Project Ironheart: Mapping the Three Great Continents

[Galeteya]

Holy cow I am SO ASTONISHED AND BLOWN AWAY that my humble passion project has made its way onto your lovely maps in the Farreach! 2 friends and I have recently actually decided to pick the project back up and write/create more in-depth headcanon/lore-adjacent mapping information for that mysterious northern area to bring it to life! It's our duty as Hellsguard-Obsessed fans . Let me know if you want any info on that when we're finished! Also, would you mind putting my name somewhere since this was a brainchild of mind? I don't mind where or how small, I'm just a little proud of my baby.

(You may also want to notate - if you haven't somewhere - that those are all NON-canon just in case someone decides to get feisty with you <3)

[Thale]

Hi there, Roaring Flame here, major Hellsguard/Lohengarde enthusiast and good friend of Galeteya. She's easily my biggest influence on becoming obsessed with the culture, sub-race and the Farreach itself. As she has already said, we plan to collaborate and add to the already existing Villages of the Farreach document she started a few years back. We would be honored to see more of that head-canon added to your continued map project overtime time if you're still interested, as a lot more will likely be added through 2026. Also, If you could find a moment in your day to credit Galeteya for her wonderful work it would definitely help in getting the word out on some of the lovely contributions she's already made in the Hellsguard community. Thanks, and we hope to hear back from you soon.

[LeCorbeaux]

Speaking of mapping, I loaded the Endwalker map of Hydaelyn in Google Earth Pro as an image overlay and tried my best to position it so that it matches the lore description (Eorzea almost at the equator, north near the polar regions) and so that hole in the clouds around Garlemand is roughly circular and under the assumption the map is using an equirectangular (plate carrée) projection or something pretty close to it. In the end, a rough estimate is that the map goes from 85°N to 0° from north to south, and spans about 210° from west to east. This makes the distance from Old Sharlayan to Limsa Lominsa by boat at about 4200 km. From the lore description (a fortnight for a fast trader) I originally estimated 5000 km, so that tracks; maybe Hydaelyn is simply 20% larger than Earth.

Nothing much to do with Project Ironheart, really, I just though someone might find it interesting. For all we know, Hydaelyn might not even be a spheroid.

[Zero-ELEC]

Speaking of mapping, I loaded the Endwalker map of Hydaelyn in Google Earth Pro as an image overlay and tried my best to position it so that it matches the lore description (Eorzea almost at the equator, north near the polar regions) and so that hole in the clouds around Garlemand is roughly circular and under the assumption the map is using an equirectangular (plate carrée) projection or something pretty close to it. In the end, a rough estimate is that the map goes from 85°N to 0° from north to south, and spans about 210° from west to east. This makes the distance from Old Sharlayan to Limsa Lominsa by boat at about 4200 km. From the lore description (a fortnight for a fast trader) I originally estimated 5000 km, so that tracks; maybe Hydaelyn is simply 20% larger than Earth.

Nothing much to do with Project Ironheart, really, I just though someone might find it interesting. For all we know, Hydaelyn might not even be a spheroid.

Hydaelyn is definitely a spheroid; you can see it's shape from Menphina, but that's interesting. Although, given the mapping done is relatively early style of mapping, who knows what type of projection the map is. Our best guess would be to compare the texture from the sphere observable from the moon to the map.... ������

[Enkidoh]

Yeah Hydaelyn and it's Shards are definetely spheriods - that was determined way back in the 1.0 days in this really old thread (and which SE themselves effectively confirmed at the time in the early ARR trailers, showing Hydaelyn from space as an Earth-like sphere, something I pointed out way back then in that thread). And of course, EW all but confirmed it for good.

As for map projections, we went into that sort of thing in that above thread but I don't think it was ever conclusively determined which was the 'correct' one, at least, as far as relation to Hydaelyn in actuality.

[Cleretic]

Honestly, given the game's rough level of technology and exploration, the question about the game's actually drawn world should less be on, like, type of projection or measuring objective distances using them, and more on the level of 'are these borders and landmasses even baseline correct?' After all, there was about a century's worth of time when European explorers thought the Californias were an island; it's genuinely kinda stunning to look back at mapmaking before satellite imagery (and honestly even some amount after it) and realize how much of it was educated guesswork that was WAY off.

The nature of a modern video game basically does require the maps we're given to be accurate beyond what's honestly realistic for the era--like, we'd be kinda mad to do an Aerslant expansion and find out that it's just been the west coast of Ilsabard this whole time. It would feel like a retcon, like we suddenly can't trust any of the other maps we've had, and even start casting doubt on stuff like the actual in-game area maps. But realistically, that would be an entirely understandable thing to learn in the era the game is emulating!

Hell, I've seen some theories that we might be seeing hints of that actually sneaking into; looking at the planet from Mare Lamentorum, there's a bit of Meracydia obscured by clouds that might be an entirely disconnected island or two from the mainland that we've otherwise never heard of or seen on maps, an Aotearoa/New Zealand to its Australia. And honestly, it would be hilariously appropriate if the way we learned Eorzean maps were inaccurate was because someone goes 'god damnit we missed New Zealand'.

[LeCorbeaux]

I'm just (maybe overly) careful before assigning world shapes for fantasy worlds, unless there's an unambiguous Word of God from the lore/setting designers. The combination of artists driving what they know without thinking about it too much, and fantastical effects which can be used ("aetherical lensing" to make up a magobabble term), can otherwise explain away all of it.

The thing about the view from Menphina specifically (and also from the various trailers and promo pictures) is that they're not very clear, or consistent. For example: There's a texture which maps neatly to a UV sphere to make a whole-globe, low resolution image of the world. It's from somewhere in Mare Lamentorum IIRC. But that puts Cape Deadwind south of the equator, while according to lore it should be north of it, if you use it for the whole sphere. You can probably "repair" that inconsistency by excluding some amount of the polar regions, especially in the south, from being overlaid by it.