pilomotor
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Jun 27, 2024 2:41 PM
pilomotor
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pupquine
Chinese manhuas regularly have worlds that span 100s thousands of mile in any direction without any indication of it beig something other than flat.
frozenchicken
The famous fantasy world of Proseedarol Ganarashon.
StarmineRendezvous
If Minecraft were a fantasy novel.
VashTehStampede
#1 Always...into the East.
Jawesome19
World building idea: world that's really big
mikeatike
Factorio.. or does it actually have a max size, iduno
offroadguy56
Greg Bear has a book, Eon, with a similar idea. An asteroid with an impossibly long tunnel inside. With portals that lead to various planets and systems in the universe.
Valkor
we live in this reality, except the scale is a bit different :(
Corrodias
I believe Valkor refers to the universe, space exploration. It's what I was thinking as I read this. Unfortunately, we're rather stuck on this planet for now and can't realistically travel far.
LurkerDraven
Feels like wheel of time books
sevenfingerman
Sounds cool, I may incorporate it into a fantasy world that I am already building.
taurondir
Read a story once where "the world" was a wall, and people kept climbing, and one day another wall started closing in, but instead of crushing everyone together, it just stopped - I forget how close but I think like, tens of meters or similar, and people just kept climbing.
Subtilico
They're in a Dyson sphere. For non space faring civs this would mean they take so long to make 1 rotation, their descendants won't recognize the place of origin. 1 Earth orbit around the sun is almost 1G km. It would take 90 years to do that with mach 1. Let alone with any ground or sea based vehicles.
a2s2020
Missile Gap, a novella by Charles Stross. It’s Cold War themed SF (pub 2006) and has a grim ending (or does it?!) but also has Yuri Gagarin exploring the flat Earth in an Ekranoplan, so still cool
BenjaminUDover
Pretty sure Ravnica from the Magic: The Gathering universe is like this. Its a plane that is just endless city in each and every direction, ad finum.
Radix865
Nah, Ravnica is more like coruscant from Star Wars. In the first lines here: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Ravnica
I think you probably get that idea from one of the flavor texts on a card where someone said they had been walking through the city their entire life and never seen the edge of it. Farseek I think?
soulthreat
In the manga “biomega” (very weird story) the earth (and i think the solar system or universe) gets reconfigured into a tube-world that just extends through space
AFelineMassofEyes
Tsutomu Nihei writes really creative world settings in general
FTUG
The NeverEnding story
elarcano
I came here to talk about how Fantástica has no borders
azazyel
If earth was as big as Jupiter it'd probably seem that way
paintingagency
We'd also be about a foot tall.
Raeilgunne
so even bigger.
AFelineMassofEyes
Everyone needs to read BLAME
LupusLilium
Something shockingly boggling about the level of detail mentioned and glossed over. Like it's not just a weird dyson sphere-like thing, but IIRC it encompassed more than the entirety of the solar system? So we're not just talking about a potential city of multiple levels based around the sun itself, but like up to and beyond absorbing Jupiter into its structure. That's -massive-. I'm unable to find the words to find it via Google, the distance from the sun to Jupiter is 5.4au, but I can't find
LupusLilium
the distance or whatever the word is for just how much Jupiter itself travels for how 'wide' that floor could be.
AFelineMassofEyes
There are areas where even science fiction goes "I don't gotta explain shit," like an unmapped megastructure built by insane machines.
WitchIrkalla
Isn't this just Hunter x Hunter?
CycloneSP
hey now, no spoilers for us pitiful anime only fans
Pheehelm
Does it extend like that in every direction? If so, do they have a day/night cycle?
Roehcai
Why not? I mean in a world with magic you kinda do anything, but for something more plausible, the sun does 'circle' the world, but in a 4th spatial dimension. At dawn it would just kinda grow out of a pinpoint of light, and shrink back into nothing at dusk.
