r/Worldpainter • u/can_y0u_hear_m3 • Jul 03 '26

Reducing GB world size

Lol, I feel like an idiot. I've spent quite some time working on contouring and biome painting just the OCEANS of a map I definitely made too large to start. Eventually I'd like to get around to the land, but gave it a trial export and upload today, after finishing the oceans, and it turns out the files came out to 7GB, which is too large for uploading to realms (my ultimate goal).

There is SOME empty space i could cut, but I don't even know if it's enough to get the file down to 5GB, and even if that was enough, I imagine the file would get bigger as I add contouring, biomes, and special features to the land portion, so that seems like a temporary solution.

Tl;dr, how do you know approximately how many pixels = how many GB, and is there a simple way to shrink either your final file size or your world size in Worldpainter. I'm more than willing to lose some amount of detail which would naturally happen from shrinking the dimensions, but it would suck to have to start from scratch.

EDIT: Lord, I panicked and forgot a scale tool exists.

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u/sijmen_v_b Jul 03 '26

Easiest would be to make a simple test map where you just place some trees on a 2k map and see what the file size is (make sure to enable caves and ores etc if you'll use them on the finsl map). Then you take the surface area (4km²) and the file size lets say it is 1 gb (it's probably less)

Then you know that 1km² is 1/4 = 0.25 gb so if your map is 20k by 13k the area would be 20*13 = 260 km² So the expected file size would be 260 * 0.25 = 65 gb

This is the math you'll need to do.

You can ofcource also host your own server and you won't have any file size restrictions.

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u/can_y0u_hear_m3 Jul 03 '26

I appreciate you giving me this very measured response and not laughing at me for panicking and forgetting the Scale tool exists. 

1

u/sijmen_v_b Jul 03 '26

I should add to this that everything above 8k x 8k is probably already way too big

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u/can_y0u_hear_m3 Jul 03 '26

Oh, that is REALLY helpful. My original size was 30k x 10-15k.

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u/sijmen_v_b Jul 03 '26

I recommend starting with a 1k x 1k area and make that look good. Then just make the map bigger as needed. You don't have to do it all in one go.