Procedural content generation: creating a universe

Released in 1984, Elite featured cutting edge 3D graphics (with hidden line removal no less) and a rich universe of 2048 planetary systems, spread across 8 galaxies, each with a unique name, offbeat description, technology level, government type and even an economy. These are used as the “seed” of the universe and they are incremented and manipulated in a consistent manner as each galaxy and planetary system is generated. It uses the current seed to populate a structure looking like this for each planetary system:

Here is the makeystem function in all it’s glory:

As you can see the system’s location, government type and economy are generated by plucking bits out the seed.

Source: blog.rabidgremlin.com