No Man’s Sky has spawned more species than exist on earth in just 24 hours

No Man’s Sky is a triumph of ambition. There’s no denying that.

The space exploration simulator has the most expansive world of any game ever created. It has an unending supply of planets to explore, solar systems to visit, and aliens to make first contact with, largely thanks to its sophisticated procedural generation algorithms. Skyrim, eat your heart out.

Although critical reception has been fairly mixed, with some complaints about gameplay being repetitive, general enthusiasm for the game is seemingly unquenchable. In the first day, the game’s servers nearly buckled under the pressure of those trying to play it, leading Hello Games founder Sean Murray to post on Twitter “.. too many of you are playing right now. More than we could have predicted“.

We hope to see those happening… but too many of you are playing right now. More than we could have predicted

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 10, 2016

But perhaps an even bigger metric for its launch-day success is the fact that in the mere 24 hours that it’s been online, over ten million species have been discovered. That’s more than the 8.7 million species that exist on earth, according to a 2011 study.

For instance over night we hit 10 million species discovered in NMS… that's more than has been discovered on earth.
WHAT IS GOING ON!!!

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 10, 2016

Given that these species are being algorithmically generated from a number of limited parameters, it remains to be seen how diverse they are. But who cares? Even if there is some overlap, it’s still the most dynamic and unique game released this year.