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I was wondering, if I were to run around in a world like this, how much I would need from one corner of Skyrim to the other far diagonal corner end to the other in kilometers/miles.

There is already a study on large game worlds, but a bit outdated.
It mentions Oblivion there, so it might be a reference point.

How large is the world of Skyrim in real life?
Is there a reliable method, theoretical or empirical, to measure it?

DrFish
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  • Well other than Todd Howard saying that the world is larger than Oblivion and the largest they have ever made, I don't know of anything. – Holger Nov 30 '11 at 11:18
  • He would not have said that, because it is not true. Most detailed world, perhaps, but it doesn't even begin to approach the size of the map in Daggerfall. (I think Arena may have been even bigger, covering the entire Empire, but I never played it, so I'm unsure.) – Dave Sherohman Nov 30 '11 at 14:38
  • It's possible he's not counting Daggerfall's map as "made", as it was almost wholly procedurally generated. The other games of course use some procedural generation as well, but as tools to help artists/designers make "empty" space faster. I would be surprised if more than 0.1% of Daggerfall's area had any kind of human touch. –  Nov 30 '11 at 17:47
  • @Holger: I recall Todd Howard saying it's "the most ambitious project" and it has "more content than any previous game", but for game world size, the only thing he mentioned is that it's "not smaller than Oblivion". Which, for the playable area, is about right. It's roughly the same size. – Martin Sojka Nov 30 '11 at 18:59
  • @MartinSojka Ah ok, I must remember it incorrectly. – Holger Dec 01 '11 at 11:44
  • Considering the gravitational block caused by the eletrons in modern computer/laptop motehrboards, I'd say that measuring in real life standards the virtual fraction of in-game map sizes would make a rate of 1sq mile = 0,0001 square centimeters. So that makes new vegas and skyrim maps smaller then the tip of my thumb, and I wouldn't recommend anybody to play these games. It's too risky getting sucked by the Tron AI and measuring micro centimeters, that would serious cripple the density of our bodies and we would die. Besides that, nobody would know we're dead. So that's why I don't play PC gam –  Aug 01 '12 at 23:54
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    What that article didn't mention was FUEL which is the largest non-procedural map I've played - 14,400 square KM (5,560 square miles). It was generated from satellite data, IIRC. It took a guy from Rock, Paper, Shotgun 8 hours straight driving to circumnavigate the map: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/06/22/fuel-around-the-world-in-eight-hours/ – Alan B Sep 09 '12 at 19:52
  • @AlanB It's the largest non-procedural map ever created for a video game. You can drive for weeks and never see the same place twice. – GnomeSlice Jan 15 '13 at 20:49
  • Three minutes equals one in-game hour. If the time scale was set so one real hour equals one game hour, it would be very easy to estimate Skyrim's size by simply walking across the province. –  Feb 04 '14 at 00:40

3 Answers3

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Skyrim's heightmap is rectangular and uses 119 x 94 = 11186 in-game "cells". The engine uses the same cell size as in Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas - 57.6 metres (63 yards) to the side, 3317.76 m² (3 969 square yards) of area. The full map thus has an area of about 37.1 km² (14.3 square miles). Around a quarter of this is not playable, stuck behind invisible borders.

The playable area is roughly the same as the one in Morrowind and Oblivion and less than one thousandths of Daggerfall's size.

In addition, the game features a good part of the surrounding area of Tamriel as low-quality "fake" terrain meshes.

For comparison, the heightmaps of Skyrim (upper left corner), Morrowind (upper right corner) and Oblivion (lower left corner) look as follows, to scale (courtesy of Lightwave from Bethesda's forums). Skyrim, Morrowind and Oblivion heightmaps

Most of Oblivion's heightmap is not playable, while most of Skyrim's and all of Morrowind's map can be visited in game.

