Game limits

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This article is about all the known limits of the Just Cause game series.

The Hot air balloon in Just Cause 2 can get higher than any other aircraft.

Map limits

See also: Maps.

Just Cause

Just Cause has an invisible cube around San Esperito. Only jet fighters, like the Rage-Johnston F6 Comet can get to the maximum height. Crashing into the barrier is harmless to the aircraft and boats. While using an aircraft, a small little column appears next to the minimap indicating how high the player is and how far the ground below them is above sea level.

The game area is a cube of 1025 km in every dimension. This is one of the biggest areas ever for a sandbox style game. Unlike Just Cause 2, every aircraft has a height limit which is above cloud level.

Just Cause 2

Look at the map. The demo game limit is the colorless area. The picture was taken at the Rajang river.

In Just Cause 2 it's impossible to get to the game height limit by any plane. Every plane and helicopter has its own set height limit:

• The Hot air balloon gets all the way up to its limit of 7 km, it'll start shaking and then disappear.
• Using a fast enough plane, such as the Si-47 Leopard, with enough persistence, you can fly to approximately 6.5 km above sea level. As with the disappearing Hot Air Balloon, once you reach a certain height in a plane, it will suddenly disappear for no reason at all and you will fall down.
• With the Dual Parachute Thrusters, you can get as high as you like by flying the plane as high as you can go (about 5km). Then continuing by parachute thrusters. When the thrusters overheat, you let go of all controls until thrusters have gone down in overheating on the (°C) bar. It has been reported that it's possible to get up to 12km high this way.

It is not known how far the horizontal limit is, if one exists at all.

JC2 demo version

JC2 demo map.

The demonstration version of Just Cause 2 limited the player to a small area in the Lautan Lama Desert.

Just Cause 3

Just Cause 3 has "volumetric terrain", which allows there to be underground caves (like the road tunnels and the Tunnels at eastern Insula Striate) and allows the player to climb tall buildings easier.

Vertical limit:

It has been reported that the Bavarium wingsuit (from the Sky Fortress DLC) can get about 5 km off the ground, before becoming dysfunctional.

Using the DK Pistol expands the head of the victim. Once kicked, the victim will then float away. It's possible to then quickly grapple onto a floating person and float up along with them. It's also possible to grapple several of them to a small car and sit in that while floating upward. Reportedly it's possible to get up to 2.5 km altitude this way.

This means that planes can get higher than anything else.

The natural highest point in Medici and the eDEN Airship are about equally high. It's not actually known which is higher because they're at a very similar altitude and so far apart. This could be the limit for solid map objects.

With the aid of "camera hack" mods it's possible to get up to about 10 million km high before the game crashes. See more at Medici Space Program.

Horizontal limit:

Aircraft and boats suffer the same consequences, once a player leaves the map range, they will be killed by vehicle explosion.

When the player gets about 15+ km away from the edge of the map, a message comes up saying "WARNING RETURN TO MEDICI OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES." No AI boats will spawn in the warning area. The message gives an additional kilometer or so of warning space before the vehicle explodes, killing Rico and teleporting the player back to the nearest default spawn point.

It has been reported that one player has gotten 20 km away from Boom Island before the boat exploded.

Just Cause 4

The Just Cause 4 map has been mentioned to be 1,024 square kilometers, which likely is meant to be a grid of 32km by 32km. In August 2018, Amazon, BestBuy and Steam were erroneously mentioning the map to be only 100 square kilometers. This was later corrected.

In JC4 the way of measuring distance is to stand at a location and place a marker on the map. Then while in game, look towards the marker and use the AR lens. This will give you the distance to said location.

Horizontal limit

Using a map marker and the AR lens, it's possible to see that the dry land is roughly 34.5 km from corner to corner (from south-east to north-west).

There's an additional about 3 km of usable sea around the dry land. This usable sea area differs at different coasts due to the dry land not being an exact square. Additional DLC islands and easter eggs could only be placed with in this limit. The edge of this limit is easy to detect while looking at the map and moving the selection circle/cross off into the sea.

Counting the "usable sea", the map is a square with 32.94 km sides, with a total of about 1085 km2.

Another horizontal limit is how far anything can travel. This distance is said to be about "0.5 times the width of the dry land away from the coast". If the player flies there, the plane explodes. This distance differs at different coasts.

Vertical limit

It's about 3 km when calculated with rough real world science. See details below. Once you reach that altitude, you can't go any further. If you're in a plane, the game will make the the plane tilt until the nose is facing downwards. It's not known what would happen if you're in a helicopter, but there are likely restrictions as well.

A reliable way to get the measurement would be to skydive to about 50 meter altitude and then grapple yourself to the ground. The game measures the altitude during a free fall as something like "greatest distance traveled by free fall".

