Thanks! To answer some of your questions(a lot of info sorry)
How large is the entire map (the terrain)?
The map is about 4k studs(although a lot is still inaccessible/yet to be made). This is roughly the same size as jailbreak for reference, perhaps a little larger. (We also have a ton of cave/cavern systems around the map so that also makes it technically a fair bit larger)
Is it the max it can be?
For now, most likely. We have a lot of assets and systems in the game including wildlife, trains, grass, weather, and general assets and props. We have to fight roblox very hard to get it to perform and run well with this size of a map so expanding it is not worth the effort.
Not to mention, we’re at the size where we still feel like the world feels massive, but it isn’t too large to where you’ll never run into people.
How are players not going to get FPS drops from this?
FPS drops are an issue for very low end devices but we haven’t hit any major performance issues for the majority of players yet. (You won’t be able to play this on your old iphone though unless we do some major streaming optimizations and cut down on memory usage because our game has a ton of unique assets).
Meshes and (hopefully soon?) models have automatic LOD switching which helps a lot with how many assets/entities we have in the game. Most performance issues typically relate to memory and server physics, the latter will be optimized more once we re-do wildlife and make it entirely client sided with server syncs
Most of our code base is fairly well optimized , everything limits itself to only take x amount of ms to complete(quality auto scales with your machine). We’re also taking good measures to ensure network performance is as best as it can be. We compress most information sent to and from the server into the least amount of bytes possible. This is necessary for us because there are some tasks/systems such as ragdolls that we have to send and receive data to frequently since we decided against using roblox’s default physics replication for a much smoother experience
Have you and your team came to base your mechanics around this?
We’ve spent a long time thinking about game design and how the map will influence gameplay. We try to make sure that there’s nothing in the world that’s pointless, secret caverns to explore will actually have things of value such as rare ores you can mine, treasure chests(soon), as well as areas you can set up a base/camp.
The struggle with a map this large will always be trying to make sure people are still playing together. Bronze City(currently the only city in the game) is naturally a big social hub. I can’t answer too much about this right now since we’re still unfinished.
I notice that you are referring to this as a “project”, so is this going to end at “project” or is this going ahead to be a fully made game?
Probably poor wording on my part. We do want this to be a complete game with retention, a lot of progression, and endless things to do. We’re mostly inspired by Red Dead Redemption 2 of course, but also some older western titles that used to exist on roblox back in the day.
We’re making great progress, at the moment we’re just adding some big retention mechanics and steadily completing the map and fixing performance issues. We’ll then start to creep more toward free to play once we feel the game is sustainable.
What type of additions are you and your team going to incorporate still? I am just asking because from the looks of it, the map seems just about finished.
There’s still about a third of the map that is currently inaccessible(blocked off with invisible walls). That is the large desert biome and the tall mountain biome. That’s what we’re working on to complete right now, then we’ll most likely polish up existing areas and create the border regions.
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. Do you guys have any prevision of when it’s gonna be the shutdown? Just so I can know when to celebrate the last minutes or days of the game with the community we have now in the game 