Martin Sojka
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    Daggerfall has procedural terrain, which is practically the same thing over and over again. Apples and oranges. – DrFish Nov 30 '11 at 11:57
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    @Bora: Oblivion has procedural terrain too (I can't tell for sure for Skyrim and I don't remember for Morrowind). The only difference is that it's "backed" in the editor, not generated by the game on the spot. – Martin Sojka Nov 30 '11 at 12:01
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    Of course not everything is to the same scale. The Throat of the World mountain, for example, arguable should require more than a couple of in game hours to run up, if it were really as tall as they make it out to be. – Xantec Nov 30 '11 at 12:47
  • @Xantec: To scale the Throat of the World, you just have to walk the 7000 steps up from its base. Now granted, that's a lot of steps (though we have longer staircases on Earth), but shouldn't really take more than an hour or two for a reasonably fit and healthy human. But that's independent from the world size as such. – Martin Sojka Nov 30 '11 at 12:53
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    @Martin well the problem is a mountain that can be 'walked up' in 1-2 hours is really just a hill, can't be called a mountain :P – l I Nov 30 '11 at 12:57
  • Nice, where you got this information from? – Shadow Wizard Love Zelda Nov 30 '11 at 13:43
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    @ShadowWizard: From poking around the ESM file with the FNV/Oblivion tools. If you want more info, following Lightwave's and Onra's posts on the official forum is highly recommended though. – Martin Sojka Nov 30 '11 at 14:09
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    @MartinSojka alternatively - use a horse! – Raven Dreamer Nov 30 '11 at 14:12
  • @RavenDreamer Thanks for mentioning it. A horse would traverse much farther distances before running out of breath. AND, it is your natural sidekick while fighting baddies. – DrFish Nov 30 '11 at 14:41
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    @Bora And gravity-defying mountaineering – Raven Dreamer Nov 30 '11 at 14:57
  • @MartinSojka Where does this info come from? Sources? – DrFish Nov 30 '11 at 16:06
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    @Bora: Grab TESAnnwyn, export the heightmap of the "Tamriel" worldspace. It'll have some bugs and missing cells near the borders, but it will report the world size correctly. – Martin Sojka Nov 30 '11 at 16:51
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    Of course, none of this takes into account the amount of space provided by dungeons/caves/etc – Chris Rasys Nov 30 '11 at 17:16
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    @Xantec running up a mountain may only take 1-2 hours in-game. However you have to take into consideration that most people cant really run up a mountain at the same speed as Dovahkiin – Skizzlefrits Nov 30 '11 at 18:25
  • FYI, the numbers are wrong. According to the CK wiki, each exterior cell is 4096 units across, and 4096 units corresponds to 58.5 meters (links: http://www.creationkit.com/Exterior_Cells, http://www.creationkit.com/Units). I'm not sure where 57.6 came from. This is only one way to measure the world size. Another is with movement speed and travel time, which would make the world significantly larger, as the answer below suggests. – Thomas Sep 23 '15 at 19:28
  • Does this comparison include the dungeons, or just outdoors? – nurettin Jul 06 '18 at 12:43
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According to the wiki, your running speed is 17.3 f/s. That means you run at about 11 mph. If the total area of the map was 14.3 miles, you'd be able to get from any point to any point in less than two game hours. You don't. It's a ten hour trip from Windhelm to Whiterun, for example. (Providing of course you play with the default time scale, of course)

If it were a real map, or everyone had the same size screen and resolution, it would be easy enough to eyeball the distance between the above mentioned cities, and call that 110 miles. Although your results may vary, I can guestimate that the longitudal distance of Skyrim is about 400-600 miles, and the latitudinal distance about 800-1000 miles. So, just as a rough estimate, the province would be somewhere between 320,000 miles, squared and 600,000 miles, squared.

For comparison, if we split it in the middle, Skyrim is about the size of Alaska.

user57246
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    Adding the time scaling is ruining your math. If you change distance proportionate with the time scaling, that means the Dovahkiin is over 100 feet tall. – SevenSidedDie Oct 15 '13 at 03:38
  • No, it doesn't. It would if you used a 1=1 time scale. (In which case, you could circumnavigate Skyrim in about 2.5 hours, which would make Skyrim a little less than 20 miles squared. If you use the default time scale, the Dovahkiin is between 5'6" and 6'4", depending on race. – user57246 Oct 15 '13 at 05:20
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    The 17.3 f/s you cite is using real seconds, not game seconds. You can't equivocate measurements in real per-seconds with game per-seconds because they're different units. If you're going to measure distance in game-hours, you have to use feet-per-game-second, and in that case the Dovahkiin runs about 0.87 feet-per-game-second or about 0.59 miles-per-game-hour. Unless, of course, you're trying to extrapolate the size of a "real" Skyrim based on the time scaling factor, in which case you're simply off-topic - this question is about the playable size, not its fictional size. – SevenSidedDie Oct 15 '13 at 05:38
  • I was actually assuming the wiki was using game seconds. Also, the 0.87 feet per second doesn't make sense because that would mean he takes one step per second; and even if he did, an average stride is about 3 ft for an average adult. – user57246 Oct 15 '13 at 05:40
  • Yeah, speeding up time definitely messes with what we consider normal. Her conversations with NPCs often take hours for a few sentences, and her steps are like molasses if we scaled the action up to real time. – SevenSidedDie Oct 15 '13 at 05:41
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    Yeah, I didn't realize there was a difference between "playable size" (which would be measured in how many boxes there are in the construction set) and "fictional size" (which is what I was answering.) Actually, the opening question does say the poster wanted to know how big it would be in miles/kms, so I take it he's asking fictional area. – user57246 Oct 15 '13 at 05:46
  • Oh, yeah, time magically stops when your having a conversation, so... – user57246 Oct 15 '13 at 05:52
  • The playable area can be measured in miles since it's so big. BethSoft games' playable areas are traditionally measured in square miles because no other unit fits. (I'm pretty sure time keeps going during conversations; I had a day-long talk with the guy after escaping Helgen.) – SevenSidedDie Oct 15 '13 at 05:58
  • I wonder if Bethsoft itself has ever addressed this. Also, there is a small problem with the inside of the Dovahkiin's house being the same square milage as the outside world. :o) – user57246 Oct 15 '13 at 06:16
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    +1 because this answer actually does answer the question and does so quite well. The fact is that there are multiple ways to measure the size of the world and they are not consistent with each other. – Thomas Sep 23 '15 at 19:22
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Well, if you take Blackreach into account, Skyrim is a tad larger than either Morrowind or Oblivion, seeing as Blackreach itself is about the size of a single hold, if not even larger.

Canoeman
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