I really enjoy NMS but many aspects are boring. The generated landscapes are predicable, why is the climate on every planet uniform across the whole planet?
NMS is an example of bad procedural generation. Cellular automata, by nature, is a slow[1] algorithm, so it's hard to run automatas for every single planet you create. It's certainly possible, but as we've seen from NMS it's not straightforward to implement.
[1] Actually you can heavily optimize cellular automata for cache, but a K dimensional automata will be in O(N^(K+1)) so assuming a 2D world, it's O(N^3). So, it's not scalable. If you look at procedural world generations in big scale, like dwarffortress, you'll see that they're one time operations that take a very long time. NMS is tricky, since you need to keep doing this multiple times.
