Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-36683454-20190724020405/@comment-32705314-20190724205333

Imo I think the map size is perfect tbh. With a decent horse/boar/elk its easy to go thousands of blocks before the fast travel cooldown finishes, but its still large enough for huge builds and sweeping geography to be created for seemingly endless stretches of the world.

Take places like the Barrow Downs and the Pelennor Fields. It takes a person who is sprinting 7 minutes (4 on a mount, 3 on a very fast one) to cross both of these biomes. The Pelennor fields are already so small that proper towns rarely spawn within the Rammas Echor, and the Barrow Downs are small enough that there are only 100-200 barrows to explore. If the world is shrunk, biomes like the two above will get absurdly small, and structures like the Rammas and the Ring of Isengard will get plain stupid in size.

And think about the lore, too. At present, a person riding nonstop on a good horse can ride from Minas Tirith to Minas Morgul in 15 minutes, often less. Bringing with them an army of Gondorians, and suddenly the Morgul Vale goes from intimidating to under attack in the space of a few minutes

Even sprinting without a mount, a person can reach Pelargir from Cair Andros before their fast travel timer resets (assuming its at 30 minutes). I definitely think that the mod map could even be made larger tbh.

The largest travel time I can think of is from the Black Gates in Mordor to the Vale’s of Anduin to unlock its waypoints. It was an admittedly boring hour on foot, but that was only because the biomes between were flat and boring. A podcast later and I was in the much more interesting Vale’s.

As for single players, I can’t count how many times I’ve been so incredibly frustrated trying to find a barrow in the Barrow Downs that I haven’t already explored, trying to find areas I haven’t already been to. The biome is so small, I’ve had to reset it multiple times just so I can find my loot, instead of spending hours tracing and retracing old footsteps.

The mod map is DEFINITELY not too large. I remember spending hours on servers trying to find underpopulated areas without other people’s builds in them. That’s why my TOS base is in Minhiriath, because nobody cares about Minhiriath.

 @Pumpkinator