No Man’s Sky is supposed to have planet-sized planets, apparently, but imagine how tiresome that would make tracking down that last unrecorded species.

No Man’s Sky planets are pretty big, as anybody who’s determined to visit every single point of interest soon discovers. But are they as big as real planets?

Maybe some of them are – who knows what’s out there? – but popular time-lapse map walker TheyCallMeConor went to check and found he could walk halfway across a No Man’s Sky planet in just under 12 hours.

Now, that’s a really long time, and probably means No Man’s Sky has some of the biggest maps of any game ever. But it would take about 5,000 hours to walk halfway around the Earth’s equator, which is a significant difference, isn’t it. You could probably argue that the player character moves much faster than we expect due to the vague nature of the measurement units we see in game or something, I suppose. Planets come in different sizes, too, although 12 versus 5,000 hours is a really big discrepancy.

This revelation seems to have been taken as evidence by those who feel Sony and Hello Games broke promises with No Man’s Sky. I can’t find a direct quote from Sean Murray stating that No Man’s Sky’s planets are as big as real planets, so sling a link across if you know the origin of this one. Murray did once mention Earth-sized planets in an interview with GameInformer.

No Man’s Sky planets feel plenty big enough already to me, but it’s a divisive game; it’s entirely possible you want even more random terrain to crawl over.