The map below is for locating land masses of Šetoxyot. Half of the world has been explored, except for the arctic and antarctic landmasses. The world is flat, and the very edges of the world are frozen, while the center of the world could be considered the tropics.

Questions? Comments?

Cool map! Good job! What is the scale of the map? Like, how far is it from the bottom continent to the middle island in miles?

It is a good start. I look forward to seeing the details filled in as time goes on.

@John Thank you!

The length of the world is 14, 490 miles, and the width is 26,742 miles. So the total area of this world is about 387,491,580 square miles. Does that sound reasonable?
But to that island, it's approximately 7,245 miles away from the top continent.

The land is about 15 miles thick, and orbits vertically around a pale green star, which creates the unusual climates.

*Is just slightly confused* Orbits "vertically"? 15 miles "thick"?

I noticed the map tesselates with itself, so I was assuming it's a globe...*goes back and reads first post again*...oh, no, you do say that it's flat! My mistake. Any particular reason you wanted it to tesselate with itself, since it's flat? Or did you intend for it to tesselate at all? Maybe I'm just thinking too much

A few more questions...

1) Does your universe use basic Newtonian physics? If so, what holds Šetoxyot together? What's on the other side of the rectangle of land?

2) Somewhat related; what provides gravity on Šetoxyot? If it's the centripetal acceleration of going around the star, what prevents Šetoxyot itself from flying away?

3) With only 15 miles of thickness, how do you have tectonic activity? If there is no tectonic activity, do you plan to provide other forces to build up mountains/counter erosion?

Re: Reasonableness of surface area:
1) Your map is square (100px by 100px), but the length and width you quote for the world are very different from each other...is the map stretched/squished?
2) About reasonable size...well, wiki says that earth has a surface area (both land and water included) of 510,072,000 km^2. Your world has 387,491,580 miles^2 = 1,003,598,590 km^2, so it's just slightly under double the surface area of earth. Sounds quite reasonable.

Re: Unusual climates:
Can't wait to hear about them!

Finally, I like how the edges of the world are frozen; it's a very sensical way to introduce temperature gradient on a flat world. I use the same trick in my world, although it is circular (disc-shaped) and gravity pulls in on both sides of the disc (ie. blatantly non-Newtonian physics ).

I meant that unlike our solar system, which has all of the planets on a flat plain, this solar system has planets orbiting on a vertical plain. And the world is flat, so it has a definite thickness.



By that you mean like gravity? Because in my mind, gravity must work in a sphere shape, thus the rectangle holds together because of the 'pressure' on all sides. At the center of the world, one has both sides of gravity working against them, and so the person is suspended-ish at that point. But on the other side of the world, the climate is almost too arid to be habitable.



The cause of gravity is unknown I was told, so I'd think that it would be identical to our universe.



I may change that now that you've mentioned it. Otherwise, water would cause a state of constant 'erode and replace', because the dirt slowly moves off the top, but is quickly stuck to the reverse side of the world.



Yes, the world would be squished then. My mistake in drawing. But what do you mean by the statement about size?



I'll have to think about how they'll work, and I'll be sure to post when they're figured out.

Thanks for your probing questions! They really made me think about the physics of Šetoxyot!

Newtonian gravity does indeed "work in sphere shape", but what I meant was: what holds Šetoxyot in its rectangular form, preventing it from collapsing into a sphere? If Šetoxyot was just orbiting it's star like the Earth orbits the sun, with no additional forces acting on it, gravity would tend to scrunch it up into a ball. To illustrate, I drew a quick diagram, with red arrows representing the force of gravity and green arrows representing the motion of matter being pushed outwards by the collapse.


Of course, you're free to change gravity to work however you want. But if you want to keep it working the same way, there are options. If you've ever heard of Larry Niven's Ringworld series, they describe a world perhaps distantly related to yours. The Ringworld is a huuuuge, ring-shaped structure--flat, like a loop of ribbon--which encircles a star. Here's a good picture to show the concept, although it gives a terrible sense of scale:

It's spinning much faster than it's proper obital speed, so that stuff on the inner surface is held down by centrifugal force. There are huge walls on the edges so the air doesn't spill out into space. And the structure itself is super-strong, so it doesn't just fly apart under the weight of all the rock/ground/water/air it's holding.

It seems to me that, in terms of physics, one could perhaps treat Šetoxyot as a small slice of Ringworld--you'd just have to change a few forces to replace the lack of a complete ring, and it could function more-or-less the same way. If this direction sounds good to you, I'd recommend it as a potential solution.

My pleasure! But let me know if I'm getting too excited about all the physics stuff, I know it's only one aspect of worldbuilding. I don't want to be annoying--it's your world; build it at your pace.

I brainstormed, and came up with a semi-possible solution:

The flat world would be inside a massive diamond or quartz shell, which is about 2 miles thick. The land inside would be habitable, and receive enough light as well. However, the light is distorted, a weird hexagon pattern.

I also imagining if once the world reached Sci-Fi technology, there would be little metal colonies on the interior side of the shell. Even at modern technology, people might attempt to mine the diamond.

