I bought into stonehearth because i liked the idea of sending out parties of customized hearthlings to go on adventures an discover dungeons and towns and dragon lairs and whatnot, while simultaneously having a town that you built to return to. Is that still happening? Or is worldsize just limited to the initial borders around your choice of location?
For now, you get what you see when the map first loads… and whatever surprises (mainly ore veins) are hidden by the Fog of War. Oh, and whatever monsters wander into the map and set up camp.
Later on, the developers are planning to add dungeons, more advanced monster camps, caves, ruins, more civilisations to meet… unfortunately that stuff isn’t the top priority right now because they have to get the basics working first; but it will be coming in good time.
We don’t know yet exactly how this content will be added, or what it will look like when it gets here; but believe me when it’s added we’ll know. The developers post regular status reports called “Desktop Tuesdays”, not to mention their even more frequent streams; so there’s a really great back-and-forth conversation in the lead-up to every new release 
I know these things will be added eventually, but what about the size of the world? will we be able to go beyond the initial borders?
You can mod your initial map size however from what I understand it takes some computers like 20 minutes to render bigger maps.
@theFipmip the team has discussed this at length over the years. The general premise they have said is as follows. “We’re probably not going to do an infinite sized map, due to performance issues. Also the current game system doesn’t really support exploring or building multiple towns, so we don’t even feel there is a need to expand the map.”
That is roughly the teams take on the issue ( assuming they haven’t radically changed their minds recently.) Based off this I will say that we probably will not be seeing an increased map size anytime soon, if ever. The points you bring up about exploration do not directly contradict the current world border. From experience I feel there is still plenty of room on the map for exploration, even after you have established a rather elaborate base. Obliviously the larger the world border the more exploration a player can do.
Despite the vibes of exploration discussed in the Kickstarter video, the game had not really developed down that direction.
As @TheDerpySupport said, the option of increasing the world size by mod is there ( although I don’t believe that anyone has made a tutorial about that yet.) This will not increase exploration currently, but maybe later firm the line it could.
The entire topic of exploration needs discussion.
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well it’s the whole reason i bought stonehearth. If there is nothing beyond building a town and collecting all the points of interest around the map, there’s nothing to keep me coming back to this game anymore.
the game is still nailing down core mechanics and is still in alpha… it might be a bit early to look for endgame.
And to be fair you would not get more stuff to do currently from having a bigger map…just more space to do nothing in
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