Hey Devs,
I am running Stonehearth on a low power Laptop.
I reach my laptops limits pretty fast but I still love it.
Anyway I was thinking since I don’t use all the space (not even close), maybe it would safe me some rescources if I could shrink the map to maybe 1/8. And it would be a choice the player would do voluntarely, to not take away from anybodies game experience.
There for I think it would be a great addition to the available options.
Pyrotika
currently, the game is not optimized in any way, or at least not commercially so. as such, the amount of space rendered quickly begins eating up a lot of memory (an issue that can be somewhat overcome by saving and restarting the game every now and then). naturally, by the time the game is released in full, that issue will either be mitigated or null entirely. at which point, there would be no point to maintaining optional sizes for the map. from what I understand from before the alpha came out for testers, the final product isn’t even going to contain individual maps, and rather the map would be procedurally generated. send your hearthlings to the edge of the map (which there probably will be) and the map will expand outwards. at least, that’s what I think it will be like come final release - the team is free to change their end-design as many times as they deem fit until the game goes into beta, and even then major changes aren’t uncommon if something isn’t working out as they hoped.
however, while I normally support a “player-choice” decision, where if the player wants less space, let them have less space, such a design will likely not last through to the final release. adding that feature in would add a lot of work and a lot of extra testing to make sure that it’s compatible with everything currently available, and to also fix the things that will inevitably break due to such an addition (adding a single line of code can easily break a lot more than people realize, and, as is often the case, every single addition to games breaks something. usually a lot of somethings). they would then have to remove this feature upon changing their map design to a more fluid, non-permanent design. doing so would, once again, require much effort to remove it whilst keeping everything working, and to fix all the things that broke.
it’s too much effort to put in to something that isn’t even going to be in the final build in the first place, or likely have anything to do with the final build. while I understand that those that don’t have rather good desktops, or are using laptops, will have issues running stonehearth in it’s unoptimized state, adding in this feature would prove too much effort to be worth it in the end. also, in the end, overloading often causes issues. issues the dev team wants to avoid at any cost. by having computers which get overloaded easily, this lets the dev team know what will go wrong when the overloading happens, and allow them to fix such issues, and, in the end, make it so their game does not overload the systems they were running on upon release. and, in the case that the system is too low-end to handle the game in it’s release form, they will be able to clearly mark off where the cut-off is and let everyone know what the minimum and recommended system requirements are. by limiting what certain computers run, it limits the amount of data sent back to the devs about lower-end systems, hurting the product and preventing them from efficiently optimizing their product for said low-end computers.
not that your suggestion was a bad suggestion, mind you. I’m not trying to scare you off for making a suggestion or anything, so sorry if I come off rude to you. I didn’t mean it that way.
if your system cannot handle the game at all, though, the devs were using something in their livesteams a while back that had the map in a really small form to showcase the new additions. that might be one of the dev tools, and it might be something that could provide, although, as I’m not on the dev team, I can’t make any promises as to what they have and what they provide. it’s entirely possible that that tool was not updated with the main game and no longer exists.
actually, if i’m not mistaken, this is already possible, you just need to do a bit of editing in the files.
paging @RepeatPan as he’s the one who knows how to do all that crazy stuff.
yea, I thought that’s how they did it it. I was referring to actually having it in the options and such. messing with the files to change the map size is different from generating a map of a certain size. although, I’m not sure what bugs might happen from changing the map size. I typically avoid messing with save-data, it’s not really something you normally wanna mess with. corruptions aren’t fun lol.
if i understand how it works, there shouldnt be any problems or file corruptions.
Q: How do I get a smaller world for testing?
A: Try adding this to your user_settings.json:
"mods" : {
"stonehearth" : {
"world_generation" : {"method" : "tiny"}
}
},
Taken from Taking Questions about Mixintos and Overrides
The map is plenty big enough to play in.
heh heh totally forgot about that way 
All of you thx a lot for those well thought out answers
I joined this forum three days ago and I am loving it no worries that you scare me of with negative answers.
I know enougth about coding to see the problem 
Right I will try the tiny map when I start my next village.
Man, this time I was really, really, really late for the party. I think I must have skipped 4 releases at least (facepalm)
I’m also using a low-end laptop, @Pyrotika, and I always have that tiny world option activated in my user settings 
it helps to load the map faster.
The microworld mod lets you make tinier worlds, but it’s not meant for playing since you’d have to add everything from scratch.
little question does the microworld still works for you? since alpha12 i got errors ^^