Yesterday in a test map, which my computer loathes, I reached the edge.
https://wiki.factorio.com/World_generator
Maximum Map Size and used Memory (bottom of the page) wrote:The map size is limited to 2000 x 2000 kilometers (a quadrant with 2,000,000 tiles side-length, an area of 4,000,000,000,000 quadrant-tiles). This is between the size of India and Australia [India+Pakistan is pretty close in terms of km^2]. It would take around 240 game-minutes (=4 hours) by train to reach that border from the center. This means that the world is essentially endless. [Since when is a 2 million-tile-long square comparable with 'endless'?!]
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The generated chunks are mapped and stored in the player's RAM, which is the limiting factor.
My goal was to (in sandbox) create a straight track long enough that a rocket fueled locomotive could run out of gas on it. The consequence of this undertaking, which is still ongoing, was a 353 MB save file.
So whenever I save or load this map, it takes a long time for my computer and its 8 GB of RAM to do so. I haven't timed it precisely but I would guess 10-15 minutes to load and 20-30 minutes to save.
The spoilered screenshot below shows poison and grenades in my toolbar, but that's not what I did to all the trees.
Here's the sloppy but effective command I used to purge the entire explored area. 'simple-entity' is the type identified with all rock obstacles.
Code: Select all
/c local surface = game.players[1].surface for c in surface.get_chunks() do for key, entity in pairs(surface.find_entities_filtered({area={{c.x * 32, c.y * 32}, {c.x * 32 + 32, c.y * 32 + 32}}, type= "tree"})) do entity.destroy() end end; local surface = game.players[1].surface for c in surface.get_chunks() do for key, entity in pairs(surface.find_entities_filtered({area={{c.x * 32, c.y * 32}, {c.x * 32 + 32, c.y * 32 + 32}}, type= "simple-entity"})) do entity.destroy() end end
With the benefit of hindsight, I think that generating a minimum height ribbon world would have been a smart opening move for the project.
P.S. My current hypothesis is that a rocket-fueled locomotive starting at spawn would almost reach the 900 km mark without refueling.
And I hear it's even longer now... 
