I like the Map concept.
Low resource cost (more that can actually go into the game instead) and It fit’s the whole “We are on a journey to discover new lands and settle them” feel. Maybe add a sexton and compass off to the edge on a slightly larger table top to wrap it all together?
After the fact: lol, I didn’t even notice the compass in the concept art originally or if you look a bit closer it looks like a wood table underneath the map 
The map-edge border seems by far the strongest. Partly because it “fits” best with the existing game concepts, but also because the more fantastic alternatives (book, floating crystals, giant cliffs) significantly break the 'feel" of participating in a fantasy world. If your map is actually a giant floating crystal in space, you aren’t on a medieval fantasy world, you’re in some sort of alternate plane planescape style setting.
book and map, book and map!
We will also be going to PAX West, in Seattle, the weekend of August 2nd
Island in the water for me is better on the eye and rounds the land of nicely.
I really like the sky island and the gameplay implications that can come with it
I’m sure this will surprise you all but I prefer the lore heavy design.
I really like the “drawn map as page of a book” option, precisely because the game is about stories.
PS. speaking about books, it just occurs to me, the screen at the beginning of a new game looks like an open book with the pages down and the outside up, with the drawing as the front picture and the “This is a story of a brave band of settlers…” as the summary text on the back.
Somany good ideas… the map is quite the game thing. But its more often used by other games.
Something i found best looking and maybe the best idea is the floating islands, because of the Multiplayer in the future it will become quite usefull to see others their cities and such.
I really like the way the book looks in the concept art, but I think that’s going to be hard to translate into voxel terrain of the game and make look good.
To me the map is the best. I don’t think it would be that much harder to, at a minimum, render the current darkened fog of war in the old paper colors of the concept art. The world map border looks a lot like the Embark map border, so it fits established themes.
Where I live, townships are mostly square/rectangular areas [6 by 6 miles] that both divide an area for surveying and limit how far towns can expand. With the map theme, Stonehearth’s townships would be doing both of these.
Also, if the alternate planes from the Kickstarter ever happen, the concept art for that sure looks like a lot of maps stacked on top of each other to me.
That map border really looks cool, and it makes sense. When choosing your land, you start off with just a flat map 1 with the highlighted area’s edge’s being the edge. I think it would be cool to do take that and apply it to even the start of the game, somewhere along the lines of having a smaller area you can start in 2 that has the full voxel view once you start, but then a slightly bigger ending area 3 that you can then explore and have the voxels appear, with the map border encompassing that.
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Edited for a new idea.
The Island Idea seems to be the best one to me. Like this we could visit other islands/ players with a plausible loading screen inbetween. It also would look really cool to travel by (air)ship 
I like the book of maps idea. I can envision the ‘fog of war’ areas all being flat sepiatone, perhaps rough sketches or ideas, which bloom into three dimensional color as you get close, or as monsters pop up. I can see a goblin settlement separated from the player’s settlement by a band of sepiatone that the goblins fade and sink into before emerging, first sketchlike, then more solidly, as they reach the edge of the explored territory.
I can imagine Hearthlings traveling to the edges, and as they get close they see the map border, perhaps well-detailed in some areas and only partially-inked in others, and if you reach the very edge and play with the camera you can see the edges of the book, perhaps a bit of the table, a quill pen set down atop the margin, a bit of a silk ribbon bookmark sticking out.
But even more than this (and I know this would require a lot of time and resources that may well be far beyond the scope of the game- feature creep is a bad thing, mmkay?) I can see something entirely new.
You get your settlement built, and everything’s doing well. The area’s explored, the map is known. But there’s more out there, you know it. So you start your Hearthlings crafting and gathering. You pick a handful of them- a few craftsmen, a Footmen or two, a couple Workers- and they form a group. They head to the edge of the page, and then you click beyond it, and… it turns.
The page folds over, and the old settlement sinks into sepia. You find yourself staring once more at the world map, except now, it’s changed. You can just barely pick out the buildings, the roads, maybe even the fields of your first settlement, brightly colored squares on a much larger sepia map. The world lays before you, and you pick another location. You begin again, with your Hearthlings a bit wiser, a bit better equipped, than before.
The merchant stalls now allow your settlements to send traders back and forth. You can choose what to sell, what to buy- it’s not free, but you have more control over the market. You can flip back and forth between the pages, settlement to settlement. There’s a third one now, then a fourth. They may be isolated villages scattered across the map or small towns that are close enough to form a patchwork city-state.
Perhaps even, with enough work, the proper husbanding of resources and crafting, you could even go further. A great balloon, which can lift you to a whole new world- from desert to arctic, arctic to forest, or forest to desert.
Created an account just so I can say book or map.
Nice one. I have to agree that the book or map ones seem to be the best ones. Although might end up being the map as that would have a more exploratory sense of the world as it uncovers. Makes me wonder what the load would be to overcome with either of those. I’m sure yall’ will figure something out when a decision is made. 
At the first when I saw the Book it almost screams Stonehearth to me until the Islands, that sorta does also
The map idea has a believable edge of the world, and it fits the rest of Stonehearth as it is. It would be nice to scroll to the edge of the map to access another map.
A book of maps would be fun to play. You could use the book to flip to other maps, with each map being a single page (or two page map).
The map idea and border is appealing. It could be used as the border of the pages in the book, and combine both the map and book concepts nicely. That way, the worlds could still have the map border, but they sit on top of a book.
Additionally, if you only have one world, it would be a single map, and the book could grow with the number of maps you have explored. That could still allow the feel of exploring a world that is larger than the map.
It would be nice to have clouds floating across the world. The clouds in the concept art look pretty.
i agree that they both feel pretty stonehearthy, but i think book/map/atlas would be best for your the edge of the normal world, and then have the floating islands be for special quests or the alternate planes that were mentioned in the kickstarter… if that makes any sense…
how about a fractal-like style where the “block size” gets coarser as we look further beyond the playable area. (e.g. playable area is 1x1x1 block size, just beyond the border is 2x2x2 and further is 4x4x4 and so on. (hmm was this similar to any of the cases in the presentation?)
Would be nice if we can dynamically increase the playable area where the “rough” region will be “refined”, analogous to a progressive image file, where we see a whole image in low resolution first, then it “gets clearer” as it loads. Likewise if we can ever dynamically reduce the playable area, things will get “coarse”.
the island with water looks the best for me, and the floating one also looks great. If yall want to really get bold pick the top 3 and design them and let the players pick the one they want as borders. like how we can pick hearths and such forth. Or set it up for each kingdom where RC gets Floating island, Acc gets the water island, NA gets a new one and Dwarves gets Lava
If yall still want the clouds, add them just put them farther back that way the wont be in vision, or just make the ones ur on the side with disappear since we cant see those anyways