Hi everyone,
Just wanted to ask about the final goals of the devs relating to map size and exploration.
Firstly, will the current map size be the same as in the final release?
Secondly, will exploration play much of a role in the game? Most other of the games have some form of exploration whether it be on the horizontal planes or the vertical one. What do the devs have in mind?
they do have plans to make chunks load more you explore but I believe they staited they don’t want something randomly generated like minecraft
as having plans to have an influence from RPG type stuff they do have plans on exploration don’t fret they are just work out the kinks on the city building first
all in all though @sdee can better help you with answering your question
hey there @Nighteyes… welcome aboard! 
the maps now are indeed made of randomly generated terrain, and the intent is to eventually have “no map edge”… @Albert is responsible for a lot of the work going into world generation (if memory serves)…
and the world itself will eventually house more discoverable “things” as well…
stay tuned! 
Thanks for the quick answers!
I was just curious about the final version and am happy to hear they do plan on have more than just the block of land they give us at game start. Have they mentioned anything about digging down like in dwarf fortress, or will things stay above land?
mining is one of the next big systems that will be implemented… you can get a reasonably good glimpse into their design direction via the road map… have fun!
Thanks for that! The roadmap clears things up a bit. I was excited when I first saw the kickstarter and have been checking out the updates periodically. It’s really been shaping up since the start!
I’m not sure if this is on the things to do, I’d like to see larger maps as a feature or even unlimited maps that are generated as you have your hearthlings explore the current generated map maybe have generation limited by your fog of war? Like it will generate your initial map seed first then as your fog of war/exploration of the map increases have more generate.
I believe this is the case, but as the game is not yet released the devs are working on other mechanics at the moment.
I doubt this is even close to realistic (with unlimited maps comes unlimited path-finding overhead, and nobody has an “infinitely fast” CPU that can handle unlimited overhead).
Games that do have unlimited maps have almost no path finding - the player has direct control over one entity (“themselves”), and everything else uses crude “pathless” motion (e.g. random wandering).
It wouldn’t need to handle unlimited overhead, it would only account for the generated chunks of territory between points A and B. It would functionally work the same as “really big maps”
That doesn’t really work properly either. E.g. you build an outpost, plant some farms, set a few crafters going, then go back to your main city for a while and… Nothing in the outpost happens because those chunks got unloaded.
For “player has direct control over one entity (themselves)” this isn’t as much of a problem because you can’t be in 2 places at once. For Stonehearth, with 50 hearthlings your people can be in 50 different places at the same time.