We've had lore archeologists of this game but Moosashi over here is the real archeologist of teyvat, surveying the continent.

A lot of these make me think they were testing different terrain mixing techniques and trying to find the best way to blend them with one another for more natural-looking landscaping. The dark terrain is probably a green screen for testing animations (since black would contrast best against basic pale humanoid models).

personally I would put a sign or something that’s just “how did you get here?” if I worked at hoyoverse

As a game dev, I’d say it’s probably an area to test texture blending with custom heightmap :) hence the strips and path to see how transition from one texture to another looks like

Guys I think he found the Mare Jivari

It’d be cool if the Inazuma trench was made so eventually we get to dive under the ocean, maybe just in the trench area. Probably just wishful thinking but it’d be cool AF

I imagine Hoyoverse seeing Moosashi doing this stuff and thinking: "What we can put in the game to Moosashi to find without a reason?"

I just love the fact that he breaks the game in every single way possible. Edit : 1.7k likes? Nice.

There is actually another one north of Sumeru city, and one to the west of the desert with the strips of alternating textures that I found when I went under the map. I think it's definitely palettes for the different regions, they could also be test areas for the textures and that's why they're so huge? It would be convenient to have swatches of terrain for eyedropping and also samples of how they blend together, along with the different audios of footsteps for each.

I'm assuming this might have been used to test texture blending. weird :p

When I was playing with Hammer (Source engine's map making tool), my screen's resolution is only 768p. I didn't have enough screen to see all the details, so I broke the map into small chunks. For each chunk, I zoom in, put details, then zoom out, select the whole chunk to paste into the main map. I think a similar situation applies here: there are multiple people on the map team, each one is responsible for one chunk. Those "test map/pallete map" area is placeholder for one of said chunk. When the detailed map is done, they just copy-pase the whole thing into the placeholder area.

AWESOME!! this definitely seems like an environmental test area, as for what they were testing, so far i can think of: -footfall sfx -different levels of intensity of the grass blending into other ground types -memory load with alternating ground types over a large area -random shapes to test ground texture brushes -possibly also testing how characters and props' colours blend/stand out against ground textures

I like to think that maybe those are textures used for either testing or quickly patching any texture-less terrain. The dark texture can sometimes be found underneath the map. I believe they are used to give certain underground areas that darkness effect.

Lo and behold, Moosashi, Champion of Glitches and Bugs... And Geo Traveler

If it is a testing area, it is obvious that such terrain patterns could have been created to test different types of terrain mixtures. Apparently, each terrain zone is like a square (a chunk) and when placed next to each other, it generates a mixture of terrains according to the game code, giving a more natural look when changing terrain and making it easier to build terrains for Mihoyo designers (map, terrain, texture etc) 👌✌️

I swear this man always amazed me with those glitches, keep going moosashi!!😭

Imagine being a dev and seeing other people see your mess

This just reminds of the shenanigans I'd do in Minecraft before lmao. There would usually be one part of my map where I'd be testing out odd builds here and there and then forgetting to remove them because I don't feel like removing all of it as this was prior to me knowing about commands (or if I do remove them it still looks obvious I did something at that part of the map). It's actually interesting all this stuff gets left behind. I expected that the developers might have their own program independent of the game to test things out just to avoid leaving stuff behind by accident, or at least check if they cleaned everything up before finalizing the next version. That or they just didn't expect people to find this stuff.

So that's where all the 23gb mobile size went to

One of the best genshin KZfaqr.... Especially one who is doing something different... Keep going

Unity terrain system uses texture chunks as 4 each So if you use only one texture it still get memory in RAM for entire chunk of 4 As well as you use 5 it will load 2 chunks Devs usually testing blending and memory consuption trying to find best solution with minimum texture chunks for current terrain zone As well it can be used as pallete for region with all premade settings

7:21 he actually reached the end of the entire teyvat map 💀

If we’re calling these “test areas”, there are of these in between monstadt and Fontaine. It’s mostly just black terrain, but there’s some patches and areas not shown in this video. Additionally, there’s a couple of perfect hills (all black) that are a little past the midpoint if you go from monstadt.

