(Quite) Accurate Total NPC Population Numbers!

[Limoncello Lizard]

Of note, there's a system with 1 single lonely person.

How many factions?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

tl;dr: There are currently 6,612,313,733,791 NPCs as system population!

Great work!

Interestingly that's still about 500,000,000,000 fewer NPCs as system population than there were in the original Elite.

 

[Athan]

Thing is that I didn't write out the sed in one go, so having the rule at the very end speeds up the editing of it

Well, it wasn't the very end was it? But it can be, and without 'cat':

< systems_populated.jsonl > popnum sed "s/.*\"population\"\://g;s/\,\".*//g"

Yes, really, that does work. Of course you could also have collapsed the entire thing into one commandline with some piping (once you had it working).

 

[Olivia Vespera]

That's pretty close. Only about 20 billion out I think.

Michael

Yay! We did it!

Some systems recently experienced population increases. Some were quite large. For example Alioth went from 10 Billion to 15 Billion. What's that all about then?

I would have bet this is related to powerplay but they usually require increases in magnitude to increase CC value

 

[Vasious]

Of note, there's a system with 1 single lonely person.

Living the Dream

 

[Deleted member 115407]

Here are the bash commands I used (linux user here, so command line is my first way to solve problems).

Rep for that [up]

Bash is my go-to quick and dirty solution

 

[V'larr]

That's pretty close. Only about 20 billion out I think.

Michael

That's actually very remarkable in regards to the info submitters of eddb and how completely they've managed to "map" out human space....

 

[Martian Successor]

My question is: what determines the population of NPCs? Do they for example repopulate baby boomer style massively in systems where human CMDRs essentially kill them by the millions? And what stops them from either emptying or swarming certain systems?

 

[RamirezKurita]

My question is: what determines the population of NPCs? Do they for example repopulate baby boomer style massively in systems where human CMDRs essentially kill them by the millions? And what stops them from either emptying or swarming certain systems?

Their initial populations were determined by the original stellar forge script that generated the entire galaxy.

All subsequent changes, including the settling of new systems, is done by a Dev throwing an appropriate number into the game by hand.

 

[Martian Successor]

Their initial populations were determined by the original stellar forge script that generated the entire galaxy.

All subsequent changes, including the settling of new systems, is done by a Dev throwing an appropriate number into the game by hand.

Cool. They could choose to do some rather interesting stuff like a Galaxy wide migration or a massive invasion.

I guess they are doing a migration of sorts now with Colonia. Are they pumping in fresh new NPCs for Colonia or are they taking them from existing stocks and actually migrating them to Colonia?

 

[RamirezKurita]

Cool. They could choose to do some rather interesting stuff like a Galaxy wide migration or a massive invasion.

I guess they are doing a migration of sorts now with Colonia. Are they pumping in fresh new NPCs for Colonia or are they taking them from existing stocks and actually migrating them to Colonia?

I don't know, but I'd guess that they are just generating new NPCs. They currently don't have the code for doing any kind of procedural population changes (they have stated before that they are working on it though), so any changes have to be done by hand. Trying to chip 100 population each from 5000 different systems to place 25K pop into 20 systems requires a Dev to go into the galaxy database to modify 5020 different entries, while just spontaneously adding more people would only require modifying 20 entries - a much easier task.

 

[Cosmo]

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to make a quick post about the total number of NPCs living in Elite Dangerous.
tl;dr: There are currently 6,612,313,733,791 NPCs as system population! That's it.

Longer version:
The number isn't completly accurate because it's based on eddb.io data, so it depends on when a system was last updated.
But I think it's reasonable to assume that it's somewhere around 6.612 trillion NPCs.

How I got that number:
Easy, just downloaded the data from eddb.io. Here are the bash commands I used (linux user here, so command line is my first way to solve problems).

#!/bin/env bash
wget https://eddb.io/archive/v5/systems_populated.jsonl
cat systems_populated.jsonl | sed "s/.*\"population\"\://g;s/\,\".*//g" > popnum
awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }' popnums

Credits:
Olivia Vespera - original idea, got me to calc the number
eddb.io - providing the data
community - filling eddb with data

That's pretty close. Only about 20 billion out I think.

Michael

Very interesting. Thanks!

 

[[VR] Merkir]

+1 for doing Maths in your spare time.

(Yeah, its MATHS not math)

I prefer to be more specific and call this arithmetic. I think of mathematics as a whole other thing, even though simple addition is included.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I guess they are doing a migration of sorts now with Colonia. Are they pumping in fresh new NPCs for Colonia or are they taking them from existing stocks and actually migrating them to Colonia?

With the total population of Colonia being basically a rounding error on the population of any medium or large system, I'm not sure it's possible to tell.

 

[clinton]

BTW, 6 trillion may sound like a big number, but it's only a 0.5% per year population growth rate, which is less than half Earth's current population growth rate.

 

[AnthorNet]

Pretty sure it does. I use EDMC in the bubble and EDDiscovery when exploring - both of them populate EDSM and EDDB automatically based on the latest ED JSON journal.

Population have to be entered manually.

 

[Badben]

That's pretty close. Only about 20 billion out I think.

Michael

That's funny, when being 20 billion off is still pretty close.

 

[Bobbydylan]

I'm not quite sure. Look for a system with 0 population on EDDB.io and go there and find out if the upload resolves it.

Of note, there's a system with 1 single lonely person.

It should be called SeaLand.

[video=youtube;j4iWeNqxjBU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4iWeNqxjBU[/video]