So, I went on a walkabout. I hadn't intended to. I was just wandering around checking out some interesting sites where I might want to put a new rail line, and wanted to see what was over the next ridge. Then what was on the other side of a big lake. Then what was behind a mountain. And pretty soon I realized I had wandered a long way from home. But, instead of turning back, I thought, "I wonder what it would be like to just keep walking until I hit the edge of the world?" and I kept walking.Douglas Adams wrote:Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Looking back through the debug file, I believe my journey began on May 2nd at around position (518,10,976). I walked mostly straight along the +X access, but didn't hesitate to edge left or right in order to find an easier path around a cliff or pit. Although there were also occasions when I just dug my way through. I did a 90 degree turn at around x=6,000 and walked along the Z axis until I was at z=-378, just to be lined up with my castle so my compassgps would point directly backwards as I walked forward. But then I started heading +x again. I used the boat mod to help me get over large bodies of water and compassgps to keep me oriented. And I reset the time a lot so I wouldn't have to stumble around in the dark.
I didn't rush. When I saw something interesting, I would explore for a bit. And even playing just a mostly straight up minetest_game I saw a lot of beautiful things.
Calculated by the time stamps in the debug file, this walk took me about 6 hours and 15 minutes of game time over several real-time days. Of course, I occasionally got up and got something to drink without remembering to exit the game, so the time isn't perfect, but I still think it's a fairly good estimate of how long it takes to do a fairly straight walk from the middle of the map to the edge of the world. It would, of course, have taken longer if I hadn't been adjusting the time to avoid the night cycle.
Given my time going about half way across the MineTest world, going from edge to edge would probably take over 12 hours. This walk was a lot of fun, so I may try that sometime! :)
My experience walking from the middle of the map to the edge convinced me that I am not likely to EVER explore a significant fraction of even just the SURFACE of this particular single player map. If you add in caves, or my new obsession, floating islands, the explorable space becomes unimaginably enormous. The MineTest world is big!
Here are some screenshots of cool stuff I saw along the way.
Floating Ridge: