How many planets and star systems are in No Man's Sky?
How big No Man's Sky really is: 18 quintillion planets, 256 galaxies, billions of regions, and how many systems and planets players have actually recorded.
18 quintillion planets
Hello Games has always given one figure: 18 446 744 073 709 551 616 planets, about 18 quintillion. That number is exactly 2 to the power of 64, the largest count that fits in 64 bits. It is the size of the universe's address book more than a census: nobody has counted the planets one by one, and nobody ever will.
At one planet per second, visiting them all would take about 585 billion years.
How the universe is built
The structure is more useful than the headline number:
- 256 galaxies, from Euclid to Odyalutai. See the galaxies.
- Regions: every galaxy is a grid of regions, each about 400 light-years across, 4 096 wide, 4 096 deep and 256 high. A region is what the last eight glyphs of a portal address point to.
- Star systems: a region holds from about 275 to about 685 systems, 597 at the median, on 1 799 regions sampled across Euclid.
- Planets and moons: up to 6 per system, 4.76 on average, never more than 5 moons.
Measured on one million systems predicted across Euclid.
How many planets per system
On the predicted million:
- Planets: most systems have 4 (27.5 %) or 5 (22.9 %). Systems with a single planet are rare, 2.1 %.
- Moons: more than half of the systems have none (57.2 %), a quarter have one.
- All bodies: 43.7 % of systems have the maximum of 6.
How much has been explored?
A tiny part, and that is the point of an atlas. Across all 256 galaxies, this site holds:
- 82 423 star systems recorded by players, with their name and their portal address;
- 139 900 regions explored;
- 902 historical records of places that changed with a game update, kept as they were seen (see Updates that changed the universe).
Live counts on the Observatory.
Why players cannot run out of places
Two travellers who start in different regions will almost never meet by chance. That is why portal addresses matter: twelve glyphs are the only way to send someone to one exact planet. See Glyphs and the portal decoder.
Last updated: 1 November 2026