New player Hi! Question, what is the point of the world map?

[Xeldrake]

So a whole world is created. Many different places to choose to land.

When landed the game is in a part of that world with borders in a microcosm.

I am guessing but could be wrong that the world is for stuff that maybe is not in the game yet?

For now it seems unnecessary to make a huge world to just spawn one random map.

[TheXIIILightning]

What you're saying is true, at this point it might be redundant, but it may be useful in the future. ^^
Not to mention that having a world generator so that you can compete with your friends, share maps and such is pretty neat.

PS: The world map is there to pretty much make the game a little deeper, as well as for potential updates, like enemy bases or even Multiplayer or New Game+

Imagine something like Sim City, where you can build several colonies in the same World Map. Trading with one another or potentially conquering the entire world sounds neat, but we can only hope that it evolves into something like that in the far future. ^^

[Goo Poni]

Maybe it's because I play in TTM but I have noticed that the other colonies actually have bases now. They're often hard to see in the standard map screen. Changing to the elevation overlay, you can spy 3 blue colonies and a green one. Clicking their tiles does actually come up with their name and no, you can't land on top of the colonies. Something that interested me was that these colonies appear to span several tiles which might explain why the raiders can throw such unsustainable raids at you. If they have 5-6 entire 250x250 map tiles apart of their singular colony, it might be feasible to throw such raids at you if they refresh their ranks quickly enough. More feasible if you're one of those who play in a 400x400 map for the extra roominess.

What I'd like way down the line is for the specifically sized tiles to be absolved and instead have one large map. So that I can just zoom out and zoom out and zoom out to the map level then zoom in on one of the other colonies and see how they're faring. Send or receive a caravan of traders from the colonies and see the caravans in motion, slowly making their way across the map. So the landing point is just that, a landing point. The colony could expand or move away from the original landing point. That's what I'd like though, I have no idea if that's remotely within Tynan's scope for the game. My crappy old laptop probably also wouldn't be able to handle that unless a method similar to X's background emulation of the galaxy was used.

[H_D]

Factions occupy locations in the map since A6 I think, but it doesn't affect anything so far.

[Goo Poni]

It gives them a little bit of a presence instead of being this non-corporeal entity that people seem to be aligned with.

[ShadowTani]

Rimworld is heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress, which have a similar over-map, and even though Dwarf Fortress haven't yet utilized the over-map much yet in Fortress mode it does have plans for allowing you to interact with it in the future. Tynan haven't said much about what plans he have for Rimworlds over-map, but it would make sense there would be somewhat similar plans as the plans Toady have for DF which includes army skirmishes etc.

[Coenmcj]

The colony's on the world map are placeholders for things to come from my understanding, almost everything else relates to map generation when loading up a new colony.