When I look at these, I am reminded of the out of bounds area outside the walls of Botw's Trial of the sword. Large stretches of grassy fields, a deep trench with void out zones, an area with wet floors and one with winds. If you get close to some domains, you can change the weather! Other domains are surrounded with water you can swim in, and sometimes it has strange effects like healing or freezing. Seeing it was fascinating!

I think the weird shapes in the first test area mightve been testing for texturing around buildings, like dirt around houses for example, especially that one almost round-ish shape, it really feels like you can plop down a building on it

As someone that plays around with Unreal Engine, to me it looks like a simple testing area to see the tile noise and stochastic blending of different textures (in layman terms, making a texture less visible than the other and trying to see if it still works well when putting them on the map) Because each of the random shapes and sizes has different texture effects like how shiny/matte/dark/light it usually looks in game, which they might test in order to keep visual cohesion while using those effects to make texturing a lot faster. The trench might just be leftover garbage data? It's just a flat plane that projects a texture it's either there so something in the sea doesn't break or the 7mb tops it occupies in the game files never got deleted.

oh my god, months ago I remember sailing in my boat to the huge water area on the map, and then suddenly I fell out of the map and landed in one of these weird terrains. I had like a 20 minute video of me just exploring the weird terrain, but I scrapped it because I figured I didn't wanna have a huge vid like that on my phone due to storage space 😅 this happened before sumeru's desert was released, so idk if it's been fixed yet or not... or if it was just a one time glitch

As someone who made some basic indie games, I used flat plains to test functions since it's easier to test functions and see if stuff works properly. So I'm guessing it's the same here, since I never cared to delete those test spaces when I exported my builds. They were locked out of bounds so I didn't bother. Probably the same?

In between mondstadt and Fontaine and above Liyue and sumeru there's a place underneath the mountain with a dark floor and random occasional path circles

I assume that the massive lined flat surfaces are either copy-pasted from one of the first they made to simply fill the area for measuring and positioning. The barcode-like structure may have helped establish the actual size of the area. Alternatively, these are generated through miHoYo's internal development tools, possibly using the highest frequency of automated terrain changes on a singular axis. As for the spot east of Mondstadt, that's most likely a testing ground for terrain interactions, effects, and transitions. The orderly squares are "catwalks" to test interactions between terrain types and objects (including Players, NPC's, inanimate objects and monsters). The randomly drawn walkways are testing how the dev tools apply the transitional effect between path and grass in avariety of sizes, shapes, and turns. In fact, the jagged line between the grass and the black floor is strong evidence towards that - that's how a transition looks with no terrain graphics available. It's something basically any developer does when mapping is supposed to be dynamic and automated - test whether the tools work correctly. And the massive stretch of flatness is likely used to test animated map details, like grass and flowers, to see if they animate and react properly, and possibly special effects. Though I'm really stumped by the sheer size of it. Then there's the big crossing near Watatsumi. That might simply be an "area marker" to divide the map sections with simple visuals, possibly to test certain global effects present only in certain areas as well as their deactivation upon leaving the boundary, or to mark areas for specific groups in the dev team to work on. It's really cool to see that stuff at all, as it reminds me that certain steps apply to any developer, no matter the experience, team size, or budget.

I think they are testing areas for terrain blending.

Moosashi, please never stop making these videos, you're the best dude

It's nice seeing these. It's always so fascinating out-of-bounds

This is why Genshin takes a lot of memory

This is really interesting. Idk what they are used for, however my theory is that they are used for loading optimisation. Games often have out of bounds areas that have textures, enemies, items, etc for the level in them, they load these first during the loading screen, and then all the textures will be loaded in when you are exploring - it doesn't have to load each texture individually as you come across it as all the textures for that area have been loaded already. If you look at old games, sometimes if you run or walk to an area faster than it can load, you have this weird experience of the map being empty until it loads in as you explore, which isn't very good for immersion, but modern games don't really have this as they use a lot of different techniques to make a smoother playing experience. Also the textures used here look like the default ones that can be found in the Unity Terrain Tools pack, which is a free environment pack that you can get for the Unity engine. Hoyo use Unity for all their projects as far as I know. It *could* be an artists palette like you said, however, I think it would be easier to have in-company game documentation about which textures to use rather than having a palette. Could be for testing footsteps like you said. Possibly they are multifunctional and are used for a combination of testing and optimisation. Source: makes terrain and environments in unity engine

All that's left is to break into the abyss

I like to think the great Inazuman Trench is canonical. Its too big and awesome to not be

Dudeee I remember the striped map! If im correct, the same design is located when you try to glitch from liyue to inazuma from under the sea. If im not mistaken, I think it teleports you somewhere too!

