meta: tellius travel times
Jan. 8th, 2026 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelav!! this post is a wip (specifically the images) for about a week until i finish the resource deck; i will update the images and delete this line when the final version is up !!
In my "Tellius Environments" resource i've created (link to be coming when it's uploaded), I've added a travel time page.
This whole resource is for fan-creatives where determining the travel time is useful ("how far is it from Melior to Nevassa on pegasus versus on foot".). This specific post covers in detail how I calculated the distances that the characters and unit types (pegasus, beorc, bird/beast laguz, etc) take to get from point A to point B, along with some Tellius specific meta.
Goal
The goal of this travel time sheet is to create consistent times across unit type that "feel" intuitively right to the world with minimum suspension of disbelief, with a secondary goal of being relatively easy to independently calculate for fanfics/meta with some amount of consistency; i'm not after strict realistic/historical accuracy.
I say this because this dramatically affects how we do the scale/calculations. As you'll see, there's various hand-wavey inconsistencies (Nasir's 2 month ship travel is suspiciously long for such a small land mass versus in-game foot travel), but we can reconcile those.
Canon mentions of travel time
There's a lot of unknowns; let's start with what we do know. We have a limited amount of explicit distance/passage of time mentioned in the scripts:
* please note the scale of milimeters to the attached screenshots is going to be off; the actual finished pdf deck that i'm measuring is 11x17inches and that map is accurate.
My first step: i chopped up Soren's 3-day (fast) hike into a beorc (fast) 1-day measurement. (I say "fast" because there's quite some difference between an experienced adventurer making haste somewhere if it's life or death versus somebody leisurely pacing themselves for a cross country months-long marathon or clumsily wandering around a forest.)
There's quite a lot of online literature that says the average somewhat fit/able human can walk between 15-30 miles a day. I went with an average of 20 because it's also easy to divide or multiply.
That measurement (the grey line) of a 1 day's journey for beorc almost perfectly lined up with 10mm. I ain't not looking a gift horse in the mouth. If we now say 20miles = 10mm for this specific map scale, let's test this theory with (a) the existing canon distances mentioned in the script, (b) existing real world distances for tigers, birds, and cavalry (oh my).
Let's start with Marcia's pegasus flight from Felirae to Alpea since its very close to 1 day as-is. (amielleon in a linked post later If we line up a beorc's 1 day (fast) walk at 20miles/10mm with Marcia's 1 day (fast) flight at 34miles/17mm (<calculated this by the 17mm), Marcia's faster by roughly a third but not at an unrealistically crazy scale for a winged beast carrying a whole-ass human plus armor for both.
I went ahead and mentally estimated a wyvern's flight time at 30miles/15mm per day since I see them as slightly slower and heavier than pegasus but still moderately ahead of a human on foot. This places a wyvern's flight time from Nevassa to Talrega as roughly 1 day if they're really booking it, or a day and a half. After re-reading the scripts before starting this game, all of the above -so far- "feels" intuitive to the times implied for the cast to do their thing. (For example, a 3 day walk one way from Sienne to Grann Desert for a paid mission, after Sanaki had given Ike 7 days of leisure in Sienne. If it had been 3 weeks or 3 hours to Grann, I would have said something's off.)
Let's get a little friskier, and see how far a (real world) tiger can travel a day.
Tigers are not endurance runners but it has been reported they can to cover up to an area of 37 miles in a day in their hunting grounds, but other sources say 20 miles, also for similar big cats like lions; though they all prefer sleeping up to 20 hours a day. We can use this (at least it's not 400miles...). Likewise, online sources also peg a war horse traveling 30-50 miles in a day which seems to be within similar parameters to a tiger; personally based off of Lethe's comments (and how laguz physiology might be slightly better than real-world tigers), I see beast laguz slightly faster than a war horse not laden with a human plus armor, but not terribly so; on the flip side horses would probably be better for longer distances.
Let's make it easy for us and peg:
Since the rest of the distances seem to be working, let's go ahead and calculate Kurthnaga's flight and Reyson's flight from the "raw" millimeters.
Reyson (and Naesala) made it from Kilvas to Serenes, and then Tanas in a day. If we allow that they just barely hit the southern border of Serenes and almost immediately got to Tanas' manse about sunset to before night, it's about 80miles/40mm with a little breathing room either way. If we then imply that a hawk/Tibarn's top flight speed is 120miles / 110mm this matches with what's implied when Tibarn flew from Phonecis to the Ribahn river, back when Zelgius warned him about Naesala's betrayal, and then back to the river. Close enough to be "cousins" in distance for the birds.
