Space Is Too Big for Games: How X4, Elite Dangerous, and No Man’s Sky Wrestle with 93 Billion Light-Years
Featured image: Screenshot from Elite Dangerous showing a spaceship against the Milky Way; credit: Frontier Developments
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Douglas Adams wrote those words decades ago, and game developers are still wrestling with them today.
The observable universe spans 93 billion light-years. The Milky Way alone stretches 100,000 light-years across and contains hundreds of billions of stars. Even at Artemis II top speed, roughly 40,000 kilometers per hour (25,000 mph), a trip to Alpha Centauri would take 80,000 years. Yet players expect space games to deliver that scale on a screen in their living room, without five-minute loading screens or hours of empty flight time.
It is a design conflict that every space game must solve, and the solutions are as varied as the studios building them.
The Scale Problem, Visualized
Astrophysicist Jeffrey Bennett, author of “The Scale of the Universe,” offers a stark thought experiment. On a 1-to-10-billion scale where the Sun is the size of a large grapefruit, Earth is smaller than a ballpoint pen tip, sitting 15 meters (49 feet) away. The Moon, the farthest any human has ever traveled, lies just 4 centimeters (1.5 inches) from Earth. The outer planets are a brisk 10-minute walk away. But the nearest star? That requires walking across the entire United States.
Compounding the challenge, space is mostly empty. Films and games often depict asteroid belts as chaotic debris fields requiring daredevil piloting. In reality, asteroids are spaced hundreds of thousands to millions of kilometers apart. Standing on one, you likely could not see the next-largest one with the naked eye.
X4: Foundations, Compressed but Believable
Egosoft, the German studio behind the long-running X series, takes a layered approach to the scale problem. Founder and Managing Director Bernd Lehahn describes it as an explicit design conflict.
“This absolutely is a design conflict that all space games have to solve,” Lehahn told Space.com. “On the one hand, space must feel very large, or else players will feel cheated. At the same time, most games do not want to force players through unnecessarily long flight times or, god forbid, boredom.”
Egosoft’s solution in X4: Foundations is arguably the most sophisticated of any space game on the market. The game layers multiple travel mechanisms on top of each other: scaled engine technologies where faster engines trade maneuverability for straight-line speed, jump gates that instantly bridge vast distances, teleportation and time acceleration for downtime, and space highways that provide slipstream acceleration through populated regions.
The result is a universe that feels vast but never tedious. Dense, populated sectors with artificial transportation sit alongside empty frontier zones where travel is slower and mystery replaces convenience.
“We want it to feel as realistic as possible,” Lehahn said. “Planets are real size; you can move in relation to planets. But sometimes, if there is a conflict between fun gameplay and realism, then we may have to compromise on realism a bit.”
Elite Dangerous: The 1:1 Ambition
Frontier Developments chose the opposite approach: build the entire Milky Way at true scale and let players deal with it.
“We have a 1:1 scale Milky Way,” said Executive Producer Gauthier Verquerre. “Roughly 400 billion star systems.”
The studio’s proprietary Stellar Forge technology uses real astronomical catalog data and models stellar phenomena, including collisions and formation mechanics, to procedurally generate every system on demand. It also generates planetary surfaces and space station interiors for on-foot exploration. The systems are generated identically every time a player visits, creating a consistent, persistent galaxy.
To make a 1:1 galaxy playable, Elite Dangerous offers four tiers of travel. Deep space thrusters operate at roughly 300 meters per second (sub-Mach 1) for combat and mining. Supercruise enables faster-than-light travel within a star system for scanning exploration. Hyperspace jumps the player between star systems through a visual tunnel sequence. And a newer Supercruise Overcharge mode allows even faster in-system navigation.
The risk mechanics are what make scale meaningful in Elite Dangerous. Fuel and heat management mean a long journey can leave a player stranded. Interdictions allow other players to pull ships out of jumps. Damage accumulates during long expeditions; a cracked cockpit canopy transforms a scenic cruise into a desperate race for repairs.
“Those long trips that our players are taking out into deep space mean that small damage adds up, canopy cracks, and moments of tension take the beauty of space and translate it almost instantly into abject fear,” Verquerre said.
The numbers are staggering. Released in 2014, Elite Dangerous still has over 99 percent of its galaxy unexplored. A 2025 update added System Colonisation, letting players build their own stations and settlements, slowly expanding the inhabited “bubble” into the void.
“The sense of achievement in reaching a system that you have plotted out at the end of a journey is something very tangible,” Verquerre said, recalling his own journey to Beagle Point, one of the galaxy’s most remote accessible systems.
No Man’s Sky: Procedural Everything
Hello Games took yet another route with No Man’s Sky: a deterministic, procedurally generated universe of over 18 quintillion planets (1.8 x 10^19). Every star is a real destination, every planet has its own environment, flora, and fauna. The game uses mathematical formulas to simulate natural structures, crafting nearly every aspect of its cosmos from algorithms rather than hand-placed assets.
No Man’s Sky lets players fly seamlessly from deep space to planetary surfaces with zero loading screens, a technical achievement that required building virtual probes to explore the galaxy during development. The universe is shared but so vast that the chances of two players ever landing on the same planet organically are effectively zero.
The Infinite Challenge
Space games do not fail to simulate the cosmos because developers lack ambition or imagination. The universe operates on scales that challenge not only the human mind but also the machines trying to reproduce it. Bridging that gap requires not just bigger maps but smarter design: layered travel systems, procedural generation, risk mechanics that make distance meaningful, and a recognition that sometimes the awe of the infinite matters more than the numbers behind it.
As Lehahn put it, the goal is simple to state and nearly impossible to achieve: make players believe the universe is endless, while keeping them entertained long enough to explore it.