Roehcai
A bit like this: https://baileysnyder.com/interactive-4d/_nuxt/img/sphere_slices_3d_2d.4d8e1be.gif
CycloneSP
constant twilight. but some high magic cities employ powerful illusion magic to mimic a day/night cycle
StarmineRendezvous
Why would they? They would have evolved to not even know what a day/night cycle is. :P
IrrelevantIrrelevant
Ancestors experienced the sun as it made its very first cycle(and never came back), and now the cities follow tradition because a bunch of old documents say it once existed, and they don't want to be viewed as weaker without it.
noWhiteHorseHereJustBatturuPrinsu
passing entire villages and cities founded by previous expeditions that were sent out millenia ago and just gave up on their mission at some point. But then centuries later start sending out their own expeditions in the other direction to see if the original city is still there to check and proof that their origin story is actually correct
Kaleopolitus
I did a setting like that in a pen and paper game around 2015. By the time of the players, the world was mapped so far that a person could not traverse one side to the other in a single lifetime without magic.
nitemayr
It's a fun shared world idea "The liternally never ending horizon"
AlmostCertainlyNotPickles
Check out the Long Earth series
SadsPikkelson
Man, I loved the first book and had such high expectations for the series. It wasn't bad, but it seemed like they just lost enthusiasm with the possibilities .
SadsPikkelson
Having millions of almost completely independent worlds of evolution only to have basically equivalent evolutionary pathways. The boring terrorist nuclear attack. Only trolls and kobolds as sentients. The shoe horned "super people" evolving. And all happening in a single lifetime. Everything about the Long Earth felt so pedestrian, even though the *idea* of infinite parallel worlds or an imagination drive is fucking awesome. The world and characters didn't jibe for me. Obviously, ymmv.
AlmostCertainlyNotPickles
Yeah. I stopped at book three, myself.
BeragondGreatstride
Lots of folks correctly calling out ringworlds for this. But I want to shine some light on the less appreciated topopolis megastructure. Giant space noodles of theoretically infinite length FTW!
AFelineMassofEyes
Go on. . . .
BeragondGreatstride
It has an entry on Isaac Arthur’s megastructure compendium video. There are timestamps in the description, but the whole vid is worth a watch (or listen) https://youtu.be/1xt13dn74wc?si=WgkO_xiMRHROVH_B
AFelineMassofEyes
You had me at "megastructure compendium video," TYVM <3
nyarlathotep777
His Noodly Appendages
Hornet65
This is Made in Abyss, but horizontal.
Ohdearaudrey
And less loli bondage hopefully
TonyBalogna
Didn't No Man's Sky promise this?
Radix865
And for all intents and purposes it kinda provides that too. A single galaxy in it has 3-4 billion regions and each region has 200-600 star systems. And it has 256 galaxies...so far at least, as I think they could technically add more if they wanted to.
Honestly I have no idea how the game functions internally considering the sheer numbers.
Futchm
I've been writing a setting something like this
Heavily inspired by Niven's Ringworld series
AlmostCertainlyNotPickles
Want to do a swap read? I'm writing a book inspired heavily by Discworld. Check the links in my bio or hit my DMs.
Itslukus
I'll do a swamp read tho
AllTheGoodOnesWereGone
"The Flight of the Horse" by Larry Niven is about a hapless guy who is tasked with using a time machine to retrieve extinct animals from the past, such as a horse. But the joke is that the time machine is a fantasy device so when he goes back to retrieve a horse, what he finds is a unicorn, etc.
or0b0ur0s
The Ringworld at least had edges you could see. Though it was more than large enough that even a migratory civilization would lose its origins by the time it circumnavigated the thing...
dpidcoe
Ringworlds scale is ridiculously massive. Even for some kind of species with ultra-endurance jogging abilities traveling 30km per day, you'd still be looking at upwards of 100,000 years to circumnavigate the thing. It would even still be on the order of hundreds of years to make a foot-crossing from one edge to the other.
or0b0ur0s
Who said they were doing it on foot? In the book there are entire civilizations on massive cruise-ship-type vessels, for one. They have vehicles... Well, some of the species did, anyway.
gvnwst
You certainly could not see the edges unless you were "fairly" close. Visibility through normal atmosphere is 10s-100s of miles at best. The ringworld is a million miles wide. (Niven acknowledges he made technical mistakes in the writing of the first book)
Sechran
Assuming magic is a thing, why not? It's no worse than all these games who showcase a complete globe and then go, "oh, wait, sorry, there was a whole ass MAGICALLY HIDDEN CONTINENT" right over here.
