They said in some Q&A that I can't remember which one. The game will start with combined pc/npc at 100k. But that isn't the cap, they could easily support the game having 250k+. Which they never said they would have a hard cap either.

Also not every county is equal. Some could be small in population, just have one town within them. It's like in the real world. I use my own country of Australia. Huge landmass which random percent since I don't know close to 70% is mostly empty land. Most of the population is on the coastline. Probably be the same in game, unless there is a reason for people to be there, why go there.

Which adds more to the game, you could go build a town out in the middle of nowhere. Then build it into a huge city, by making something unique in the area that nowhere else has. People won't just be spread in every county to make it fair. I know I wouldn't put a character in a county that had nothing going for it.

This exact concern came up a while ago in a large and rather heated forum post. I tried for a few minutes to find it but to no avail so I will just recap what was said there as best I can.

Server population starts around 100k players total, NPC and PC combined, as PC's for the most part will be taking over NPC's. Those figures amount to about 57 players total per county if we assume perfect distribution. This isn't a ton of players and mayors, barons, and even entire counties will be competing for a playerbase and will not simply be given a fully populated city to start.

All this being said, players have the ability to reproduce, and I imagine once exposition begins, populations will rise steadily as players look to grow their family and town numbers through child contracts which honestly don't seem too difficult to manage. There will be a lot of room to grow and build cities in this game which honestly is a lot more fun than spawning into a 200 population city and having no where to go. It is likely that a large portion of mayors will be running a hamlet or very small town to start, although I could be wrong, and those towns and hamlets will build up their population and compete with one another as the game progresses. I think a lot of people have the notion that mayors will have a full blown city and this is not the case, at least to the best of my knowledge.

If someone has a link to the previous thread that dealt with this concern that would be a great place to see both sides of the argument and the info SBS provided to alleviate some of the players that were concerned (myself one of them).

the other side of this consideration is that NPC tend to only have 1 life so if there are massive wars that 100k will reduce drasticly.

one can hope birth rates keep up with the death rate but truly no one will know.

also last i heard the new figure was 200k per server. ether way as has been noted some countys will have no towns at all so yes there will be alot of open spaces

if we also throw into the factor random plagues or other such events then ya that 100k or even 200k is looking mighty lean indeed. (unless ur dras)

The one life for an NPC stance was revised I think. If it was truly only one CDG and they're gone then you could CDG them without repercussions quite often (no witnesses upon a permadeath if they're alone). So people would quickly kill every npc on the server and you would have almost nobody left to use for new players who want to join the server.

Caspian said in one of the Q&A's that 100,000 is the minimum population they plan for a server to have. Both PC's and NPC's will be reproducing, and can have up to one child per week if they can supply room and board. If we start with 100,000 at the begining of ElyriaMUD, and it runs for the expected 9-12 months, then we have Exposition which won't allow any combat in the first month, population will hopefully be at a good level by launch. We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out.

Posted By Steevo at

I hope that the average county will have around 500 characters but as of right now we can only expect to see just over 100. I’m wondering if there’s any new information that I missed or something i got wrong, or if someone from SBS might see this post and possibly give us some more information. If someone such as Caspian does see this then I have a couple of questions.

1. In the design journal it was shown that having 2000 counties would result in them being very small and only having 100 characters, since we now know that there will be 1728 counties then does this mean that the continent might be bigger than originally planned? Otherwise the average county would be too small to even have a couple towns and a village.

2. How many characters do you think you will have in an average county? If the average were to be 400-500 then the continent would need somewhere around 700k-850k characters.

I've found the same information and had the same thoughts at the beginning of this month, then went ahead and brought it forward:
We'll get official information on how population numbers and density is supposed to look like as soon as the developers will have finalized the numbers and have thoroughly discussed it.
Here is my thread about visualizing the world's size with the numbers you're mentioning and I've derived for the same reasons.
This is my google spreadsheet which shows different population densities by population count assuming even distribution.

Posted By Kaynadin at 3:11 PM - Thu Jul 20 2017

The one life for an NPC stance was revised I think. If it was truly only one CDG and they're gone then you could CDG them without repercussions quite often (no witnesses upon a permadeath if they're alone). So people would quickly kill every npc on the server and you would have almost nobody left to use for new players who want to join the server.

But don't forget that even without witnesses you can convict a criminal of his misdeeds as there will be forensic skills to investigate the crime scene to look for clues. This will not require a witness.

It's the first time I hear about NPCs having more chances to defy death, but right now, for both topics, we should be eagerly awaiting what SbS envisions the population to be distributed like.

Personally, I would like to have more deserted counties which allow for more crowded ones.

I would like to find counties that have got multiple cities (with 150 inhabitants minimum per city, this would be at least 2x150 = 300 people).
In the old DJ #18, about 400 people in a county have been mentioned as an example, and I think that's a good number for game play. (If one has to tune that down, maybe a county could have 200-250 and then one make some counties much lower, while other counties could be as high as 400.)
Because with how the new numbers for domains will be split, we would need 400x1,728 = 691,200 players per server for a player density of 400/county on average and 388,800 players in case of 225 characters per county.

And then again population density would vary by available resources and how harsh the area is to live in as we know for the Brudvir for example.

Travelling in the world is also a closely related topic and important factor for how many people are needed in a world to make it feel right.
This is my take on travelling by foot and on mounts for anyone who wants to join in the theocrafting as to how that would affect the number of people required to make a world feel well populated and scarse in more remote areas.

as a note, for those who keep averaging out to an even spread per county. Caspian said in one of the DJ or Q|As (I want to say the settlement q\a, but I'm to lazy to go sleuthing)

that not all counties will be populated. Some will be rural and have the count's house, a few required support structures. And otherwise be devoid of Mann.

That is true that some counties wont be filled, but some really doesn't affect the number that much unless by "some" Caspian meant it as like a third of all counties. If 10% of counties are devoid of life we now have 64ish players per county which doesn't really change much from 57. IMO safer to assume even distribution because some implies the majority (80/90%) are going to be filled.

I didn't realize that 100k was the start of Elyria MUD which is actually really cool if that is true. It makes sense though, it would let them see how fast populations will grow and they can tweak the population growth rate before we get into the real game.

I hope that when SBS solidifies their decision on population that they do a little summary for the community. There are so many different sources for this info and speculation surrounding it that it would be nice to have a single post outlining their plan and we can all reference that going forward lol.