No Man’s Sky players discover over 10M unique in-game species overnight

The space exploration game No Man’s Sky features biodiversity that would make Earth weep with envy, and players are incredibly avid taxonomers. Hello Games founder Sean Murray tweeted today that players have racked up over 10 million species discoveries thus far in-game, which is around five to 6.5 times the number of known species on earth, depending on whose numbers you trust.

While human scientists may differ on the exact number of unique species accurately catalogued on Earth, No Man’s Sky universe has servers to back up its totals, giving its developers a running tally of all the in-game activity accomplished by intrepid explorers.

For instance over night we hit 10 million species discovered in NMS… that's more than has been discovered on earth.
WHAT IS GOING ON!!!

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 10, 2016

The discoveries are rolling in despite server issues, which have caused a lot of players to see the red indicator that means the service is having trouble connecting. The reason seems to be overwhelming interest in the unique title, which offers over 18 billion planets to explore, as the number of active players far outpaces what Hello Games ever anticipated.

Another sign that the interest is high: Two players actually managed to find each other in the first day of the game’s availability, something Murray said on Twitter has “blown [his] mind.” Murray has said the chance of two players running into each other in-game is “pretty much zero” given the universe size, so that might be even more amazing a feat than the 10 million species discovered.

In my initial play time, I found a fair number of new species, and you can see one of them, my new best friend right here: