How big will the planets be?

Sorry if this has already been discussed. I looked and couldn't find much on it. How big will the planets be? In comparison to a Terraria small or large world how do they compare?

 

Hey there, spacerobot.

Planets should come in around roughly a few sizes, namely small, medium, large and infinite. From what I've read somewhere once, infinite planets will continuously generate terrain towards left or right, while depth is capped. Small, medium and large planets, however, will eventually loop --> Which means if you keep walking in one direction, you'll eventually return to the same spot.

Bear in mind that there's no 100% certainty that this will be in game, as developers may change their minds.

Here's a useful link for ya: List of Announced Game Info
And some juicy info about planets:

 

Can`t say for sure, but I`d say I`ve seen somewhere on forums a chunk of info that said that planets shall be quite large, some of them being infinite(?).
Also, JESUS CHRIST ITS A NINJA JUMP IN THE CAR

 

Pretty sure they said the engine can support infinite worlds but they won't be used in the unmodded game (to encourage exploration).

 

Even so, I am 90% confident that the engine will not support worlds more than 2^32 pixels wide, 95% confident it will not support worlds more than 2^32 blocks wide, and 99.9% confident it will not support worlds more than 2^64 pixels wide.

 

Which is 20% more infinite than most of the other game`s worlds anyway.

 

True, "infinite" was perhaps the wrong word to use. "Effectively infinite" may have been better. As even with your smallest number there, if the player could run 20 blocks in a second, would take thousands of hours to cross. "Big enough that the player can call it infinite" might be accurate.

 

I was watching a live-stream of Bartwe bug testing, and he ran all the way around the world in about 10-15 minutes. So as a comparison that particular planet seemed to be about the size of a small/medium Terraria world, if you've ever played that game. He also dug to the molten core of the planet, and that seemed to be about as deep as a small terraria world.

 

I highly doubt the game would keep track of worlds by pixels, it would be extremely inefficient. An upper limit of 2^32 blocks sounds reasonable, though.

To the original topic, I believe the planets are aimed to be smaller than Terraria planets in general. The game wants you to explore, and if every planet was the size of a large Terraria world, it would put a damper on that exploration.

 

Nice! Thanks for the info everyone. I like that they will come in different sizes. This game is going to rock.

 

I can't wait to go on more adventures! I hope the planets are small and quick to loot, and they better be smaller than Middle-earth!

 

One does not simply step into a Starbound world.

That being said I hope the size varies as I would like some to be small for complete terraforming and some to be huge for near infinite resources.

 

The infinite resources aspect is one of the reasons Tiy has mentioned for his decision not to have "infinite" planets in the game. He wants planets to be small enough that you can't just camp on one and harvest it for the remainder of your game.

 

My two pixels amounts to this: I'm really against the concept of an "infinite" sized planet, or even a planet that cannot be effectively circumnavigated. If you can't circumnavigate a planet because it's so ginormously huge, then you'll run into two main problems: first, traveling will be a nightmare (and effectively, completion of the planet will be practically impossible), and second, generating resources on the fly will bog down system processing and suck up memory. With an astronomical amount of space to explore and millions or billions of planets, there's no reason a player should have to focus on one planet (outside of his or her homeworld) for so long.

This does not need to turn into A Valley Without Wind.

 

The developers has stated that they are not interested in putting infinite planets into the un-modded game. The code for them will be there though, so a mod could easily add them in.

 

They'd have to be very small to accomplish that. A small world in Terraria could easily supply 100x your need of any mined substance.

 

Large worlds in Terraria were really so you could generate more dungeon and shadow chests plus floating Islands. If you wanted to get every item in the game in one world, large was the only way to semi-guarantee everything would be there.

 

Not if not a planet only has 2 out of 7 necessary ores for your tech level. Tiy has mentioned that the planet level will determine what ores are generated.