Since Kurthnaga is a black dragon royalty (and another caliber of apex predator altogether even above the other laguz kings), we can honestly make up numbers at this point; but the game implies he flew from Goldoa Castle to Castle Nox in a day from Almedha's sending stone call to him arriving after the next battle. I calculated it in 1 day just to make it easier for myself with the result of 230 miles / 115milimeters. That's half the continent in one day which doesn't feel horrifically extreme for him (versus a modern passenger airplane which is in the thousands of miles per day which would feel off); it'd still take him at least two days for the whole continent. Mildly #broken as befitting of a royal black dragon but not instant teleportation.
At this point we can eyeball these numbers and fill in for an army, which is all that's left.
Beorc Army (steady march): 15miles / 7.5mm
Beorc Army (forced march): 25miles / 12.5mm (in between a slow horse and a fast one, feels reasonable)
The multipliers
I freely admit this is the least researched part, as I heavily used this medieval travel time sheet exclusively for its multipliers.
Unmaintained Road 0.5 - 0.9
Paved road 1.2
Natural Trail 0.7
Known Area 1.2
Unknown Area 0.8
Experienced & Urgent 1.2
Good Weather 1.1
Bad Weather 0.7
Hills & Mountains 0.3-0.5
Forest/Snow/Mud 0.5
Laguz King 1.3
(Good eyes will notice I added/removed a few that fit Tellius better, most obviously the Laguz King. If their stats were that much better across both games, I'm sure it'd be reflected in travel endurance a bit.)
We need these because there's a big difference even between an experienced adventurer going through a paved road versus snow, or a hawk laguz fighting through rain. However, when corroborated with Soren's canon "we'd lose a few days (walking) through the mountains" comment for a beorc army, the multipliers seem to more or less fit. I'm fine with this.
But what about Nasir's 2 month ship trip???????
As mentioned before, Nasir's 2 month ship travel is suspiciously long for how relatively small the land mass is. Many years ago, the wonderfulamielleon did some similar meta-ing on distance and arrived at a very different calculation that I did. Some of what amielleon calculated was useful elsewhere in this post/resource; I'm mentioning all of this for transparency and friendly fandom interest/history so everyone can arrive at their own conclusions.
That said, after researching ancient ship travel inconsistencies, it seems that sailing ships having foul/fair wind matters a huge deal.
Personally, I believe Nasir and his crew likely fighting foul winds all the way from southern Goldoa -> Begnion; I am greatly simplifying things, but generally the hotter the climate, the more likely winds go from east->west, and the colder the climate, it's reversed. Moreover, Nasir and co start their sailing trip in summer (Path of Radiance starts in spring, and takes about a year for the full game). Lastly, the trip around Goldoa and Begnion's coast is treacherous and has to be navigated carefully around islands and sharp underwater rocks.
We can use these three data points to surmise that foul winds & dangerous terrain slowed his passage considerably. (One can even take advantage of this line of reasoning to say this is why bird laguz pirating is so lucrative if ships are slowed near their islands).
While keeping in mind nautical miles are a different scale than land miles and we have to convert first, how many "raw" nautical miles Nasir travels based off of this scale? (I would have liked elementary school math if it had been framed like this....)
~417 nautical miles
a source: Ostia to Alexandria = 1220 {nautical} miles = 21 days
1220*3= 3660 nautical miles for toha->begnion
another source (i forgot, sorry): roman ship distance: 80-100 (nautical) miles per day.
(x2 months: 60 days, ~5000 (nautical) miles from toha->begnion
which had me mentally pegging the nautical mile distance as ~4000.
not, uh. ~500nm (if i was generous).
Well. We can always claim Nasir was a better spy than ship captain. ;p
(.....and/or that IS/Nintendo completely pulled that one specific number out of their behind. If you're brave enough to counter the game, something like 21 days is a lot closer to being realistic to the other in-game numbers at that map scale and also still "feels similarly long enough" for the cast to bond on the ship.)
Moving on.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, barring Nasir's world's worst captaining award, we have enough genuinely useful/solid/consistent information with winged, beast, cavalry, and army distances across real-world examples and in-game examples that I feel confident enough to post and posit this as a resource. Even if you choose to tweak your own distances for your own reasons, I hope this proved at least somewhat helpful as a jumping-off point.
And if you enjoyed reading this, I appreciate that and you ~
please comment if you feel like it!
This whole resource is for fan-creatives where determining the travel time is useful ("how far is it from Melior to Nevassa on pegasus versus on foot".). This specific post covers in detail how I calculated the distances that the characters and unit types (pegasus, beorc, bird/beast laguz, etc) take to get from point A to point B, along with some Tellius specific meta.
Goal
The goal of this travel time sheet is to create consistent times across unit type that "feel" intuitively right to the world with minimum suspension of disbelief, with a secondary goal of being relatively easy to independently calculate for fanfics/meta with some amount of consistency; i'm not after strict realistic/historical accuracy.
