becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

commiemartyrshighschool:

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

earlgraytay:

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

Okay so as you all know I’m extremely cool and clever and also a published scientist, so let me tell you about my latest research.

In the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the continent of Hyrule is one of the biggest open-world maps ever created, even beating games like Skyrim and the Witcher. But, HOW BIG?

Obvs it’s very hard to get a precise size because the in-game map does not have a scale bar (terrible map skills from that cartographer). HOWEVER, if you climb the Ridgeland Tower there’s a guy up there who is a weeaboo for the Rito, who begs you to glide for him in the name of “research” (what a fucking dweeb am I right?) If you do so, he tells you how many metres you’ve flown before landing. This includes if you simply step off the tower and plummet to the ground in a straight line, and happily for my in-game ankles, the tower is surrounded by water to cushion the many landings I made to bring you this information.

Ten drops gave me a mean average height for the tower at 63.83, median 64.2, so I’m taking it as 64 for ease of Maffs.

For a flight from the tower, I picked a strip of land on the same contour line as the tower base and then flew along that. There was a slightly higher standard deviation in twelve flights because sometimes Link would step nicely over the edge and start gliding and other times he would yeet himself bodily into the sky and then start, and one time gave me an outlier because I got zapped by an electric Wizzrobe that saw me. But over all, flying the same line and hitting pretty much the same landing spot, I got an average of 250.1 metres. I took this as 250, again for ease of Maffs.

Pythagoras’ theorem hit then, so I worked out that the distance from the base of the tower to the landing spot was 242 m. Putting that into Adobe Dreamworks, I could then translate that per pixel of the map I was working with (2.42 metres per pixel.) From there, that allowed me to calculate the area of Hyrule’s land mass, roughly, in pixels and then convert it back, so having done that GUESS WHAT FOLKS

Hyrule is 25,454 km2, or 15,816 sq mi.

Wales, by contrast, is 20,735 km2, or 12,884 sq mil.

So the continent of Hyrule is, it seems, bigger than my entire country to the tune of about one and a quarter times the size.

Thank you all for listening, I will now take questions.

Wow, this is super cool!

What’s the biggest area of Hyrule in terms of pixels? (Like, counting “places the player can’t reach for whatever reason”).

Hmm, depends how you define “area”. The majority of the continent is a single landmass, so technically “everything that isn’t an island” counts? But, I’m assuming you’re after something a bit more specific.

My latest research is focusing on mapping Hyrule’s weather systems, though, which has yielded some PRETTY INTERESTING RESULTS already, and that certainly falls into areas - the largest of which covers central Hyrule (i.e. Hyrule Field and Ridgeland, the Great Plateau, Lake Hylia and the Faron Grasslands). I attach the following figure for your consideration.

Rainfall, sunlight hours and cloudiness are identical across this region, although temperature varies. I shall publish these very important results soon. Thank you for your question.

Does this mean that Hylians have a UK level grasp of distance? That Link would just die of boredom on a 6 hour car trip?

I would posit that they have something closer to a Wales level grasp of distance specifically, which probably also explains why they have perfectly easy trade routes on foot or donkey but every village Cannot Fathom actually walking over the mountain to the next one. If I am correct with this hypothesis, a six-hour car journey would be seen as not an activity for boredom, but an Undriveable Distance that one would have to tearfully kiss their relatives goodbye for in the manner of a colonist heading out to Mars.

Thank you for your question.