perfect map size for solo, in your opinion?

[tools guy-kun]

my first save was on pregen10k. neat map, but way too large for me when I'm playing alone.

thinking about making a map in the range of 4k-6k. I like to have the traders close by and the POIs fairly close as well, but doesn't always have to be next to me.

what's a good map size for solo play that can simulate what I described above?

Edit: feel like I’m going with 6k. Thanks a bunch everybody!

edit 2: double thank you everyone for the thoughtful answers. writing this so I don't often repeat myself. someone mentioned that loot respawn is important for this answer as I'm unsure why, but regardless I play with loot respawn on. however, I heavily rely on traders and quests because that's where my fun comes from, so loot respawn is irrelevant as long as they remain the way they are.

[Shurenai]

Navezgane is 6k, and is pretty much all that is needed for a single player. I feel like 4k is too small.

[CatPerson]

Depends how much you like to explore and maybe build multiple bases whenever you see a nice spot, just for funsies. :D

If you're more of the generally stick to one, maybe two neighboring towns sort, I'd pick the smallest size available. There is not much reason, then, for a super large map.

My personal go to's in A20 are (using a mod) 5k and if I'm in the mood for a little more exploring, 8k.

Note that by default the random map generator will never tightly "fill" the map with towns and cities, there is a max limit of each type it'll use per map size, which doesn't increase greatly for 10k maps IIRC, which is one reason why the larger the vanilla map, the more boring empty space there often is, You can alter these numbers in the rwgmixer.xml to have a higher chance of more POI density. This may impact performance of both the map generator and gameplay a bit.

[Mardoin69]

I feel like 6k is optimal for SP IF your focus is NOT exploration. If you're a big fan of exploring but, don't want cities being too far apart, then bump up to 7k. Once you get up to 8k, things start spreading apart quite a bit. It's still decent though imo.....I actually go with the 8k maps cuz I don't mind a bit of travel time.

[ElDudorino]

Smallest size. Keep everything as close together as possible and minimize the time spent doing nothing but holding W (and maybe Shift).

[CatPerson]

^ I think it would also depend on another two things:
--do you like loot respawn off
--do you like to play a single map/save "forever" or do you have a habit of wanting to start over completely on newly generated maps fairly often (me)

...I forgot about 6k. That is a pretty good size for solo, even with loot respawn off, if you aren't a constant-start over type. I did find 4k a little too restricting, especially vanilla generated.

[Razorfish]

10k Is too large, even with a mbike or aircraft...
worse, the aircraft does nothing to increase the mapping........, it treats map exploration as if ur on the ground....
But more important is town/monument distribution.

As regards density..... it should only effect performance if the game map chunk is more densely packed, or you have players in other chunks....

[Sprocket66]

8K with the improvedrwg mod for very large cities pretty close together with big downtown area's. You won't run out of poi's to raid. If you want extra variety try the compo pak for over 100 more various poi's.

[MoistGamer]

whether or not you play with loot respawn on or off wasnt mentioned in your post. Weighs heavily into the answer. Mine anyway. If you have loot respawn on, the smallest map possible will do. One city is all you need.

Otherwise as others mentioned having a bigger map allows for more loot once you already scavenge everything around you.

I disagree with needing to make the map bigger for the sake of exploration, youll see more of the same cities with the same buildings, the only difference being the haze or snow or fog you are seeing it through on your approach.

I saw in another post where the expectation by the CEO was that the average game should last til about day 60, ideally anyway, on average. You don't need more than 6km for 60 days. Thats like 6 giant ass cities in my experience. As it sits today I deliberately ignore most of them.

The amount of buildings on an unadulterated random-gen map would make you think you are in the center of Manhattan. Long time ago they were spread out and finding a building was pretty exciting. Now you can jump from roof to roof like spiderman just suckin down the primo loot before handing in your pictures to the daily tribune.

