Elpida is located on the island of Insulera. Though the Elpidan's have good control over the greenlands, the snowy forests are much less explored. The island itself offers several unanswered mysteries. For one, sudden changes in temperature are not uncommon. Travelling researchers have tried explaining the strange weather patterns with no success. Secondly, barbarians regularly launch attacks on Elpidan trade caravans. They are not native inhabitants, as there was no such thing when Insulera was first discovered. The source of their attacks is not apparent. So far, no barbarian encampment has been found with the exception of a few small tents in the forests. The island only has one known town - Elpida. The mining village acts as a supply space for Elpidan miners to store their tools. It is not perceived as an autonomous village, but rather as a district extending Elpida's reach. A couple points of interest are worth noting. The Dark Cavern provides some basic minerals and is located very close to the center of the town. Travelling up into the mountains, one can find remnants of old ruins, possibly used for ancient rituals. Not far north, the "Halls of Death" hide in a valley. This peculiar structure is unlike anything else on the island, possibly used as a burial ground. Little is known about those buried there. A curious explorer will likely find much more. The map was put together by the cartographer in Elpida. It does offer a fairly comprehensive insight into what the island looks like, but may be missing some very important points of interest.
The island is around 2000 x 2000 I believe. It is a very decent size, especially considering we want to add more island as the community grows. There is tons of space around Elpida for expanding the town and politics gameplay - we have some fairly ambitious plans for player housing. The free space will enable us to do really impressive things. The "mining town" also has a lot of free space - it could very well be a second full scale town (if we wanted, which we don't for gameplay reasons). In terms of exploration, the space is big enough to hold more stuff than an average player will ever see. The map doesn't show most of the points of interest there are - and I think there is space to add 5 times as many before it feels cluttered. We will have each island running on a separate server. So the most likely reason for adding a new map is not actually the size, but the hardware and player limit. Elpida was designed with 50-100 online players in mind. If we start nearing that number, we will look into new play areas.
I don't know if they are still there, but I made quite a few tents and homes for the plots if you ever wanted to make it an option for player housing/mini town. An idea is running the maps simultaneously on separate servers with the chat and other features linked. You would then have to find a way to make the world changes happen the samev(block removal or new homes), which is in possible.
The idea that when we expand due to number of players would be introducing a whole new island with new content. If we wanted to make it so a single map could hold more players we would upgrade the servers. As for what you were describing, it is possible, just a real pain to implement.
If a new map is implemented will we be able to carry over our stuff to the other island or will both servers be cut off from one another?
We all probably shouldn't get too ahead of ourselves, but my personal guess is that going from island to island would be like traveling, so you couldn't bring everything, but you could bring some stuff. Traveling between servers is very easy and can be done by the server itself. I don't know for sure how they will do it, but it will be something like this. So when they transfer you, you as a player done have to do anything.
@Saphiria Veneficia I guess your right. We'd have to hit the 100 players first before thinking about such drastic situations If we can move between the two servers with our items though it could technically be considered as an expansion pack (without having to pay for the pack )
We would likely use Bungee Cord, yes. The way it works is it pretty much connects you to a new server, with the exception that you aren't going into the server list and clicking any buttons. The good news is we have a database server already running in the background, so such move is possible. If you earn something on server A, it gets saved into the database. You then go to server B, open up the same database and the information is identical. It would be a lot of work to make that happen though - and also would require several tweaks to our current systems. But we have been thinking ahead, so it is doable when the time comes. You will never have two "instances" of the same world though. That is something opposite to what we are trying to accomplish, so hopefully that will never happen. Anyway, all of this is quite far away. You'll see plenty of other features first.
