Map sizes

[Dunk Mujunk]

So I was browsing the DST reddit and saw a post that spoke of maps set to the smallest setting seeming much bigger than they used to be. It caught my eye because I had just mentioned to my gf the other night that our maps, which we always set to the largest setting, seem smaller than they used to be.

Now we've been playing DST for quite a while, a bit over 2 years solid playing together, and I had a couple or so years playing alone on and off (I was clueless for a looooong time lol). I definitely can't say that it seemed the maps we generated shrunk over night. Its more of a vague, "wait a minute...." kind of feeling.

Am I crazy? Is it simply that as we have acquired knowledge and ability the maps have seemingly shrunk due to lessened stress/danger? Or has there been a change to min/max world sizes, or maybe some kind of bug?

When I get home I will see if I have any old screen shots, but there is one map in particular that I think about that seems waaaay bigger in my memory than our current map (which is suppose to be the largest setting).

And now that i'm actively thinking about it I seem to remember our old maps having duplicate biomes quite often (besides grassland and dark forest). I can vividly remember pretty much always having 2 birchtree biomes, and now that I'm thinking about it I can't remember the last time we had more than 1 birchtree biome.

As a last bit of info we are playing split screen on PS4, and other than hound waves set to less, world size set to largest, and depth worm waves turned off we have all other settings at default.

Am I crazy? Im not crazy right?

I'm probably crazy.

[ADM]

Well... the World Size is actually completely random so I don't even change it.

If you are unlucky you can have a large world with the same size than a small one, cause the game actually try extending the amount of the same areas by a random generated number who can't be greater than "SIZE_VARIATION" (which is like ...1, 2, 3... depending of the size)

So yeah, the World Size is not impacting the map a lot, unless you absolutely want to make it small as you can by decreasing it. Since generated "biomes" will not be affected (always same required biomes with additional biomes from a list) but only change the maximal size they'll have.

[Dunk Mujunk]

I'm not quite sure I'm understanding. If the world size setting isn't effecting the amount of land what does it effect?

 

[Mike23Ua]

You said you were playing on console and noticed your worlds being smaller now, you are NOT crazy.. the developers stated not too long ago that PS4 and Xbox One were never meant to be capable of running the “Bigger” map options, and so not too long ago they shrunk them down quite a bit and disabled the ability to host a world any larger than default.

sadly It is the limitations of our consoles, the bigger worlds were causing tons of lag on PS4 and Xbox which could at times cause your game to become completely unplayable.

 

now having said that- the Bigger option didn’t simply effect size of land, it also effected how many trees could spawn, Mobs spawn, Etc... like for example A Swamp full of around 50 Merms and what seems like 400 Tentacle.

Keep in mind that the more new content they add to the game with future updates, they may have to continuously shrink down our total map size so it’s all still playable.

but I’m no game developer, and I do not speak for or on behalf of Klei, so for a 100% Official answer, you may want to ping @ an actual developer. 

Hopefully this helps you! 

[Dunk Mujunk]

Thank you, it does.

A bit disappointing as I enjoy building roads of my own and the satisfaction I get kinda scales with the map size.

But if it keeps the performance up its worth it. Hopefully one day maybe Klei could figure out a way to give us larger maps again without sacrificing performance.