UESP Forums

The smallest unit for length/width or distance appears to be a red door on the map. This would be 1 cell or 1 tile. How big is this in real-world terms? My house uses 30 inch doors and the standard seems to be about 36 inches, but considering this is the standard unit for everything, it seems the red door map icon would also include the frame and part of the wall.

Height seems more difficult to judge. I'm not certain of the various levels of items for height. You can climb out of a trench in a dungeon, but elsewhere you can only climb onto lower platforms and must jump onto others. Strength increases distance jumped, but I'm not sure about height. Levitation seems to be a magical counterpart to physical jumping but it also has a limit on how high a platform you can move onto. I'm not sure if this can be increased.

How would you calculate (semi) real-world dimensions for the game?

Looking at the city gate, I see that it takes up two cells and has two doors. However, with the doors scooted towards the center, it looks like you could fit two doors in one cell. (4 doors wide for the city gate). So first I thought a cell should be considered 6 feet wide, but knowing that distance in Arena uses kilometers, what if I say it's slightly larger and go with 2 meters. After some calculations I compared my values with some other online information trying to describe the playable area of Arena. I found one persons claiming they remembered it to be about 10,000 sq miles. That was close to my figure, but mine was smaller. However, if I considered a cell to be 8 feet across instead of six, that was pretty close. 8ft make it slightly under 10,000 and 9ft makes it slightly over, but 8 times 8 gives me the magic number 64 making a cell 64 sq ft. Too much larger doesn't seem right, but it's open to opinion. I've decided to stick with 8x8 feet for a cell.

Playable area in Arena
So if the playable area is determined by the wilderness size and if we exclude when you go past the boundary and the game starts repeating the same area over and over; we have this:

• Wilderness Area = 64x64 Wilderness Blocks = 4096
• Wilderness Block = 64x64 Cells = 4096
• Number of Provinces = 8
• Number of settlements per Province = 32
• 4096 x 4096 x 8 x 32 = 4294967296 playable cells in Arena
  
  • This includes water and walls and areas blocked off
  • This excludes interiors (houses, dungeons, etc.)
  • Neither of these add or remove much compared to the wilderness

So now you just multiply by your favorite dimensions for a cell and convert sq miles or kilometers.
I'm going with 8 feet, so 8x8 = 64 sq ft times 4294967296 = 274877906944 sq ft which converts to 9,860 sq miles or 25,537 sq kilometers.

Please correct any math issues or point out anything I overlooked. (I still don't know how to determine height, but the playable area was really what I was after.)