Shape of the World

Status: proposal (2026-07-27). Nothing here is settled design — this page exists to be argued with. Engineering feasibility has been assessed and is not the bottleneck; everything else is open.

The world is a ring: sail west far enough and you return from the east. It is not a globe and does not pretend to be one — the world's shape is a fact of its cosmology, and one that nobody living has proven.

The pitch

Circumnavigation as content. A player stands at a west-coast dock, provisions a ship, and sails west into open ocean. Hours later — if the voyage holds — they make landfall on the world's eastern shore. This is the medieval-explorer fantasy: not teleporting, not fast-travel, but a genuine expedition that most players will never complete and every player knows is possible.

Almost no game in this genre has an honest wrapping world. The ones that feel like planets fake it; ours would simply be a ring, and own it.

The cosmology

The world is a band — call it a ring, a hoop, a girdle. East–west, it closes on itself. North and south, it ends.

What the ends look like is an open flavor decision, and a rich one:

• The north: an impassable ice sheet? A wall of storms? Mountains no pass crosses?
• The south: the rim itself — an edge the sea pours over? Or just more ice?

In-world, the shape is disputed. Scholars argue ring versus disc versus sphere; sailors have opinions; maps disagree at the margins and decorate their ignorance with serpents. The first circumnavigation doesn't just cross the world — it settles the argument. That voyage is lore the players themselves get to write.

The ocean

Most of the ring is open sea. This is what makes the whole idea affordable: land interrupts ocean, not the other way around. The sea needs no authoring — it simply exists wherever nothing else does — and continents, islands, and archipelagos get seeded into it over years.

Open ocean is also a natural home for procedural and repeatable content: weather, currents, fishing grounds, shipwrecks, sea creatures, uncharted islets. None of that is designed yet; the point is that the canvas is enormous and costs nothing.

Ships

Circumnavigation is a voyage, so this whole proposal is gated on ships existing as real content — not a teleport with a boat animation, but sailing you actually do. What that means (a sailing skill? navigation? provisioning and spoilage? crew?) is entirely open design space, and it is the prerequisite: no ships, no ring.

The second gate: travel must stay slow. The ring only means something if distance does. If fast-travel ever makes any two points seconds apart, the world's shape becomes a trivia fact nobody experiences.

Scale

At run speed (5 tiles/second), with a hypothetical ship at twice that:

Circumference	Nonstop run	Nonstop sail (~2× run)
9,000 tiles	30 min	15 min
18,000 tiles	1 h	30 min
36,000 tiles	2 h	1 h

The working recommendation is the 18,000–36,000 tile band: big enough that rounding the world is an expedition, small enough that real players actually do it. Below roughly 3,000 tiles the wrap is discovered by accident in a first session and the world reads as a toy.

A ring also flatters its own size: no destination is ever farther than half the circumference, and there are always two routes — east-about or west-about. The world feels complete rather than walled.

Cost and timing

Engineering assessment (2026-07-27): converting the world to an east–west ring is tractable — the map code is already well-factored for it — and, importantly, it can be bolted on later without resetting or migrating the existing world. Nothing about today's map, the live server, or near-term content is blocked or made throwaway by deferring this. A true sphere was assessed and rejected: topologically hostile to a square tile grid, a rewrite of the renderer, and — since the curvature would be invisible at any playable scale — indistinguishable from a ring in actual play.

So the sequencing is: keep building the world as-is → ships, someday, as their own initiative → the ring lands as part of an "age of sail," with the cosmology already written into the world so the geography was never pretending otherwise.

Open questions

• Does the ring cosmology fit the world's story as it exists in your head? Ring vs. disc vs. something stranger?
• What are the north and south ends?
• Where does the existing landmass sit on the ring — and what's at its antipode?
• What is sailing, as gameplay?
• How should the in-world shape dispute surface — books, NPCs, a questline, a Celaboran opinion?
• Circumference: does the 18–36k band feel right, given how the world should feel to cross on foot?