StarCat Major

Thank you so much for your kind words! I'm glad you like the art style, it's kind of half the tech in the game :p

As for the dot-stars, technically you are visiting individual stars that dot the sky, but there's some trickery going on with separate scales for solar systems and the starfield as a whole. With a different interface, you would certainly be able to visit any one of those dots and get a unique and deterministic solar system :)

I render 8×8×8 "blocks" or octants each with 4096 stars;

An octant is given a seed based on its integer position in the galaxy (one octant unit = 256 unity units).

This octant seed is then used to hash out three coordinates for each of the 4096 stars, roughly like

pos = uint3(hash(i*3+0,seed), hash(i*3+1,seed), hash(i*3+2,seed))

The hash functions at the core of the game all support seeds for the hash as well, meaning each seed gives you another 4 billion hash values. It's not the highest quality hash, but certainly higher quality than causing any visible structure to the starfield generation~

Each dot-star's position is then used in a 3D hash function in the same fashion to generate each solar system as you travel to that star.

The 8×8×8 grid of octants each have positions and vertices ranging from (0,0,0) to (1,1,1), and I simply scale the entire starfield by 256 at the end to throw the stars faaar away.

Finally, the entire starfield is kinda parented to the player in such a way that when the player moves right, the starfield moves with them - avoiding the parallax that would give away their real distance of maybe a few dozen metres.

(Note: the 1D hash function's seed parameter is not exactly great, so if I don't vary the value as well, structure will emerge. The 3D hash function is great with any seed and any value, though :)