You can see this underneath the Inazuman sea too! There’s also a huge hill with this texture too

Maybe those area has to do with texture mapping for the playable terrain and LOD in the game. For faster texture load maybe? atleast thats what I think

ur doing gods work man, this is so damn interesting to see

I vaguely remember a technique where you have a empty web page and a completely separate data source and the data is shown on the webpage by linking the data source in the Web page instead of just adding the data directly. I'm also reminded of vector art where images are reduced to pure numbers which can be reconstituted easily while preserving the quality. It would mean hoyo wouldn't need to import thousands of textures just one with the rest being copied and displayed using numbers. A possible method of reducing the volume of data for mobile players maybe?

Maybe they were playing around with procedural generation? Maybe they're planning to put more playable maps in those areas? That would also explain why they weren't just removed from the live build and why they're such large plots of land. I do think it more likely it was just test areas to play around with textures, but it is weird to me why the areas would be so large though if that were the case.

YES! Been waiting for someone to talk about this.

the random patterns test how each texture blends together

When I did the glitch in your previous vid I got to a place what could be a testing area too, northwest of fontaine and had to fly and plunge my way down after walking underwater past the waterfall. I feel like it could be as huge as the one in the middle of liyue and inazuma

The Forbidden Knowledge Archon is at it again.

Placing a giant turtle underneath at the border would have made all lore masters speculate

i love exploring test areas in a private server

It’s actually amazing that these exist

Now we know where all our storage space went

it really is surprsiing that those are still in the game considering how optimized the game generally is for mobile devices

The stripes were probably there to test how different terrain textures merge and blend into each other. They might be so repetitive because they needed to be tested multiple times to see if any bugs come out. Back when Inazuma was released and there was a sorm that'd teleport you back, similar stripes were placed at the bottom of the sea ( went on a trip down there with geo traveller lol )

I think it’s a map pallet and to test for charter models. Along with building stuff (like chairs) just to test to see if it’s correct.

I think they are textures inside the game, cause sometimes they need to extend the map of a previous region when adding a new region like they extended Sumeru Desert.

Moosashi how did you even manage to stumble upon this?? XD Truly an out of bounds miracle worker

They do seem to be leftover test areas that would also serve as quick terrain palette grab. I wonder if they also serve as placeholder for future regions. Perhaps the dark sea (not sure how literal it is when they say it's outside of Teyvat) or some other lost civilization? Surely there must be something in between the main continent and Inazuma (granted HYV would usually put some terrain to tease about future regions)?

My guess is that those empty lands are left there to fill some GB in the game data, so whrn they release a new nation they can delete the empty map and replace it with the playable map, in that way the impact for the user would be less (let's say sparing 10 GB instead of 20 or so in your hard drive)

damn that inazuma stretch from 2.0 brought back memories. i traversed that plane for my alt and it was painful lmao.

I think this is where cutscenes play out. Like when the Traveler wakes Nahida up.. etc.

Hey moosashi when you showed the glitch first, my second use of it was going to old Varanara without the Aranyaka quest, I’m not sure if you’ve done this one on your main account but it is very interesting considering the high level withering and if you somehow manage to get out of the map and go under the area all areas of the underground map, the second level and the secret boss fight arena are as far as I’m concerned completely surrounded by invisible walls so ye maybe you might want to check that out if not well now ya know something I guess.

The effort and time spent in finding these😮

Me and a friend found about the Inazuma storm one a while ago.And ofc we took some pictures 😂

those are places where the next "island" or "region" would be

You know what: I think it might be fun if they lay out some easter eggs in these areas. Might serve as a good test-out to see how big the world can be once it's actually completed.

That bug is sooo fun honestly, but when I tried it for the first time I started from Stormterror's Lair and tried to go to Fontaine from there, which I failed cause I kept on falling and I ended up in some abyss looking space and it freaked me out, like I genuinely started feeling anxious 😅And I can't wait for the parts of the map we tried to reach using the bug to be officially out lol and being like "hehe I was illegally here before"

I love glitches in games. Its like another fun way of playing the game and getting extra content in a way.