Jak8714
Why magic? Why not sci-fi quantum bullshit?
NorwegianSheepknuller
Warcraft, we're looking at you!
BaklavaWearingBalaclavaWhilePlayingBalalaikaOnBlackLava
Ok, random thought. Imagine if humans were like the size of an amoeba compared to the size of the planet. It could perceptively appear infinite.
SadsPikkelson
If we assume the situation follows roughly the same physics as our universe (spheroid planet rotating about a sun at a roughly fixed distance) calculating the circumference of the planet is relatively trivial. Add in something like teleportation magic and cartography becomes a simple matter of time. Obviously, that doesn't work with strange dimensions, but usually magic makes everything simple with even a little thought.
mfcrogue
Looking at you World of Warcraft, how many hidden continents have they got now?
DocBenny
Fromsoft: "we've been hinting about the existence of parallel dimensions all along and now you finally get to visit one, and get your ass kicked in it!"
thecsem
You know im not good at elden ring, but I haven't found the dlc that much harder than starting elden ring from scratch. Like I beat every boss in the main game through mostly bull shit tactics and my mimic boy and the dlc feels no more difficult.
nothingunused
The existence of an ass continent suggests the possibility of a boobs continent, too.
EniChaos
themyscyra
feryooday
thighs continent for me, thank you
nothingunused
There's room on this world for that one, too, my friend.
Cinammontoastcrunch
Not like a hidden content is unrealistic, the earth had undiscovered landmasses in fairly recent history, just because you have magic doesn't mean you have satellite imaging!
SadsPikkelson
But, you can often fly (and there's always an airship!). Surely with magical flight, mapping becomes almost trivial. All you need is a cartographer, a wizard, and time. You might only map 10 square miles a day on foot, but you could map a 100x30 mile corridor in one day with flight. An island might escape notice, but certainly not a continent.
AngryKoboldWithSomeGlasses
Fly spell lasts like 10 minutes until your wizard drops out of the sky like a rock
SmeesNotVeryGoodTwin
Wizard: "But I don't want to chart the globe! I want to turn people into dinosaurs!"
SadsPikkelson
But how will you know what dinosaurs look like until you find the lost continent?
random360
Step 1. Discover the fossilized bones.
Step 2. Reconstruct the body however you do. (We are here).
Step 3. Turn people into dinosaurs.
Step 4. Hide the continent.
Step ??? Profit.
Tuomir
Just because you can fly doesn't mean you can fly anywhere - dangerous and impassable prevailing wind conditions, mountains taller than feasible flight altitude, long stretches where resupplying is impossible, and hostile wildlife are all plausible reason why large areas of a world might go unexplored for a long time.
Anarchduke
Classic Mythological/Fantasy bird of prey, The Roc, highly encourages all you large, tasty bags of meat to learn to fly.
baals
But on an endless world? A continent as far away as say a light year?
SadsPikkelson
Well, if it's infinite, obviously, you can have anything. But in that case, the odds of running across a single other culture are essentially zero. If 1 million cultures are evenly distributed across a light year they are, on average, almost 10,000,000 miles apart, and that's assuming a straight line. That's the distance from Earth to the sun. You could ride a horse 20 miles a day for a thousand years and you wouldn't cover that distance.
nomadengineer
World of Warcraft has only done this like six times.
RaytheForgetful
FOR REAL. At least with Draenor/Outlands, it was another planet so it made sense, but how the FUCK did the Kul Tirans or the first Humans (direct vrykul descendants) not stumble across the Dragon Isles while sailing to and from the Eastern Kingdom?? It wasn't shrouded in magical lore retcon mist like Pandaria was. UGH.
punkknock
The Dragon Isles actually WAS hidden in a similar way to Pandaria. It happened pre WoW (and pre Warcraft). The isles was shrouded from everyone, including the aspects, to keep it safe.
RaytheForgetful
So they recycled an excuse for it to be not there, lmao idk if that's better or worse