The game is a "region". I did a calculation on this, once. Even using 3 meters per tile on the largest possible map, you would arrive at a region that is roughly the size of Ireland.
http://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%2013%20Society.htm - "To feed one person for a year on wheat required about two acres of land - today's yields would produce the same from 1/3 of an acre."
In DF one tile can feed 60 dwarves (using longland grass) at maximum potential yield this means each tile is at minimum 20 acres which is about 1.5 times the size of the base of the Great Pyramid at Giza(and that is assuming the modern yields). This means the maximum size world is actually 6.2 times the surface area of the earth and a 4*4 embark is 3/4 the size of Rhode Island.
And current farming is massively unrealistic and involves nothing more than throwing seeds at mud. Further, a crocodile is one of the most productive dairy creatures in the game currently, while cows produce so little milk as to be worthless even compared to a pig. Food is simply not realistic. We had a pretty massive thread on that. Two, even.
And a tile is 3 meters cubed at most. Arguments are generally over whether it's 2, 2.5, or 3 meters.
Toady's FotF post:
I think they are fine given what I've read (that the floor space for a cottage for a family would be between, say, 25 and 125 square meters, depending on affluence and local customs and whatever else). Throwing out 2m arbitrarily as a tile edge, we'd be at 100m^2 for the floor space and 1536 m between villages, which I'm more or less comfortable with (I read an aerial survey for medieval sites in England which put average nearest village distance at 0.89mi or something, and we talked about how this might be varied earlier). Since we are on a grid, even with a single room the outer walls take up 24 tiles and the interior is 25, even though the outer walls shouldn't take up a lot of space. If they are divided into a living and storage area, which might involve an internal partition, then the floor area would be cut down an additional 5 tiles, putting us down to 80m^2. I don't know how different the cottage shapes are going to be, but within their plot there will end up being variations in terms of overall size, gardens, other structures, furniture, items, etc.
He has also mentioned in a DFTalk that it is 2 m.
The game is a "region". I did a calculation on this, once. Even using 3 meters per tile on the largest possible map, you would arrive at a region that is roughly the size of Ireland.
http://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%2013%20Society.htm - "To feed one person for a year on wheat required about two acres of land - today's yields would produce the same from 1/3 of an acre."
In DF one tile can feed 60 dwarves (using longland grass) at maximum potential yield this means each tile is at minimum 20 acres which is about 1.5 times the size of the base of the Great Pyramid at Giza(and that is assuming the modern yields). This means the maximum size world is actually 6.2 times the surface area of the earth and a 4*4 embark is 3/4 the size of Rhode Island.
This actually makes a lot more sense than you put it. Dwarves eat 6 meals a year, or 183 times less than we do. Therefore, one tile that will feed 60 dwarves is around four hundred forty-two square metres (442 m2). This means that the actual length of one tile by this metric, which is probably the second-most hyperbolic possible (I've got an even more extreme one), is 21 m.
Consider how long an average human walks in an hour (4-5 tiles). We can walk 5 km per hour, so the size of a DF tile must be greater than 1 km wide. Therefore, the size of a square is 1 km2 and measures over two hundred acres. This means that the second-smallest size world has a higher surface area than the Earth, and that a Carpenter's workshop is bigger than Monaco, and how your trade depot is more like downtown Manhatten. How's that for measurement?
Next time you build a wall, remember you just surpassed the Burj Khalifa's height record. Next time you participate in a Skyscrapes, you've built past the boundary of space.
8 meals a year. 4 seasons and 2 meals per season.
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Topic: Is Dwarf Fortress Round? (Read 6271 times)