Survey · Gateway

The Gateway

This is not a screenshot. The landscape was pulled out of the game as a sixteen-by-sixteen grid of proxy tiles, decoded, stitched, and drawn as a map — so the coastline below is where the coastline actually is, and the water is water because the engine has no land there.

Ground

land: 170.4 sq mi
coast: 18.8 sq mi
water: 120.8 sq mi
bounding box: 309.9 sq mi

The bounding box used to be quoted as the land area. It is not — most of a box drawn round an island is sea, and the three figures above are what that box is actually made of.

Grid

extent: 18.3 × 17.0 mi
chunks: 19 × 17 = 323
chunk edge: 1 mile
territories: 57
sanctuaries: 4

Chunks are the unit the territory system works in: crossing into a claimed chunk is what fires an entry notice.

Two scales, kept apart

The playable Gateway is about 4.2 by 3.9 kilometres. The world it stands for is roughly three hundred square miles, so one mechanical metre represents seven world metres. Both numbers are real and they are never mixed: a Warden ruling is always quoted in mechanical metres, because a ruling quoted in represented miles would tell a player to back up seven miles.

What is measured, and what is fitted

The coastline is measured — it comes from the landscape tiles themselves. Registering those tiles to our territory coordinates was fitted, because the two use different frames: our map extent was derived from the territory survey and is smaller than the landscape. The best fit puts 85.7% of land territories on terrain and only 12.5% of marine ones, a separation far too large to be chance but not exact. Treat positions within a chunk of the waterline as approximate.

Domains

Territory is not one thing. A Pteranodon claiming a cliff, a Deinosuchus claiming a river bend and a Triceratops herd holding the plain beneath them are three claims that can share coordinates without conflicting. Every biome is therefore classified into land, aquatic and aerial, and a claim is made in a domain.

aquatic

land

aerial