I was thinking about an extremely stupid question:
What kind of map would make a single villager take the longest possible time to collect everything?
Assumptions:
- standard resources only
- 480×480 (Ludicrous)
- 1 villager
- Dark Age
- Mayans (since resources last 15% longer)
My current guess is:
- snake path across the whole map
- no shortcuts anywhere
- only one drop-off point, placed at the very edge of the map
- fill the path with gold
So the villager has to mine a tile, walk all the way back, walk all the way in again, and just keep doing that forever:
= gold, = blocker, = drop-off (treated as 1 tile)
Very rough math:
A 480×480 map has 230,400 tiles. If roughly half of them can be used for the snake path and the other half for blockers, that gives a path length of around 115,000 tiles.
That means the furthest gold tile is about 115,000 tiles from the drop-off, and the average tile is around 57,500 tiles away.
A villager carries 10 gold per trip. With Mayans, an 800 gold tile becomes 920 gold, so each tile takes 92 trips.
Back-of-the-envelope, this feels like it should take 40,000+ years!
Is that actually the worst possible setup, or is there some even more cursed map design?
You could also use water as the blocker and fill it with shore fish, but there’s a weird interaction there: if the villager mines 10 gold first and then gathers fish, the carried gold gets dropped, so they don’t have to walk all the way back just to unload it.