Scum's map may get much, much larger in the future

Scum's map is a pretty big one—144 square kilometers—and it can take a while to haul yourself from one end to the other in the Early Access survival game. But if you teleport yourself into the sky using the admin console, you can see a map that is actually much bigger. It's about four times as big—at least potentially. Scum is an island after all!

You can even have a look for yourself. In singleplayer, opening the text chat (T) gives you access to admin commands. Type "#teleport [Character Name] 0 0 1000000" (no brackets around your actual character name) and you'll appear floating high in the air. Turn your camera and you'll see the wall forming a square around the playable area, and the rest lying beyond. There's also a weird floating mountain range, possibly some skybox scenery?

It's not just a matter of teleporting over the wall and exploring, though. Currently, the rest of the map is a just flat, featureless 2D plane. There's nothing physcially there, and if you try to visit via another teleportation command (#Teleport [Character Name] 0 650000 50000) you'll just plummet right through it as I did below.

I sent an email to Scum's team asking if this additional ghostly portion of the map was a planned expansion of the playing area for the future, or if this was the original size of the map prior that was scaled back prior to the Early Access launch.

Devolver's reply to my email was a bit noncommittal: "SCUM Island has more than what is seen at the moment and during Early Access the areas accessible to prisoners may change over time."

I suspect, at least, the map won't be getting smaller.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.