Map structure
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
- pause the game (by default with Shift-Space) or
- you can use the Debug mode to turn the tile-layer on.
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.