So a redditor wanted to know why can't you dig past 128 meters in game.
I figured many of you want to know, and since I don't have anything better to do till august 10th, and because I'm tired of drama on this sub, I can do something informative for the rest of you.
**Please note that this is simplified because I don't want to complicate this post with technical stuff. If you're looking for technical stuff, look in the comments.**
So let's say you're in space and you see [this beautiful planet before you](http://i.imgur.com/tVaEuhn.jpg). Clearly, the planet is round and because you live on Earth you asume that its 3D and given enough time, you can dig through it's core to reach the other side. It's a fair assumption.
But this is imposible to do in No Man's Sky. Why? Please look at this amazing piece of art below:
http://i.imgur.com/ArtXuke.jpg
The game divides a planet into chunks, same like Minecraft. Once you land, you don't see the planet anymore, but the chunks that surround you.
Once you land, the game renders a tiny plane from that sphere around you (like minecraft chunks). So basically, when you're on the ground, the 'earth is flat' - you're walking on a flat surface with mountains and hills on top. There is no "other side", or core to dig to because the planet as a sphere only exists in space. If you would break the last layer of the chunk, you would fall through the planet, because there's nothing under that loaded surface. Think Minecraft, where after a certain depth you would hit bedrock, and after that, endless void.
EDIT: As a sidenote and a bit of technical stuff, the planets are actually cubes mapped to spheres. It looks [like this](
http://i.imgur.com/ZrQ4njD.png), and each square is a chunk.
EDIT 2: [Super duper technical talk about this](
https://youtu.be/-KHLwQ9IY-s?t=578) (thanks /u/cherbert, for reminding me about it)
EDIT 3: I know that Hello Games could have done planets differently and then we could drill a planet all the way through, but they didn't. It was their choice, for performance reasons or whatever. This post is not about "what ifs", but about "what is".
EDIT 4: [Giant Bomb podcast - One of the guys asked Sean how far down you can dig and Sean apparently said 128m](
http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/giant-bombcast-06-23-2015/1600-1260/)
EDIT 5: Ok, *"Why does this limitation exist in the first place?"* It seems I forgot to explain this and apparently it's imperative to do so! So the limitation is there for any of the following reasons (including ones which I can't of think right now):
- it requires additional work for the PC/Console to render additional layers, so performance reasons.
- it would require way more work to implement correctly, so developement time reasons.
- it adds too little to gameplay value (you don't find anything underground besides caves, which already exist), so no gameplay value reasons.
- the devs wanted to keep things sweet and simple, and this allowed them to focus on more important things, like how to generate cool stuff for us to find.
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