It helps to separate two senses in which something can be new. Something is ontologically new when it comes into existence for the first time: a new species evolving, a new star forming, a new sculpture being carved. Something is epistemically new when someone learns of it for the first time, though it existed before: a species that has lived for a million years being described by a biologist, a star that has burned for a billion years being catalogued by an astronomer, a manuscript that has sat for centuries in an archive being found by a historian. Most of what we call discovery is epistemic novelty. Columbus did not create the Caribbean. The first person to describe the coelacanth did not create the coelacanth.
A creature in No Man’s Sky sits awkwardly between these. In one sense it is epistemically new: it was fully determined before anyone saw it, by the seed and the rules, and the player who finds it is learning of something whose properties were fixed in advance. Nobody could have changed the creature by looking at it differently; nobody’s wishes affect its shape. In another sense it is ontologically new: it did not exist, as a rendered thing with a shape and a colour and a gait, until the player’s machine computed it. Before the player arrived, there was only a number.
The closest analogy I know is not biological but mathematical. In October 2024 Luke Durant, a former engineer at the chip maker Nvidia, using a network of graphics processors he had rented in the cloud, discovered the largest prime number then known: two raised to the power of 136,279,841, minus one, a number with more than forty-one million digits. Was the prime discovered or created? In one sense it had always been prime; its primality was fixed by the rules of arithmetic, and nobody’s computation could have made it otherwise. In another sense nobody had ever written it down, checked it, or known it, and its existence as a known fact was the result of a large computation run for the purpose. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, the collaborative project through which most such primes have been found since the 1990s, credits each discovery to the person whose computer found it. The prime is named after its form, not its finder, but the finder’s name is recorded, and the record is the reward.
A creature in No Man’s Sky is, in this respect, much more like a prime than like a coelacanth. It is a determinate consequence of a set of rules, unknown until computed, and credited to whoever computes it first. The difference is that mathematicians did not make the rules of arithmetic, whereas Hello Games did make the rules of its universe. The player discovers what the rules imply; the studio made the rules. This makes the discovery real in one way — the player genuinely learns something they could not have known otherwise, about a structure they did not determine — and hollow in another, because the structure was put there, or at least made possible, by someone else.
from Brave New Worlds: A Cultural History of No Man's Sky (2026)
