Galactic coordinates, planetary coordinates and glyphs in No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky writes a place several ways: glyphs, signal booster coordinates, the X, Y, Z of a region and planetary coordinates. The first part says what each one is and how the site converts them for you. The second part shows the maths behind the conversion, for those who want to do it by hand or write their own tool.

Part 1: the easy way

Four ways to write a place

Portal glyphs: twelve symbols, like 1157CE589C1E. They point to a planet in a system, and a portal can take you there.
Galactic coordinates: four groups of four characters, like 041D:004D:0D88:0157. They point to a system, not a planet, and no portal reads them.
Region coordinates: three signed numbers, X, Y and Z, like -994, -50, 1417. They point to a region of the galaxy, measured from its centre, not to a system.

None of them says which galaxy. The same glyphs or coordinates lead somewhere else in each of the 256 galaxies. See Which galaxy am I in?

Get your glyphs

You get them from photo mode, a portal or your save: see Find my address. Their names and how to read them: see Glyphs.

Get your galactic coordinates

A signal booster, built from the build menu, shows the galactic coordinates of the system you are in, as four groups separated by colons. It can print a word in front of them: it is not part of the place, leave it out.

Convert coordinates to glyphs

Paste the four groups in the portal decoder of your galaxy, as they are, with or without the word in front. It converts them to glyphs and opens the system.

Coordinates have no planet in them, so the decoder picks the first one. Change the first glyph to reach another planet of the same system.

Region coordinates

Each region page of the site shows the X, Y and Z of the region: X on the west-east axis, Y on the height, Z on the north-south axis, all counted from the centre of the galaxy, which is 0, 0, 0. The page also gives its distance from the core in light years. For the example above, see region CE589C1E.

Save editors write the same three numbers as VoxelX, VoxelY and VoxelZ.

To send someone to a planet: the portal glyphs, with the galaxy. As a link, it is even simpler: see Save and share an address.
To give the system from a signal booster: the galactic coordinates, or convert them to glyphs first.

Part 2: the maths

Everything below is in hexadecimal, base 16, with digits 0 to 9 then A to F. Any calculator in programmer mode does the sums.

The galaxy as a grid

A galaxy is a grid of regions: 4096 from east to west, 256 in height, 4096 from north to south. A region is a cube of about 400 light years.

So a place takes three numbers for the region, one for the system in the region, and, for glyphs only, one for the planet.

Glyphs, digit by digit

Twelve glyphs, each one a hexadecimal digit, read from left to right:

1 digit: the planet in the system, from 1 to 6;
3 digits: the system in its region;
2 digits: the height of the region;
3 digits: north-south;
3 digits: east-west.

1157CE589C1E reads as planet 1, system 157, height CE, north-south 589, east-west C1E.

Galactic coordinates, group by group

XXXX:YYYY:ZZZZ:SSSS reads as east-west, height, north-south, then the system. The order is not the one of the glyphs, and each group is padded with zeros to four digits.

Two starting points

The two forms count from different places.

Coordinates count from a corner of the galaxy. East-west and north-south go from 0000 to 0FFF, height from 0000 to 00FF. The centre sits at 07FF:007F:07FF.
Glyphs count from the centre. The regions next to it end in zeros, and the numbers go up on one side and wrap around from the top on the other side.

Going from one to the other is a shift by the centre, plus one.

From coordinates to glyphs

For 041D:004D:0D88:0157:

Planet: pick it. 1 for the first planet.
System: the last group, without its leading zero. 0157 gives 157.
Height: add 81 to YYYY and keep the last 2 digits. 004D + 81 = CE.
North-south: add 801 to ZZZZ and keep the last 3 digits. 0D88 + 801 = 1589, so 589.
East-west: add 801 to XXXX and keep the last 3 digits. 041D + 801 = C1E.

Put them in glyph order: 1 157 CE 589 C1E, so 1157CE589C1E.

Why 801 and not 7FF: the centre 07FF must land on 000. 7FF + 801 = 1000, and keeping the last 3 digits leaves 000. The same goes for the height: 7F + 81 = 100, last 2 digits 00.

From glyphs to coordinates

The other way round, add the centre instead and keep the same number of digits:

XXXX: east-west glyphs + 7FF, last 3 digits. C1E + 7FF = 141D, so 041D.
YYYY: height glyphs + 7F, last 2 digits. CE + 7F = 14D, so 004D.
ZZZZ: north-south glyphs + 7FF, last 3 digits. 589 + 7FF = D88, so 0D88.
SSSS: the system, padded with a zero. 0157.

The planet digit is lost: coordinates do not carry it.

Glyphs as signed numbers

Keeping the last digits is the same as reading the glyphs as signed numbers, the way a computer stores negative numbers:

east-west and north-south: from 000 to 7FF is 0 to +2047, from 800 to FFF is -2048 to -1;
height: from 00 to 7F is 0 to +127, from 80 to FF is -128 to -1.

In the example, east-west C1E is 3102, minus 4096, so -994. Height CE is 206, minus 256, so -50. North-south 589 is 1417, below 2048, so +1417. The region sits 994 regions from the centre on the west-east axis, 50 on the height and 1417 on the north-south axis, on the negative side for the first two.

These three signed numbers are the region coordinates, the X, Y, Z shown on each region page.

Save files

Save editors and some tools write the same place as VoxelX, VoxelY, VoxelZ, SolarSystemIndex and PlanetIndex. The first three are the region coordinates, the rest is the system and the planet, all in decimal: for the example, VoxelX -994, VoxelY -50, VoxelZ 1417 and SolarSystemIndex 343, which is 157 in decimal. See Use direct URL for the form this site returns.

Distance to the centre

With the signed numbers, the distance in regions is the Euclidean distance, fitting for a game whose first galaxy is called Euclid: the square root of the sum of the three squares.

994² + 50² + 1417² = 2 998 425, whose square root is about 1 732 regions. At about 400 light years per region, the system is some 693 000 light years from the centre.

The distance between two places works the same way, with the difference of each number in place of the number itself.

Last updated: 1 November 2026