No Man's Sky: 10 Core Gameplay Features You Need To Know About

3. Background Music Is Procedurally Generated

Boiling down the science that makes up No Man's Sky amounts to a number of formulas consistently interacting with each other in relation to everything from grass growth to alien leg length, but did you know the entire score is somewhat random too?

Recruiting the help of band, 65DaysofStatic, genius audio director Paul Weir remixes all sorts of recorded clips and soundscapes to form the backdrop of whatever you're doing. Note that the 'biosphere' he is referring to here is the name given to all the elements of a given scenario at one time, from potential threats to the state of the weather. He says:

“Whenever you’re in space, or on a planet, or underwater, or in a cave, that physical state will be attached to its own audio state. I want to use the seed values that create the planets to seed the music. We’ll know what the biosphere is, what the habitat is, and we’ll know how much danger there is. That information is there to use if we want to, and it’ll all act as a driver for the ambient music.”

So basically, it sounds like the game will modulate dynamic audio based on things you're approaching or doing.

It's similar to many other large-scale games and what I found out talking to Far Cry composer, Jason Graves, however this time feels like only the barest parts of a composition were recorded in full, with the game slotting them together as necessary.