If you’ve ever booted up No Man's Sky and stared up at the endless sky full of unmarked stars, you’ve probably wondered exactly how many planets are in No Man's Sky 2025. I’ve spent hundreds of hours jumping between systems, scanning weird alien flora and fauna, and even getting chased by sentinels on toxic ice worlds, so I’ve dug up all the official numbers and behind-the-scenes info to answer that question once and for all. This guide breaks down not just the total count, but how that number came to be, what makes each planet unique, and how you can find some of the rarest worlds in the game.
How Many Planets Are In No Man's Sky 2025, Exactly?
The short official answer from Hello Games is over 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets across the entire No Man's Sky galaxy cluster. Wait, quintillion? That’s 18 followed by 18 zeros, a number so big it’s almost impossible to wrap your head around. To put that in perspective, if you visited one planet every second, it would take you more than 570 billion years to see every single one. That’s longer than the age of the actual universe, which is only around 13.8 billion years old.
You don’t have to worry about running out of new places to explore, even if you play the game every single day for the rest of your life. But wait, that number hasn’t always been the same. Early versions of the game launched with a smaller galaxy count, but years of free updates have expanded the universe multiple times, adding new biome types, star system variants, and even entire hidden galaxy regions for dedicated players to find.
How No Man's Sky Generates So Many Unique Planets
You might be wondering how a small game studio could create 18 quintillion planets without hiring millions of designers to build each one. The answer is procedural generation technology that uses complex algorithms to create every planet, creature, plant, and even rock formation on the fly as you approach a new system. The algorithm uses a fixed seed number for the entire galaxy, which means every player sees the exact same planet when they visit the same coordinates. That’s why you can share a location of a rare paradise world with a friend, and they’ll land on the exact same beach with the same pink grass and floating jellyfish creatures you saw.
Even with how many planets are in No Man's Sky 2025, you’ll almost never run into two planets that look identical, even if they share the same biome type. Not every planet is a fun place to visit, though. The algorithm generates everything from lush tropical worlds with breathable air to irradiated dead planets with surface temperatures hot enough to melt your exosuit in 10 seconds. You’ll also find weird outliers, like planets made entirely of diamond, worlds where it rains glass, or frozen planets that host hidden ancient alien ruins under the ice.
Some of the rarest planet types you can find in 2025 include:
Do Updates Change the Total Number of Planets?
A common question from long-time players is if major content updates add more planets to the total count. The short answer is no, the core 18 quintillion count has stayed consistent since the 2020 Origins update, but updates do make existing planets far more interesting to explore. For example, the 2024 Frontiers update added new settlement types, unique volcanic biomes, and more varied creature spawns to thousands of existing planets that previously felt empty and generic. So you might revisit a planet you first explored in 2020 and find it’s now home to a bustling alien town or a new rare resource node you didn’t see before.
Only major galaxy expansion updates add new planets to the total count, and Hello Games has not announced any plans for that as of 2025. That said, even with the existing count, less than 0.0001% of all planets have been visited by players so far, so there’s still more unexplored territory than any community could cover in a million years. I’ve run into uncharted planets even in relatively popular regions of the starting galaxy, so you don’t have to travel thousands of light years to find a world no one else has ever seen.
Tips for Finding Unique Planets Fast
Now that you know how big the No Man's Sky universe is, you probably want to skip all the boring toxic and irradiated worlds and jump straight to the fun, rare ones. I’ve tested dozens of exploration methods over the years, and these tricks work way better than just jumping randomly between systems. First, invest in a high-grade scanner upgrade for your starship. This will let you see basic biome info for every planet in a system before you even land, so you can skip any worlds with hostile weather or no resources right away. You can buy these upgrades from space station technology vendors, or find them as rewards for completing explorer guild missions.
Next, prioritize traveling to systems with yellow, blue, or green stars. Yellow stars have the highest chance of spawning lush paradise planets, while blue and green stars are more likely to have exotic and high-resource worlds. You’ll need a cadmium, emeril, or indium drive for your ship to reach those higher-tier star systems, so make those upgrades a priority early in your playthrough. You can also use community-shared coordinates to jump directly to rare planets, but I prefer exploring on my own half the time. There’s nothing quite like the rush of finding a perfect paradise world no one else has ever named, and getting to leave your mark on it for every future player to see.
At the end of the day, the exact number of planets doesn’t matter as much as how fun it is to explore them. Whether you’re playing for the first time or coming back after a long break, asking how many planets are in No Man's Sky 2025 is just the start of a journey that can last hundreds of hours. You don’t have to try to visit every world, or even find the rarest ones, to have a good time. Some of my favorite memories in the game are from random small planets I found by accident, with weird alien creatures and gorgeous sunsets I never would have found if I was just rushing to find a paradise world. Take your time, jump between systems when you feel like it, and don’t be afraid to land on that weird glowing planet you spot off in the distance. You never know what you might find.