I say this because this dramatically affects how we do the scale/calculations. As you'll see, there's various hand-wavey inconsistencies (Nasir's 2 month ship travel is suspiciously long for such a small land mass versus in-game foot travel), but we can reconcile those.
Canon mentions of travel time
There's a lot of unknowns; let's start with what we do know. We have a limited amount of explicit distance/passage of time mentioned in the scripts:
- (PoR) 2 months at sea on Nasir's ship (Mentioned by Nasir & Naesala)
- (PoR) Melior -> Greil Mercenaries fort, 3 days on foot for Soren. (When he warned them about Daein's invasion)
- (PoR) loosing a few days walking through mountains (Mentioned by Soren after the Riven bridge fight)
- (RD) 2 calvary days from Felirae castle to Alpea (Mentioned by Ludveck)
- (RD) Goldoa Castle to Castle Nox in 1-2 days, Kurthnaga flying (when Almedha called him via sending stone)
- (RD) 20-24hrs Pegesus flight from Felriae -> Alpea fort. (For Marcia during Ludveck's rebellion in 2-E)
* please note the scale of milimeters to the attached screenshots is going to be off; the actual finished pdf deck that i'm measuring is 11x17inches and that map is accurate.
My first step: i chopped up Soren's 3-day (fast) hike into a beorc (fast) 1-day measurement. (I say "fast" because there's quite some difference between an experienced adventurer making haste somewhere if it's life or death versus somebody leisurely pacing themselves for a cross country months-long marathon or clumsily wandering around a forest.)
There's quite a lot of online literature that says the average somewhat fit/able human can walk between 15-30 miles a day. I went with an average of 20 because it's also easy to divide or multiply.
That measurement (the grey line) of a 1 day's journey for beorc almost perfectly lined up with 10mm. I ain't not looking a gift horse in the mouth. If we now say 20miles = 10mm for this specific map scale, let's test this theory with (a) the existing canon distances mentioned in the script, (b) existing real world distances for tigers, birds, and cavalry (oh my).
Let's start with Marcia's pegasus flight from Felirae to Alpea since its very close to 1 day as-is. (
amielleon in a linked post later If we line up a beorc's 1 day (fast) walk at 20miles/10mm with Marcia's 1 day (fast) flight at 34miles/17mm (<calculated this by the 17mm), Marcia's faster by roughly a third but not at an unrealistically crazy scale for a winged beast carrying a whole-ass human plus armor for both.I went ahead and mentally estimated a wyvern's flight time at 30miles/15mm per day since I see them as slightly slower and heavier than pegasus but still moderately ahead of a human on foot. This places a wyvern's flight time from Nevassa to Talrega as roughly 1 day if they're really booking it, or a day and a half. After re-reading the scripts before starting this game, all of the above -so far- "feels" intuitive to the times implied for the cast to do their thing. (For example, a 3 day walk one way from Sienne to Grann Desert for a paid mission, after Sanaki had given Ike 7 days of leisure in Sienne. If it had been 3 weeks or 3 hours to Grann, I would have said something's off.)
Let's get a little friskier, and see how far a (real world) tiger can travel a day.
Tigers are not endurance runners but it has been reported they can to cover up to an area of 37 miles in a day in their hunting grounds, but other sources say 20 miles, also for similar big cats like lions; though they all prefer sleeping up to 20 hours a day. We can use this (at least it's not 400miles...). Likewise, online sources also peg a war horse traveling 30-50 miles in a day which seems to be within similar parameters to a tiger; personally based off of Lethe's comments (and how laguz physiology might be slightly better than real-world tigers), I see beast laguz slightly faster than a war horse not laden with a human plus armor, but not terribly so; on the flip side horses would probably be better for longer distances.
Let's make it easy for us and peg:
- beast laguz (fast) 40miles / 20mm
- beast laguz (paced) 20miles / 10mm
- cavalry (trot) 20miles / 10mm
- cavalry (gallop) 35miles / 16.5mm
Since the rest of the distances seem to be working, let's go ahead and calculate Kurthnaga's flight and Reyson's flight from the "raw" millimeters.
Reyson (and Naesala) made it from Kilvas to Serenes, and then Tanas in a day. If we allow that they just barely hit the southern border of Serenes and almost immediately got to Tanas' manse about sunset to before night, it's about 80miles/40mm with a little breathing room either way. If we then imply that a hawk/Tibarn's top flight speed is 120miles / 110mm this matches with what's implied when Tibarn flew from Phonecis to the Ribahn river, back when Zelgius warned him about Naesala's betrayal, and then back to the river. Close enough to be "cousins" in distance for the birds.
