A world inside a doorway

The building occupies one square on the map. Its rooms do not have to.

A traveler reaches a workshop beside a lane. There is a public workroom, a storeroom through the back, and stairs to a cellar. All three are places the player can occupy. None needs to consume another square of outdoor terrain.

Chimera now separates these two kinds of space. The terrain grid answers where the workshop stands in the landscape. A connected interior answers where the traveler can go after crossing its threshold.

The map is not the floor plan

The current outdoor grid uses 30-meter cells. Those cells are useful addresses for elevation, vegetation, water, travel and the larger world map. They are a poor floor plan for a modest building.

Making every room another terrain cell would stretch a small workshop across an implausible area. Making the whole workshop one room would erase the interesting choices inside it.

Instead, an interior is a graph: named spaces connected by explicit routes. A doorway, passage or staircase tells the engine which spaces it joins. The connections do not have to reproduce the spacing and compass directions of the outdoor grid.

That gives the author room to design a cellar, a winding cave or a large hall without first making each part fit a fixed terrain subdivision. It also leaves room for deliberately impossible architecture in games that want it.

An interior still has a relationship to the physical world. Its site has a shared outdoor anchor for location-related context. But sharing that anchor does not put everyone inside the same room. A traveler in the cellar cannot hear a conversation merely because the workshop's occupants have the same underlying map address. Current NPC speaking range requires the same room; sound traveling between rooms is future work.

A door leads somewhere specific

Suppose a building has a front door on a lane and a back door into a yard. Entering through the front does not make every later exit lead to the lane. The back door still leads to the yard.

An ordinary exterior connection therefore has a fixed destination. The workshop's front door connects to its authored outdoor cell, and the back door can name another. Their destinations belong to the doors, not to a record of where the last visitor came from.

This also means two people entering through different doors can meet inside without changing where either door leads.

Programmable movement is a separate idea. A portal whose destination depends on a dial or a player's state would need a trusted game capability to resolve that destination. The authoring format can describe that kind of reference, but the current publication path does not yet activate programmable portals. A sentence about a magical doorway is not executable movement code.

The wall blocks the crossing

Outdoor structures need a different kind of precision. A castle wall may run along the edge of a cell without making the cell itself inaccessible.

The editor can mark selected cell sides as blocked, drawing a red line along the actual boundary. That boundary blocks crossing from either direction. Someone may still approach the wall, stand beside it or walk along it.

A site outline does not create that barrier automatically. Nor does a preferred entrance turn every other approach into an invisible wall. Open ground remains open unless an explicit rule blocks it.

Published movement uses these boundaries, including conservative checks that prevent diagonal steps from cutting through blocked corners. What looks like a wall to the author must also matter to the traveler.

The room keeps its contents

Interior scope applies to things as well as people. An item placed on the cellar floor belongs to the cellar, not to every space sharing the workshop's outdoor anchor. An NPC can have an authored home in a particular room and be visible to someone who enters it. Graph-home NPCs are stationary for now; patrols currently use local outdoor routes.

The rooms also have stable identities. Changing a description should not create a second copy of the workshop or make its existing contents disappear. Publishing protects occupied spaces against deletion or incompatible topology changes until their occupants and contents are deliberately relocated.

That is a small but important promise for a persistent world: revising the building should not silently strand the people already inside.

The grid still tells you where the workshop is. Crossing the threshold gives you another kind of map.

Next: meeting someone who remembers you.