How big is Hallownest?

[Piffy]

I'm trying to figure out the scale of the game, and my best guess is that our protagonist is ~2cm high without the horns, if you take into account the size of the falling water droplets in the City of Tears and the length of Hornet's needle. This theory also assumes that nails are literally (or at least traditionally) forged from nails and that our protagonist's nail is made of, like, half of one of those tiny finishing nails you tap in with the point of another nail.

But I'm wondering if there are any canon numbers because I feel like I could be off by a factor of 2 (but those would be very large bugs), and also taking+stitching together screenshots from my husband's computer to find out the exact pixel height/width of the entire map is going to take forever (especially with my rubbish reflexes). So I'm asking here first.

[paugus]

Originally posted by The Embraced:

Why would you even think about this? It's a fantasy world...

The same reason this fantasy world exists to begin with. Imagination. Try it sometime. :)

[Fawkzi]

I've actually always wondered about this mainly due to the NPC's you meet like Quirrel and Cloth. Our little protag can comfortably traverse the deepest parts of the world due to our size but you often meet the large NPC's in these areas.

Often makes me stop and think about just how they got there through those narrow pathways that are crawling with enemies. Especially Cloth. Cloth is pretty big..

I guess it's not entirely realted to what you're talking about but that's one thing that's always played on my mind. Would be nice to figure out the scale just because it'd help me figure out how the hell they got to these places.

[paugus]

Originally posted by The Embraced:

but it makes little sense why someone would try to find out how big bugs are in Hollow Knight in comparison to the real world when it has nothing to do with it.

Some things dont have to make sense

You're giving yourself some great advice here. I'm also curious as to why it bothers you so much that people are musing over something that doesn't interest you.

[Piffy]

I'm writing a crossover in which Hallownest is a hole in the ground in Yharnam and I need to know how big of a hole we're talking about.

[Damos]

Alternatively, I'd like to know what's the total number of rooms in the game. Granted, some are tiny and some take multiple screens both vertically or horizontally, some are made of several sub rooms without transition, etc...

Another one would be : if the main character represents 1 unit on the map scale, how many units does it take to go from west to east, or north to south? Any kind of stats like that on the size of the world would be fun :)

[laiken]

Sounds good to me. I might try to get a number that way.

[Piffy]

Originally posted by T0ASTY(delish):

Sounds good to me. I might try to get a number that way.

I'd love to hear your results, and then we can each just math for the units we're using

[Pixelpusher]

Did you ever get results op?

[thbeesley3062]

The stag is most likely 6 inches long (Maximum size for rhinoceros beetles, which he is obviously based on.)

[Boksha]

I always thought the "bugs" in Hallownest were significantly bigger than the insects we know. In the very least they clearly aren't earth insects, even though some of them are based on those, but the anatomy is all over the place. Even if they were though, pre-history has had insects much bigger than anything we see today; the limiting factor has always been oxygen usage, and we know nothing about the air in Hallownest.

Given the impact you make on the floor when you fall from a great height it feels like the knight should be at least the size and weight of a mouse or so, possible 10 to 20 cm tall. Any smaller than that and you wouldn't really notice anything when falling from a great height. Given that you can fall from very large heights and not take any damage whatsoever, I'd say the knight can't be much bigger than that either, or the impact would at least hurt you (cats, for example, can't take a fall at terminal velocity fully unscathed, although they can sometimes survive, and any creature bigger than that generally just gets crushed instantly when hitting the floor at terminal velocity)

I seem to recall some people also estimated the knight's size based on Hallownest's gravity, but then we have no idea whether the time we experience the game in is real time, or just the knight's perception of time (smaller creatures tend to have much faster reaction speeds than larger ones, and therefore might experience time to be slower; for all we know, the game's speed is much slowed down to make up for everything in-game happening much faster than we'd be able to handle)

Of course, the two paragraphs above assume earth gravity; no guarantee of that either.

Another hint independent of gravity could be that the knight is way too to be supported by surface tension when jumping into water, and instead has to swim like bigger creatures. I feel a creature about 2 cm tall would have a lot more trouble getting out of the water due to surface tension as well.

[Pixelpusher]

Originally posted by thbeesley3062:

The stag is most likely 6 inches long (Maximum size for rhinoceros beetles, which he is obviously based on.)

a unit of measure
now if im bored enough ill measure the entire map in game with the stag

[estehmanis]

never thought of it that way. now that i'm scalling them in my mind they seem a lot cuter

[MADE IN IRON]

Originally posted by Boksha:

I always thought the "bugs" in Hallownest were significantly bigger than the insects we know. In the very least they clearly aren't earth insects, even though some of them are based on those, but the anatomy is all over the place. Even if they were though, pre-history has had insects much bigger than anything we see today; the limiting factor has always been oxygen usage, and we know nothing about the air in Hallownest.

Given the impact you make on the floor when you fall from a great height it feels like the knight should be at least the size and weight of a mouse or so, possible 10 to 20 cm tall. Any smaller than that and you wouldn't really notice anything when falling from a great height. Given that you can fall from very large heights and not take any damage whatsoever, I'd say the knight can't be much bigger than that either, or the impact would at least hurt you (cats, for example, can't take a fall at terminal velocity fully unscathed, although they can sometimes survive, and any creature bigger than that generally just gets crushed instantly when hitting the floor at terminal velocity)

I seem to recall some people also estimated the knight's size based on Hallownest's gravity, but then we have no idea whether the time we experience the game in is real time, or just the knight's perception of time (smaller creatures tend to have much faster reaction speeds than larger ones, and therefore might experience time to be slower; for all we know, the game's speed is much slowed down to make up for everything in-game happening much faster than we'd be able to handle)

Of course, the two paragraphs above assume earth gravity; no guarantee of that either.

Another hint independent of gravity could be that the knight is way too to be supported by surface tension when jumping into water, and instead has to swim like bigger creatures. I feel a creature about 2 cm tall would have a lot more trouble getting out of the water due to surface tension as well.

I allways assumed they were tiny bugs, but what you say makes a lot of sense...

[thbeesley3062]

Here is a calculation I did.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HollowKnight/comments/jcgsxw/hallownest_actual_size/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[Beef Hammer]

I could of sworn this was asked and answered by the devs at one point, and i wanna say it was something like a backyard sandbox.