And the world would now be circular...

K, so here's a way I would use the shell idea to get a flat world:


This is a cross-section side view.
-Black is space.
-Bright blue is the diamond shell.
-Grey is rock.
-White is air.
-Blue is ocean.
-Green is land.
-The shell is being swung around the star much faster than orbital velocity. This pulls the matter inside against one wall.
-The sun would always directly overhead. This means perpetual day, unless something else blocks the sun, or unless the sun rhythmicly shines brighter and less bright.

Alright, I have my little post here:



Hopefully that can explain what I'm thinking of.

I have a crude image of how the idea above might work.

Orange is lava
Blue is water
Light blue is shell
Brown is land
Gradient is cloud bank

Ooh, I think the whole concept is very neat. What do you use to make the maps?

Thank you!
I use a free program called Gimp.

Gimp is awesome. Very helpful.

Ok, here's the idea I was telling you about. Picture first, then talk...


Ok. So here we have 3 different versions of the same idea.
The basic idea is this: to get day/night, the shell is not being swung around the sun (which would mean perpetual day, barring unusual weather phenomena), but around something orbiting the sun.

Basic explanation of the diagrams:
-At the top of each case, we see some structure orbiting the sun. The yellow star shape is the sun, the black circle is the orbit.
-Below this, we zoom in on the structure to examine it. The yellow arrows remind us of the direction that sunlight is coming from. Red arrows indicate direction of rotation.

Case 1: A planet is orbiting the sun, and the shell is orbiting the planet.
On the diagram: the black circle indicates the shell's orbit. There's only one shell shown, the lighter ones just show the same shell at different points in its orbit. When the sunlight is hitting the grey side of the shell (the rocky "bottom") it's night-time on the surface. When sunlight comes through the blue side (the "top"), we have day.
Extra features: If we are standing on the surface inside the shell, the planet will always be straight above us. There will be an eclipse every day at noon, as the shell passes through the planet's shadow (depicted in dark grey). During the night, the planet will be lit with the sun's light and glow brightly, somewhat analogous to moonlight. At midnight, we will see the shell's shadow moving across the planet.
Pros: Really cool world set up! A sun, a planet (could be earth like, or a gas giant, whatever you want), and a world in a shell!
Cons: we need a mysterious force between the planet and the shell that enables the shell to be moving at faster-than-orbital speed (remember, that's what gives us "gravity" inside the shell).

Case 2: Two shells, connected by a beam of some sort, are swinging around each other. The connection could be a simple rod attached to both shells, or a tube that allows travel between them, or it could be as wide in the middle as it is at the ends, making a large air space between the two shells.
On the diagram: pretty self-explanatory. Day and night work the same way as in case 1, with each shell experiencing an eclipse at noon (the opposite shell passing in front of the sun).
Extra features: If the connecting tube has a lot of airspace inside of it, you can do neat things at the very midpoint of the tube, where there will be zero gravity. The air here would tend to be very thin, but if you have enough air jammed into the whole contraption, it could still be breathable. Provided you have fans or something, you could move heavy objects around without difficulty. Bicycle-powered helicopters! A floating, zero-gravity city! Just make sure it doesn't drift down the tube one way or another, or it will start to feel its weight! Finally, here at the midpoint, it will almost always be day. Just two brief eclipses per day, one for each shell as it passes in front of the sun.
Pros: two opposite shell worlds, and a really cool midpoint to play around with! Also, since the shells are connected physically, we no longer need a mysterious force to hold them together as they whirl around each other.
Cons: You're kinda stuck with two worlds. If you only want one, you'd have to turn one shell into a dead counterweight, which would be kinda ugly.

Case 3: Three or more shells are connected in a spinning ring.
On the diagram: 4 shells are shown, connected in a ring. The black lines would be some kind of super-strong substance (magical cable of some sort?).
Extra features: This option is the most like the ringworld. You have a ring of connected shells, spinning to provide gravity for all of them. The difference is that, while the ringworld encircled the sun, this ring doesn't. That means there have to be gaps in the ring if you want daylight to hit the inside faces. So, you can have as many shells as you want, but the more you have, the less daylight they get--remember those eclipses? If you have 3 shells, each shell gets 2 eclipses per day. It you have 4 shells, each shell gets 3 eclipses per day, and so on. And the night itself--when the shell is facing away from the sun--doesn't get any shorter.
Pros: As many worlds as you want (at least three) provided you're willing to take the hit in daylight. No mysterious force needed for this one, either, since we again have physical connections between shells.
Cons: Lots of eclipses during every day. Unless that's an idea you like, in which case np.


There's actually a lot of ways to hybridize these ideas with each other, should you so desire. We can talk about that later

Wow, cephron! Your thought-out scientific ideas amaze me! I like them!

Thanks!! I think this is the part of worldbuilding I love most--or at least, get excited about most.

Looks like Vivace is whipping up a storm of worldbuilding in his new subforum! We talked about it, and it seems he likes the "case 2" option so far. Interested to see where it all goes.