Are planet names pregenerated?

[Huntra]

So I'm playing and I enter the system name "Imovsh-Are" and it has a planet named "Bush". So Im rather perplexed because I've never seen a planet without some randomly generated type of name.
Also is it possible that another planet has the same pregenerated name?

[Mr. Bufferlow]

Every system, planet, animal, and plant has to have a name for the game to work- so they are built by some kind of procedural generation. They have done a few universe resets and it seem likely that some of the player provided names came through but maybe not registered as their discoveries...or they could just be some random pick by the algorithm.

Since the number needed is astronomical*, there may be some repeats. *no pun intended

That would be an interesting little video if the Devs ever explained how they make that feature happen- especially when you consider all the detail they provide about each animal species...some are super funny.

[Dirak2012]

Thanks to how unstable the database is, many planets named by players may show as if they were not yet discovered, so it's hard to say where the name comes from.

[AmberAnvil]

Procedural generation can obviously result in some recognizable names. I found a planet a couple of days ago named "SELL". I've also found stars named "Beelzebub", "Texas", "Amerika", "Fondled" and "Naruto". All of these were first-contact situations, not in Euclid. : )

[+VLFBERHT+]

From info long ago... For the game engines proc-gen naming of planets, flora, fauna, planetary bases/location, etc., Hello Games uses an algorithm design that mimics the natural understanding of how words are formed using standard English (unless they have incorporated more languages into the rules).

So, it is possible for there to be stuff proc-gen_named with "actual words" used in the Real.

However as another poster mentioned above, the vast majority of stuff you run across that has a name you recognize as a "real word" most likely was one named by an NMS'er that the server {at one time or another} purged the system as having been discovered by someone, too reset it as undiscovered.

P.s. Sometimes, entering a solar system that had never been discovered and now shows discovered by me, go land on each planet and claim them discovered by me, only to return at another time to find the solar system and all the planets has then been discovered months and years ago by another NMS'er. ... It would seem that their has always been this issue with how HG_servers retains certain information.

Maybe it's a system response thing or how it retrieves archived "changed-state?" information ?

[Huntra]

Thanks for the info everybody. I suppose there are so many planets that its inevitable to find some with recognizable names or common words. So far though its been pretty random and i havent seen another planet with a 4 character name or one in english, which tracks. Even its sister planets had numbers in their names, which is also common. Regardless of that im sure it wont be the only one we find.

[Hagalazꑭ]

I saw a "first contact" pirate system named Sparta in Euclid. And to further add to the story, one of the planets in that system was named Israel-Major. And those were original names which I dediced to keep "as is"

[Sera]

Originally posted by AmberAnvil:

Procedural generation can obviously result in some recognizable names. I found a planet a couple of days ago named "SELL". I've also found stars named "Beelzebub", "Texas", "Amerika", "Fondled" and "Naruto". All of these were first-contact situations, not in Euclid. : )

I find these, or a I find normal names. Says I found it... then hour later, my cataloger updates telling me who found it 6 years ago.
Which will throw me off, cause I'll rename it, or keep original name.

Only to have it revert..

[Nox]

We also discovered while we were exploring and naming the hub systems planets that the discovery service would not always honor submissions, and was offline more often than not. If it received a submission dated older than the one already on record it would sometimes overwrite the previous record.

Furthermore, when ps4 nms was merged, a lot of things got overwritten.

[Huntra]

thats interesting, the merger between the different servers might have created some aberrations in the names of planets/systems for sure.