# 0002. Half-scale voxel grid

- **Status:** Accepted
- **Date:** 2026-06-27

## Context

The world is built from voxels. The physical edge length chosen for a voxel propagates into nearly every system: collision resolution, mesh chunking, level-of-detail thresholds, network bandwidth, and in-memory data layout all scale with voxel density. A finer grid yields more expressive terrain and building at a direct cost in voxel count per unit volume.

Relative to a conventional coarse voxel grid with a 1 m edge, halving the edge to 0.5 m doubles the linear resolution and multiplies the voxel count per unit volume by roughly 8×.

## Decision

A voxel edge is **0.5 m**. Inside the engine the world unit is the block itself: **1 unit = 1 block**, counted in blocks rather than metres. A player therefore occupies **3 units tall × 2 units wide** (3 blocks × 2 blocks).

## Consequences

- Density is ~8× that of a 1 m-grid world per unit volume. Chunk dimensions and voxel data layouts must be chosen with that multiplier in mind; a layout that is comfortable on a coarse grid may not be here.
- Collision, meshing, LOD selection, and network bandwidth budgets all inherit the 8× factor and must be designed against it from the start.
- Finer terrain and construction detail become possible, this is the motivating benefit.
- The choice is load-bearing and expensive to revisit later, since persisted worlds and save formats encode the block scale.