How large is the map in LOTRO?

Simply, how many square miles/kilometers does the lotro map occupy? What if all of the expansions are included?

3 Answers

Consider a game with two tiny areas separated by a vast distance in its lore. We may choose to say that the game has a vast world, based on lore, or a small world, based on playable area. My answer will consider only the playable area in LOTRO.

An upper limit on the answer can be calculated from the client data. The radar map uses tiles for game blocks, and a block is 160m × 160m. We can count all the blocks with radar map tiles for all regions. This will omit interiors, but will be an overestimate nonetheless. It will include duplicated blocks that occur as a result of reusing an area for several points in time.

The most striking example is the area around Minas Tirith over to Ithilien which occurs in versions before and after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Other major examples include the Helm's Deep battles and the recent Azanulbizar / Dimrill Dale update. Smaller examples include the hermit's tale in Wildermore with a flashback to the days before snow covered it. In these cases, multiple radar map tiles will exist, leading to an overestimate.

At the time of writing, there are 45324 blocks with radar map tiles. This means an estimate for the upper bound on the the playable area is 1160km².

No solid proof, but found 2-3 sites that list it as being 30,000miles/squared.

That seems to be very big an estimate. For comparison, that is 4.5x the size of Russia, the biggest country in the world. Its almost 8 times the size of the US and Canada

If my calculations are good, that would mean the LOTRO's map is about half the size of the whole earth's inhabitable area.

I calculated the playable map size in this video of mine:

The size in mid-2021 (without the latest expansion, Fate of Gundabad) was around 376 km².

Feel free to peer-review my method.

Also, the upper bound for the map size in LotRO, should they use 100% of the (as of now) available space, would be around 1677 km² per Region, so now 1677 x 5 = 8385 km²

MEB