I just go with a testing area and they keep it in the live game so when they are building the next area its a resource available quickly. I could see them using the space later for more development ( like when we get khanriah since its underground)

I wonder how much these empty planes and objects take up in storage spaces.

Yeah like many said, testing blending different types of terrain with different brushes etc

literally genshins farlands

A pallet, or swatch area as I call it, seems very plausible. When I'm working on a digital painting I will designate an area and layer of my canvas for little swatches of color so I can easily go back and select previously used colors. It helps keep my overall palette uniform in color design. Since this is a game that is always being developed and added to it would make sense that they would hide these swatches in the out of bound areas and not bother removing them for the live versions every time they exported a new version. In my work I just make the swatch layer invisible before exporting the final piece. I may need that swatch palette again.

Definitely some testing ground 😯 Mayyybbee the black part could be mare javari (or however you spell that ;-;)

I think the part with the four squares are either placeholders or markers for corners of terrain chunks or boundaries between biomes. I saw something like this but with different colors of grass and ground in an area between Sumeru and Fontaine out of bounds, with each corner containing different colors of grass and ground, so I think it's more likely the latter.

They enjoying seeing the meme about the size of the file update while nothing hold half of it

I broke out of the map in World of warcraft a few times. Its for artists to quick grab textures usually.

there’s also a test map right in front of narukami island underwater i walked there a few days ago using the liyue harbour glitch

This I'd where the 50+gb of my storage is used for

Super cool who would of knew this has been hiding out in the distance for so long

Was kind of wondering if the furrowed Mondstadt area was from Dawn Winery, but the pattern under the grapes is just dirt in game.

funny enough, the mondstadt one is the first place i went with the glitch after you released the video revealing how to do it

The striped areas look like tests for borders between different ground textures. You can see each stripe has a different repeating pattern

u should try getting under celestia, when i went there there was a pitch black floor with 10 stone circles making a circle lmao

I found another large flat platform like this to the west of stormterror's lair, inbetween fontaine and mondstadt.

So that's where all my storage space went...

Is most definitely just testing, I've been doing some out-of-bounds exploring in Fontaine and you can find similar places, there is even one with a second Emperor Of Fire and Iron, also you can re-enter Mary-ann's house and Nice To Meet You again

Hmm, now I wanna check and see if this terrain is in the 2019 CBT 1 beta

these areas actually might be the genshin team trying to see if there are any mishaps in the land generation stuff they do cuz the land and the textures in the land is a half and half hand painted and computer gen tech so they might have used the land in betweens to just test how the stuff works and if there were any peoblem/glitches in the generation techiques they used....

just reached the out of bounds place, very epic

I used something similiar when i maked a few lands for train railroad...whatever it was...simulator i think?! For texture palette adjusting terrain smoothness or texture transition

Nice find

i love going under the water in liyue and exploring all the spots i can get to, gotta love the test areas underwater (all i know is tehres one near inazuma)

i remember glitching there with my friend last year and we were so confused

Love these kind of curious finds. I hope you are still reading comments this late, but let me indulge you in a story. I used to play TERA, quite a lot even. Back during its beta (or Alpha, I don't remember clearly), there used to be an open world dungeon you could freely enter and exit whenever. Said Open World dungeon however didn't make it into the final release version... ...or did it? Turned out, the dungeon still exists, but is now buried deep below the map and of course bereft of all things except the dungeon itself. There was this weird glitch that if you mounted up at the right moment, you could traverse out of bounds by mounting up and down, jumping inbetween in a steady rhythm. Kinda like climbing stairs. Your OOB videos really remind me of the good old days and the odd things one could find in that game if you went off the beaten path! I'm sure you would've had a field day with TERA if you had played it when it was still alive. Sincerely hope you will keep finding ways to break the game and that we will get many many more videos from you ❤

some of them maybe for testing blending between different terrain types

There are similar stripes on the way from Liyue to Inazuma using the underwater glitch!

Ngl "The Inazuma Trench" sounds pretty cool

Its definitely a test map 2:30 especially when you're painting terrain with several different textures, you'd have to make sure the transition between one kind of terrain to another feels seamless

That does look pretty cool though.

Me and my friend found the one around Inazuma a while ago and named it the Texture Farm because it reminded us of minecraft famland