Intriguing. I wonder after what length of time the world will “fill up” and it’ll be hard to find anywhere to start fresh? I guess this is something that the dev tries to tune consciously. In a similar vein, I wonder whether it will be best as a single player to start near someone else (to trade with

Basically never.

Using steamdb for concurrent steam users, there are currently 31M people online. Even if we take the peak for every day in October (assume it is about 40M each day), 40*31=1240 or 1.2 billion people.

The world population clock says we are at 8.2 billion with vast swathes of uninhabited and low population density land. Yes, we have some ridiculously dense population centers but much of that is based on resources and human interaction which would be similar constraints in a video game.

So the “meme” places and whatever is defined to have the best resources will be full up. But they will never run out of space even if this becomes a global phenomenon where everyone connects so they can wank about how pop culture in the 80s was the best.