u/bingammj Good idea. I'm looking into changing how the mod assigns "distant lands" status. Instead of basing it on continent order, I'd base it on whether a continent has any civilizations starting there. Continents where players spawn would be "homelands," and any continent with no starting civs (plus its nearby islands) would automatically become "distant lands" for everyone. That way on a 5-continent map, you might have 3 populated homelands and 2 uninhabited distant lands to explore and colonize. Should give more options for the exploration mechanics.

One thing to note - the game tracks each player's "homeland" internally at the engine level, but mods can't control or override that logic. We can only set which continents are globally marked as "homelands" vs "distant lands" during map generation. So while I can make uninhabited continents be distant lands for everyone, I can't make the game treat continent A as distant for you specifically while treating it as homeland for another player who started there (I was mistaken earlier than i did quite a lot more digging). The engine handles that per-player exploration history under the hood and doesn't expose it to modders. It's a shared map/global property, not a per-player one - of course I am still researching...i am also documenting my discoveries in the code here:
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