Someone made 'Probably the biggest map ever in videogame history' in Garry's Mod, a multiverse octillions of kilometres wide that's half-magic, half-maths, and wholly mind-boggling

Forget what the megacorps are doing. I'm fairly certain that, if a true artificial intelligence ever does spring from a digital chrysalis and kill us all some day, it'll be because someone got a bit too enthusiastic twiddling the dials in Garry's Mod. I say this because I've just finished fooling around with the sandbox's user-created 1:1 Multiverse (2048 Universes) map, and I'm more convinced than ever that mankind is playing with forces the gods usually keep for themselves.

Billed as «probably the biggest ever map in videogame history,» 1:1 Multiverse comes courtesy of a modder named Alexandrovich, and claims to feature «2048 different rotated universes 880000000000000000000000000000km EACH». Don't worry, I've got your back: that's eight hundred and eighty octillion kilometres. Multiplied by two thousand and forty eight. Alexandrovich says the next update will add 2,048 solar systems to occupy it. Here it is in action.

If you're anything like me, you're probably a tad suspicious of that claim, but I'm increasingly convinced it's true (or true enough) having messed around with the 1:1 Multiverse map myself. Firstly, there's the system requirements: the map says it would very much prefer running on a machine with 128GB of RAM (although it can deal with 12GB and runs mostly fine on my own 16GB PC). 

Then there's the fact that it really does feel quite large once you're loaded in, as asinine as that might sound. There's no real sense of movement even if you set your NoClip speed to some ridiculous nine-digit number. The only way to really grasp how far and how fast you're moving—at least that I discovered—was to spawn a car and watch it zoom off into the black. A map posted in the mod's screenshot gallery also gives some inkling as to how it's all laid-out, though I admit my grasp on it is a little shaky.

But what persuaded me that the map probably is what it says on the tin is learning how it works. 1:1 Multiverse uses another mod as its basis. That mod is InfMap,