Edit: actually if you are newer at the game, the exploration is fun because you dont know what to expect. If its your 10th, 15th, 150th game... you already know. There's a shotgun messiah in 6 out of your 8 cities. No golden unicorn down that road over yonder, just more pop n pills and messiahs.

[CatPerson]

@MoistGamer - re: exploration, it's true in terms of "the same POI's" but what I personally enjoy sometimes is discovering the wilderness (single) POI's in different environment and terrain shaped spots. Like when they're in some oddball location - found one almost on an mini-island once because of some lake/road weirdness - or maybe right on the edge of an ocean border ... and that sort of thing is a bit more likely to be encountered with more space - BUT, such is definitely not important at all for the main gameplay loop and most aren't going to care, yes.

I do agree that type of exploration has become a lot more dull overall in more recent Alpha's because of the way the RWG generates maps, so I engage in it a lot less, but I still notice/find stuff occasionally. Once I made a map with nothing but wilderness POI's and lots of mountains/hills, which was kind of interesting, but even then they remain too spaced out because the algorithm/pathing expects there to be Cities. Kind of a fun challenge tho.

It's funny because after being away from the game for a while I wasn't familiar with a lot of the newer/larger city POI's etc, so that was indeed fun for a while. But at this point I find a lot of those way too large. Maybe it's more realistic, and visually they look nice/great, but it's tiring/too long to go through them - I tend to avoid the larger ones completely now unless I'm desperately hunting for something that random has been unkind with.

[hawley.kevin]

8k max town lil laggy but more loot then what u no to do with xD.......

[marcdasharc]

My best map was a 5k map. It had 3, Crack-A-Books (Skyscraper_2) on it. With the furthest one being only 2.3km away from my base. Man, I built myself up so fast. Had a fortress of turrets from the loot chest in Skyscraper_2. Thus far, I would say it was my funnest playthrough

[Moxey]

I have never explored a single map completely so id say even 4k will do

[Reeva!]

If you like knowing where to go, Navezgane. Can learn the map pretty quickly, and you always know where the best loot is, and more importantly, where the Wasteland is.

If you like random generation, try a 10k map, you'll love it. Only thing is that Navezgane was actually hand built from what I understand, as such they added the Burning Forest and Wasteland biomes separately, but tbh, the burning forest is really bad for loot. They then combined the 2 biomes into the general wasteland for all random gen maps. Could be a good thing or a bad thing, if you don't/like the burnt forest.

10k maps are gigantic as well, will take you a lot of time to fully explore places. Try and find some good seeds online though, some of the maps have Really bad loot, massive empty spaces, or just wonky terrain in general. Longevity does go up with a bigger map.

[tools guy-kun]

Originally posted by Reeva!:

If you like knowing where to go, Navezgane. Can learn the map pretty quickly, and you always know where the best loot is, and more importantly, where the Wasteland is.

If you like random generation, try a 10k map, you'll love it. Only thing is that Navezgane was actually hand built from what I understand, as such they added the Burning Forest and Wasteland biomes separately, but tbh, the burning forest is really bad for loot. They then combined the 2 biomes into the general wasteland for all random gen maps. Could be a good thing or a bad thing, if you don't/like the burnt forest.

10k maps are gigantic as well, will take you a lot of time to fully explore places. Try and find some good seeds online though, some of the maps have Really bad loot, massive empty spaces, or just wonky terrain in general. Longevity does go up with a bigger map.

Thank you for the nicely thought out answer, but I did mention this in the beginning of the post: “my first save was a 10k map but it was way too large for me when playing alone.” Navezgane seemed like a nice choice but ultimately I ended up using random generation to see what it was like.

Thanks again.

[Mardoin69]

MoistGamer made some good points about the larger maps. And, for a newer(er) player not wanting to have to travel a long ways but, still get a good variety of what random gen has to offer, I stand by my 6k recommendation. It was also mentioned about a mod....someone created a modified rwgmixer.xml that fine tunes some aspects of the generator to get larger--thereby closer together--cities even when using larger map sizes. I've used that mod and it does improve it nicely imo. Something to consider.