Since Kurthnaga is a black dragon royalty (and another caliber of apex predator altogether even above the other laguz kings), we can honestly make up numbers at this point; but the game implies he flew from Goldoa Castle to Castle Nox in a day from Almedha's sending stone call to him arriving after the next battle. I calculated it in 1 day just to make it easier for myself with the result of 230 miles / 115milimeters. That's half the continent in one day which doesn't feel horrifically extreme for him (versus a modern passenger airplane which is in the thousands of miles per day which would feel off); it'd still take him at least two days for the whole continent. Mildly #broken as befitting of a royal black dragon but not instant teleportation.
At this point we can eyeball these numbers and fill in for an army, which is all that's left.
Beorc Army (steady march): 15miles / 7.5mm
Beorc Army (forced march): 25miles / 12.5mm (in between a slow horse and a fast one, feels reasonable)
The multipliers
I freely admit this is the least researched part, as I heavily used this medieval travel time sheet exclusively for its multipliers.
Unmaintained Road 0.5 - 0.9
Paved road 1.2
Natural Trail 0.7
Known Area 1.2
Unknown Area 0.8
Experienced & Urgent 1.2
Good Weather 1.1
Bad Weather 0.7
Hills & Mountains 0.3-0.5
Forest/Snow/Mud 0.5
Laguz King 1.3
(Good eyes will notice I added/removed a few that fit Tellius better, most obviously the Laguz King. If their stats were that much better across both games, I'm sure it'd be reflected in travel endurance a bit.)
We need these because there's a big difference even between an experienced adventurer going through a paved road versus snow, or a hawk laguz fighting through rain. However, when corroborated with Soren's canon "we'd lose a few days (walking) through the mountains" comment for a beorc army, the multipliers seem to more or less fit. I'm fine with this.
But what about Nasir's 2 month ship trip???????
As mentioned before, Nasir's 2 month ship travel is suspiciously long for how relatively small the land mass is. Many years ago, the wonderful
amielleon did some similar meta-ing on distance and arrived at a very different calculation that I did. Some of what amielleon calculated was useful elsewhere in this post/resource; I'm mentioning all of this for transparency and friendly fandom interest/history so everyone can arrive at their own conclusions.That said, after researching ancient ship travel inconsistencies, it seems that sailing ships having foul/fair wind matters a huge deal.
Personally, I believe Nasir and his crew likely fighting foul winds all the way from southern Goldoa -> Begnion; I am greatly simplifying things, but generally the hotter the climate, the more likely winds go from east->west, and the colder the climate, it's reversed. Moreover, Nasir and co start their sailing trip in summer (Path of Radiance starts in spring, and takes about a year for the full game). Lastly, the trip around Goldoa and Begnion's coast is treacherous and has to be navigated carefully around islands and sharp underwater rocks.
We can use these three data points to surmise that foul winds & dangerous terrain slowed his passage considerably. (One can even take advantage of this line of reasoning to say this is why bird laguz pirating is so lucrative if ships are slowed near their islands).
While keeping in mind nautical miles are a different scale than land miles and we have to convert first, how many "raw" nautical miles Nasir travels based off of this scale? (I would have liked elementary school math if it had been framed like this....)
- Step 1: measure the path Nasir took in millimeters/land miles.
- Step 2: convert land miles to nautical miles.
~417 nautical miles
- Step 2.5: see how far off we are compared to real-world (ancient) accounts of nautical mile distances/days traveled.
a source: Ostia to Alexandria = 1220 {nautical} miles = 21 days
1220*3= 3660 nautical miles for toha->begnion
another source (i forgot, sorry): roman ship distance: 80-100 (nautical) miles per day.
(x2 months: 60 days, ~5000 (nautical) miles from toha->begnion
which had me mentally pegging the nautical mile distance as ~4000.
not, uh. ~500nm (if i was generous).
- Step 3: bullshit numbers until it makes sense (lol)
Well. We can always claim Nasir was a better spy than ship captain. ;p
(.....and/or that IS/Nintendo completely pulled that one specific number out of their behind. If you're brave enough to counter the game, something like 21 days is a lot closer to being realistic to the other in-game numbers at that map scale and also still "feels similarly long enough" for the cast to bond on the ship.)
Moving on.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, barring Nasir's world's worst captaining award, we have enough genuinely useful/solid/consistent information with winged, beast, cavalry, and army distances across real-world examples and in-game examples that I feel confident enough to post and posit this as a resource. Even if you choose to tweak your own distances for your own reasons, I hope this proved at least somewhat helpful as a jumping-off point.
And if you enjoyed reading this, I appreciate that and you ~
please comment if you feel like it!
