I started investigating how the map of the game worked on my third day when La was but a wee fawn. Already I had begun developing her character as one obsessed with solving mysteries, investigating everything, and learning everything there was to be learned.

On that day I turned on the framerate setting in the menu and found that it also displayed the coordinates on the map in which the deer was placed. Immediately I knew it was going to be a good day. Roleplaying led to research, which led to learning. Here's what La learned.


I suspect that most of you are familiar with The Cartesian Coordinate System. If you ever had to graph anything in school, this is the system you used.

The coordinates that accompany the frame rate are presented as "X x Y", where the lowercase x reads "by" and X and Y are variables. In The Endless Forest, these variables are always whole numbers. In mathematical notation, the position numbers would be written as an ordered pair, (X,Y).

On a graph, the point (0,0) is called the Origin, which is one of math's more elegant names, I believe. I roamed and sought the Point of Origin in The Endless Forest, and found that it was not in the middle of the map as I had expected.

The Point of Origin was directly in the center of The Ruins. My deer La is standing right on it in this screenshot.



Here's a doodle to help you understand Cartesian coordinates. The x-axis is horizontal, stretching theoretically to infinity while the y-axis is the same except vertically. The x and y values of a location are the distances from the origin (the middle). The origin is (0,0) because there is no distance between it and itself. The x value is the distance horizontally from the origin and the y value is the distance vertically.

On this picture I picked a few random points and labeled distances, and hopefully you can see what each number means.



La's third day was spent investigating places like The Twin Gods, The Fountain, and De Drinkplaats, but none of them had especially telling or interesting coordinates.

I did go around and mark places on the map though, so here are some coordinates roughly scrawled onto the map to give you an idea of span:



This map image is the same one from this site and I got it without deer pictographs from the wonderful AliceV.


I decided to find the farthest points that a deer could travel from the Point of Origin.

The X-axis (left/right or east/west) extends from -159 to 479.
The Y-axis (up/down or north/south) extends from -159 to 479.
The center of the map is at (159,159).

As a result, you can travel freely between the points (-159,-159), (-159,479), (479,-159) and (479,479). Those are the four corners on the official map, and you can see La do it here.



She barely has to move to touch all four corners of the map! To illustrate this another way, I took that same map from the site and chopped it into four parts so that the four corners of the first map were in the middle and the middle was now the four corners, and you can see how everything touches.



Magic! This is also true anywhere on the sides that will connect directly across. You could illustrate this by printing out the map as it appears on the map page and rolling it up like a toilet paper roll. Where two sides touch, they are connected.


The map of the forest has never, as far as I know, included a compass of any kind. Presumably because deer aren't big on map making in general. That said, there is some possible evidence that deer and cow may have a sense of direction.

But, despite being a human with such a poor sense of direction that I occasionally get lost in my own neighborhood, I think I figured out which way is north, or at least have a good reason to justify what I believe.

To explain, let's go back the the Ename Ruins. I used the game as a reference but also this sketch of the foundation of the abbey that I found on the Tale of Tales page about The Ruins. That page says speaks of, "...the presence of an important archeological site where an abbey was built over the remains of a fortress to defend against the French Kingdom around the year 1000. Today nothing remains of the abbey but its foundations. ... we imagined our own version of what the historical site could look like. Fitting with the romantic picture of our forest, we created a ruin of the gothic Saint Salvator church, based on actual measurements."

There are two Saint Salvator Churches; one in Utrecht, Netherlands, and one in Bruges, Belgium. Since that's where ToT is, I went forward assuming that the one in Bruges was the intended church. It's extremely old and has been restored a few times, but in general seems to keep Romanesque aesthetics.

Churches and especially cathedrals have a part called a facade, which is generally a side with big doors and windows. With Romanesque, Gothic architecture, and even after, churches were often built with the facade on the West side of the building (facing East) so that the rising sun would enter through the windows, shine over the people in the church, and touch the altar. Here's an example layout of a French cathedral showing where the facade is.

From this I have chosen to conclude that The Ename Ruins' former facade probably also faced East.



Not that it matters. North, South, East, and West become irrelevant and totally meaningless in every way when they are constantly shape shifting into each other due to magic endlessness. But it's fun to think about architecture and history.


As the player I conclude that The Ruins were the first things created for the forest, which is why they are the point of origin, and that other areas were added on around it. This is corroborated by the Tale of Tales website.

My La would conclude that The Ruins predate the statues of the Twin Gods.


I will post more as I figure out more. If you find any interesting points that you'd like to share, or if you think I'm wrong, you should post them!

I'd also like to be able to add a section on the deermuda triangle at some point.