[Drauk]

Originally Posted by AladainAF

What always kept me in awe about the game, even today, is that they crammed a massive world (basically 800 planets full of minerals, lifeforms, and storylines), alien encounters, home-planet, interstellar travel, nebulas, plot, character development, and a lot of items on 2 360k floppies.

I bet they used controlled random generator for that. Basically instead of storing all the data about planet, you just store several seeds for RNG per planet.