Our earlier article Mindblowingly Boring Star Map said "we're very sorry for not providing you with the software itself, or any images generated with it". This is no longer the case. Here you can look around in a generated universe in all its boringness. Description below.

The star map is a rectangular area with sides 2¹⁰⁰. So it is rather big. In it, there are 2¹⁸⁸ stars evenly and pseudorandomly distributed. Why that many? Because this makes stars on the bottom level somewhat sparse, but still easily found.

You can plot any region of this map, on any zoom level. For simplicity, the zoom level must be a power of two. E.g. you can request a grid at offset (100, 200), scale 2⁵. The first pixel of this grid would then represent the star count between coordinates x = 100×2⁵ → 101×2⁵-1 and y = 200×2⁵ → 201×2⁵-1. This web client only allows girds of size 256×256.

The arrow buttons to the right of the map move the viewport around. The top set moves by 64, the middle set by 128, and the bottom set by 256, which is a full page. Zoom in/out halves/doubles the scale. The zoom buttons will attempt to zoom in an out to and from the center, but will pan as needed, if the edge of the area is hit. You can also use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. In that case, the mouse pointer will be the fixed point. You can also directly enter values in the input boxes.

Feel free to look around. You will not find anything, there is nothing here. Or perhaps there is by chance. However, interesting features are so few and far between, you'll never find any, just like you can't find another player in No Man's Sky. Okay, that wasn't nice to say. Anything over zoom level 15 is pretty much a white field with no details. This is because the distribution is so smooth that pixels differ only by a tiny bit, not enough to be noticeable. You can see the actual number by hovering the mouse pointer over a pixel.

What makes this map interesting (apart from the lessons learned in how to use procedural generation, see the article mentioned above) is to meditate on its size. This is a sister page of the Pretty Big Maze. Play the same types of games here too: try to feel the true size, and fail. For example, you can enter some random coordinates, find a location that you like, and claim it. You don't need to do anything special to claim it, just keep the coordinates secret. Nobody will find that place, or accidentally stumble upon it. Nobody. Ever.

In some sense, these huge places feel bigger than infinity. Infinity is simple. The finite size of this map suggests that it must be comprehensible! If you try just a little harder, you might get a handle on it, at least some vague understanding. So you keep going. But it is not comprehensible. And with every attempt, you yourself get bigger. Your will, your character, your soul grows, in an attempt to match the size of the task. The more you try, the more you grow.

Good luck with your growing, and thanks for reading this little rant!