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Map structure

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Map structure refers to...

Tile

A tile is the smallest piece of the world map. The whole Factorio world is made out of them.

Tiles are used as a unit for measuring area and distance.

A Chunk (32×32 tiles) is the next largest unit for area/distance.

How to see tiles and chunks?

You can either

Examples

  • Area covered by Radar: about 100 tiles diameter (100 tiles in each direction, bounded to the matching Chunk, read about Radar to understand this)
  • Speed of a basic Transport belt: about 1.8 tiles/sec.
  • It takes about 1 minutes and 52 seconds to run 1000 tiles without speed up. [1] (As a side note, this would mean that the character is a very healthy person.)

Real size of tiles

1 tile is generally assumed to be 1 square meter in size (like Minecraft). According to this discussion, this assumption seems to be true.

Chunk

A Chunk is a unit defined as either an area of the map 32×32 tiles in size (containing 1024 tiles in total) or a distance of 32 tiles.

Chunks are used for:

  • Map generation. When the player runs around, has a radar explore the map via sectors or has artillery shells fired across long distances, the map is revealed in chunks.
  • Chunks are "switched off" to save CPU cycles. If nothing important happens in a chunk (e.g. there are only fishes swimming around in the chunk) the chunk is not computed in the next Tick.
  • The pollution model is based on chunks, and pollution spreads to neighboring chunks.

Region

A Region is 16 by 16 Chunks large.

Regions are actually not used anywhere in-game except for the debug info (no game mechanic depends on regions, no scripting functions have access to regions), and currently they are only used for organizing allocations.

There is a chance that they will be removed completely in the future.

References

See also