They should have came up with this law ages ago and hats off to who came up with the name . 😂 <| sep |> As far as I am aware , CIG ' s artistguided procedural generation approach to making planets is unique at least as of now . Most other game devs so far have tried to use procedural generation as a way to have functionally infinite environments , generated 100 % via an algorithm . This sounds great in theory infinite content ! , but it tends to lead to an alphabet soup problem , like with No Man ' s Sky ' s planets . Every one of a billion procedural planets may be unique , in the same way that each of a billion bowls of alphabet soup is unique , but very few of them will be actually be interesting in some way . Randomly stumbling across one of those few interesting planets in a sea of sameylooking worlds is a statistical improbability . On average , randomness is just noise . Content designed entirely by artists , on the other hand , can be crafted to be much more exciting than something that was randomly generated simply by virtue of it being intelligently designed , but handcrafting takes time . Modelling even a single planet like this without any kind of procedural generation at all would not be possible on a realistic time scale . CIG is doing something inbetween . Environment artists can paint the broad strokes of a planet ' s surface biomes , height map , flora , even cities , while an algorithm fills in the finer terrain details and ground clutter . Then they can go in and make changes in certain areas , tweak specific points of interest to perfection , place modular buildings or other handcrafted elements in places that actually make sense and overall give the environment a specific feel . And since these cool places and other details didn ' t happen randomly , players can be guided to them in ways that make sense within the game landing zones , missions , lore , beacons etc . . In the end , Star Citizen may only have a few hundred or so planets , but each one should be interesting in its own way , and you won ' t have to search through thousands of boring planets to find them .