The world you know

A ridge can be visible while the valley behind it remains a mystery.

The world already has an answer about that valley. Its elevation, water, and vegetation belong to the simulation. But the traveler has not earned that answer merely by standing nearby.

Chimera's first player map makes this distinction explicit. It records the ground a character has discovered and displays that knowledge through a direct view of the world. The map can help someone find their way without quietly giving them the view from above the planet.

Looking leaves a memory

Walking reveals the cell underfoot. Looking can reveal more: a directional look examines a sector, while looking around checks all directions within the game's configured maximum distance.

Visibility begins above the surface of the current 30-meter cell. The initial eye-height setting is 2.5 meters, configurable by the game. Rays toward nearby cell centers are checked against intervening terrain. A ridge can conceal lower ground, while a sufficiently tall peak beyond it can remain visible.

The current model handles terrain occlusion. Vegetation, buildings, darkness, and weather do not yet block these rays. The map therefore records a specific, bounded approximation of sight, with room for richer perception later.

Once ground is discovered, moving away does not erase it. Looking and walking add to the remembered area. Displaying the map itself reveals nothing new.

Two distances from the same journey

The console now provides two views:

/map       overview: 120 meters per square
/localmap  detail:    30 meters per square

The overview groups four by four terrain cells into each displayed square. It helps orient a traveler across a wider area. A partly explored group is marked as partly known, rather than filling its unseen portion with guesses.

The local map shows individual cells. At the default 25-by-15 size, it covers 750 by 450 meters. A movement to a neighboring cell corresponds to one square at this scale, making it easier to inspect the shape of nearby discovered ground and place a precise marker.

Both views come from the same knowledge. Neither depends on asking the language model to reconstruct a map from earlier conversation. The tool sends a structured display to the player's client, and the console prints it directly. The model receives an acknowledgement and permitted selections, rather than being asked to redraw the terrain in prose.

A destination is not a survey

A character may know where a settlement is before visiting it. That knowledge can support a destination marker without revealing every field, street, and building around it.

Settlements and other regions can also span many cells. When their extent is explicitly disclosed, the map can represent that larger area. A single known point does not invent a boundary.

Personal markers add another layer: a camp, a danger, a crossing, or somewhere to meet. Players can choose symbols, write notes, and customize known default markers. Selecting a destination supplies a bearing and approximate distance. It does not promise a passable route or walk the character there automatically.

Remembering less to remember farther

An Earth-sized world makes copying terrain into every player's journal an expensive proposition. Chimera instead keeps sparse masks of known cells and looks up their terrain in the shared published world data.

The masks cover chunks of 64 by 64 cells. A few discovered cells use a short list of indices. More densely explored chunks use a bitmap. A completely known chunk can use a single-byte full-chunk marker. Those are encoded mask sizes; database keys and rows add their own overhead.

Elevations are not duplicated for every traveler. Personal notes and learned feature markers are stored separately. Two people can therefore remember different parts of the same landscape without owning two copies of it.

The map you carry

Games built on Chimera can make map access permanent or require an item or skill. The current game uses a carried starter map. Dropping it removes access and pauses further map discovery until access returns.

Existing knowledge remains attached to the character. Giving someone the physical map does not yet transfer your discoveries; copied and shared maps are future work.

For now, the map gives the traveler something simple and useful: remembered ground, space for a note, and a direction toward a known destination.

There can still be an unknown valley along the way.