How many planets are there?

[MindfulOcean]

I noticed there is a thread for people to post the coordinates of interesting planets they find. That suggests that the planets aren't random. Is there a fixed number of planets, or does the game just generate them on the fly as you travel, but use the same algorithm and seed so that you can find the same planets in any game without actually running out of new planets?

[Mod Sloth]

Theoretically, there is an infinite number of planets, limited only by hardware constraints. Every universe is generated by the same algorithm, hence the coordinates work for separate installs.

[MassConnect]

There are at least 12 quadrillion possible planets. There are a lot of coordinate seeds to feed the RNG. Not even the entire community combined can hope to document them all in our lifetime.

[Mno]

12624572583684684523.

Give or take.

[jmido8]

I saw someone say way back in early release that a dev commented about there being like 12 quadrillion planets, but would be around 400 quadrillion by release. Basically, there's an infinite amount.

[A Kobold]

Originally posted by Anarchy Blues:

12624572583684684523.

Give or take.

More like 9254883254983742504632754327854602346354612735... Stars.

Oh, sorry, rolled my face on my numpad. The actual number is ♥♥♥♥ if any of US know.

[tamorr]

If you know minecraft, it is similar in a way to how it works there. The Universe itself has what is called a "UUID" which is the seed for the universe. The devs made it so that by default everyone with have the same universe, but with each new character will spawn in a specific type planet someone withing that universe.

The xy is only the star system coordinates. Just like how in minecraft if someone has the same seed and sees something specific they could use the same seed and go to those xy coordinates, or in the case of minecraft xz.

Beyond that there will be other identifiers such as planet location within the star system; Orbit, usually in roman numerals. Next would be usually be nothing or a letter. Nothing would mean it is the primary planet within that orbit. Having a letter means it is a planet around the primary one.

This can also be seen in the file names of world files. xy being the first numbers, and usualy the third set of numbers being the UUID. Then after that would be planet location, which is done slightly different although similar since it only usually uses numbers to represent location.

Now with that out of the way; hopefully it was understandable, like the others mention there are more than 4 quintillion star systems in the universe. what that means is only roughly that amount can be actually typed in to go to the xy; while you can go beyond that by going to the largest or lowest coordinate and simply panning the screen into more space of generation.

Of course with that many star systems of planets, going outside the xy is almost redundant; since you couldn't really get to those stars directly by use of the xy, so explore at your own risk. At least you can get back within the grid easily. It would probably take more than a few lifetimes to go to each planet, not to mention the drive space that visiting that many would take up. Of course by that time I am sure drive space would be increased quite a bit due to how technology is advancing. :P

[bounce]

Originally posted by jmido8:

I saw someone say way back in early release that a dev commented about there being like 12 quadrillion planets, but would be around 400 quadrillion by release. Basically, there's an infinite amount.

First, all that comes next is pure especulation of one interested in compare the in game universe with the know RL universe ( I know, I should go to reddit but here i'am, sorry)
Ow almoust a year since that post but I found those numbers quite interesting, since with that number we can aproxymatelly say how many galaxys are in starbound universe (not they actually make any representation of "galaxy division", at least none that I have seen).
In one of the most accepted ways to count the numbers of stars of our galaxy, using the mass of our sun to do it, we know that milk way has +- 200bilions stars. If we suppose that each solar system has an average of 10(yes, it is a very generic number) planets (here on we will use the term planet for every celestial bodies) we have 2trillion planets in milk way.
That give us a impressive 200000 galaxys the size of milk way in the starbound's universe.