than 32 if we take our current set of 128 chunks we’ll have roughly 3,734,375 repeated occurrences of each chunk. Even if we can scale up and produce 512 unique chunks that’s still about 933,593.75 repeats on this single planet. In practice I suspect even a really good implementation of a template system for No Mans Sky would lead to a very similar level of infinite variations on the same thing as the current system does.

Some unfortunate side effects could also be:

1. It would likely eliminate the current possibility that the noise and other structures used to generate the existing planets have of creating super rare combinations of features that are nearly unpredictable.
2. Larger form features such as the curved trenches that form on some planets would be very hard to keep around.
3. More than likely this would have big performance overheads.

In conclusion while I also want improved variation to the generation I can’t say I think templates are the right approach and I’m going to wait and be patient and try to make the most out of the current generation while it lasts. If it is ever replaced I’m sure there’ll even be people going back to previous versions of the game to revisit it just like people do with pathfinder nowadays.

If you made it this far I hope you enjoyed what I was saying and maybe learned a thing or two. I’d love to write a bit more about topics like this so I’ll keep an eye on discussions of the proc gen going forward.

TLDR:Planets big, templates small. You need a lot of templates to fill a planet with minimal repeats and matching up the edges of templates in a natural way is a major task.

edit: fixed some weird wording.

So other day I decided it was time to grow my fleet of living frigates. After using up my small supply of two (2) anomaly detectors, I realized that I actually had no idea where they came from. A little digging on the wiki told me that they “occasionally” drop from destroying asteroids. Well… that’s vague. So I shot out into my local system’s deep space and began blasting some asteroid fields. One hour later, no Anomaly Detectors. After a little more research around Reddit and the Steam forums, I realized that nobody really does know how to efficiently farm these things, just that they “occasionally” drop from asteroids. I saw some theories here and there, but none with some good, solid evidence- so I took it upon myself to produce some.

To test, I decided to spend 15 minutes in various system types destroying asteroid fields. The timer starts the moment I find an adequate asteroid field, and paused if there are any interruptions (hostile ships, cargo scans, etc.).

Before I get on with the results, let’s establish what we do know about Anomaly Detector drops. Their wiki page says they drop from asteroids, but looking into the page on “asteroids” gives us another vital piece of information: they only drop from “small” type asteroids. Not the large ones that break piece by piece, and NOT the crystal type asteroids (which is the primary asteroid type in my initial system).

So without further ado, here are the actual numbers for the 13 systems I tested in order of most Anomaly Detectors to least, including their star color, primary lifeform (if any), and whether or not they are dissonant:

• Blue “abandoned” system (Gek), dissonant- 10 Anomaly Detectors

• Red “uncharted” system, dissonant- 8 Anomaly Detectors

• Red “uncharted” system- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Red Gek system, dissonant- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Red Korvax system- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Green Gek system- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Green “uncharted” system, dissonant- 6 Anomaly Detectors

• Yellow Gek system- 5 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue Vy’keen system, dissonant- 4 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue Korvax system- 4 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue “uncharted” system, dissonant- 3 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue “uncharted” system- 2 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue “abandoned” system (Vy’keen), dissonant- 2 Anomaly Detectors

So, what do our most successful systems have in common?

… basically nothing. In fact, the #1 system has more in common with the bottom 3 than any of the other top 3. Between 1st, 2nd, and the 4-way tie for 3rd place, we have red, green, and blue systems; uninhabited, abandoned, and populated systems; dissonant and non-dissonant systems- a little bit of everything. With the information gathered, I’m very comfortable in saying that the system you search in does not matter at all. It’s all RNG.

So that’s it? All that time wasted to find out it doesn’t matter?

Well, not exactly. Knowing that the drop rate is unaffected by the system type allows us to focus on other areas to maximize our collection: Not all of those 15 minute testing periods were built the same. Multiple times, I accidentally hit NPC ships mining asteroids as well. System freighters would warp in, despawning the chunk of asteroid field I was currently harvesting. I even had a freighter distress signal interrupt me without warping. Of course, I stopped my timer for the sake of testing fairly, but it did add to the actual time spent mining. So while they may not drop more Anomaly Detectors, uncharted and abandoned systems wind up being more efficient for farming Anomaly Detectors, as you’ll experience fewer interruptions.

So after over 3 hours of mindless asteroid blasting, I can definitively provide the most efficient way to farm Anomaly Detectors:

• Step 1: Warp to an uncharted or abandoned system. Any system color will do.

• Step 2: Locate an asteroid field and verify that it does not contain any of the “crystal” type asteroids. If it does, repeat step 1.

• Step 3: Blast to your heart’s content! If you install a Cargo Scan Deflector, you should have next to no interruptions whatsoever!

Hopefully somebody out there finds this post useful. I know it was a lot of text for a rather underwhelming conclusion, but at this point I was too far in to not post my results. And even if it wasn’t super productive, it was fun doing some actual research on a relatively undocumented topic in the game.

Anyway, now I gotta go figure out what to do with 72 Anomaly Detectors.

Happy hunting, travellers!