Calculations to confirm the vertical limit

An Italian YouTuber flew to full height and then just free fell (with closed wingsuit), measuring ~100 sec before hitting the sea. This allows us to make the following calculations:

No air friction:

• Rico fell from 50 km, reaching the sea with a speed of 980 m/s, which is 3530 km/h, passing from -20°C to -50°C then returning to 20°C. This would beat the Felix Baumgartner record from the Red Bull Stratos mission.

With air friction:

• We don't know Rico's weight, but a person of his height and athleticness level should be about 80-90 kg. Clothing and basic equipment would add another 10 kg. Weapons would add about 5 kg per assault rifle, or 15+ kg for a large rocket launcher.
• Assuming 100 km/h falling speed, the altitude is about 3 km.
• The clouds look like cumulus clouds, which form at the approximate altitude of 1.5 km from sea level. Skydiving from the height limit takes ~50 seconds to reach clouds and another ~50 seconds to reach the sea.

If this is accurate, it's completely coincidental, because no game engine weather, temperatures, or gravity are that accurate.

Speed limits

Game limits prevent the fixed-wing aircraft from flying at realistic speed.

In JC1 the jet fighters are about as fast as the slowest real planes.

In JC2, modifying the game can make the aircraft fly at realistic speed, but depending on your PC, the rest of the game might not be able to keep up with that. This could cause many objects to not spawn at all, or spawn too late and cause the player to crash into invisible bridges, buildings, trees and other things. This can also occur in the PS3 version without any modifications. An adequately powerful PC could prevent this problem, but ideally game programming should prevent this problem by spawning lower resolution objects.

Some cut game content from Just Cause 2 suggests that beta aircraft flew a lot faster. For example, the Pell Silverbolt 6 is said to have flown nearly twice as fast.

Just Cause 2 Multiplayer allows the player to use the "boost" feature to set aircraft speed to an approximate maximum of 745 km/h, which is a realistic airplane cruising speed.

Just Cause 3 spawns shorter trains when the player flies a plane above Railroads, or drives a fast sports car along the track.

In Just Cause 4, the highest possible speed for a vehicle is 503km/h. This number can be found by modifying the game. Using this mod, you can modify the top speed of vehicles. After multiplying the original top speed of the fastest vehicle in the game, the Fellhawk Jet Fighter, by several times, the top speed in game remains 503 km/h. Using nitros or diving doesn't increase the speed at all.

Agency submarine missiles fly at a very high speed (by Just Cause 4's standards) of about 650 km/h, although real missiles are much much faster. Grappling onto a missile and riding it results in delayed rendering of surrounding terrain, because the computer/console can't keep up.

Pointless provinces

Just Cause

Provincia Mendoza City and Resolucion only contain parts of Esperito City. Why they exist is unknown. The game probably needs to have all settlements inside some kind of a province.

Just Cause 3

Similar to the above, JC3 must need all settlements to be inside a province and provinces to be in regions.

• Regno doesn't seem to have any reason. It's really only there to contain Citate Di Ravello and its suburbs.
• The eDEN Airship is in a "province" of its own, called "eDEN Airship" and has its own region called "eDEN Airspace".
• The Bavarium Sea Heist areas are again kind of odd in that sense. The Scolio "region" is only an area of sea, which story-wise was empty until the Stingray arrived there. The "region" is composed of one province named "Stingray Area".
• Soros, Cauda, and Umbra are regions controlled by the Rebellion from the start of the game. The only settlements in these regions are the rebel hideouts (Cava de Rebelles, Grotta Contrabandero, and Refugio Umbra respectively). Since nobody is supposed to live or work here, it doesn't make much sense to make administrative districts for what are supposed to be uninhabited areas. These only exist so that the rebellion is able to have a safe space in a liberated province from the start of the game.

Boom Island and the Volcano island in Medici are the only areas with out provinces and regions, but they do not have named and completed settlements on them.

Vehicle existence limits

This is an extreme example of what can be achieved. The picture was taken at the Pekan Keris Perak base.

• JC and JC2 let the player have a limited number of vehicles, before entering the next one will cause the first one to cease to exist, no matter how close to it you are. The maximum number of vehicles depends on the game version and possibly hardware. Some have seen the first vehicle disappear after entering a fourth and some have seen up to six, before the seventh vehicle causes the first to disappear. In JC2, vehicles don't disappear immediately, but after a few seconds.
• JC and JC2 have a limit to how far you can go from the vehicle you last used, before it ceases to exist. The exact distances are not known but it is very short, as vehicles can disappear right in front of your eyes. This happens more commonly on lower end PCs and consoles due to the low performance.
  • See the video at the bottom of the page for a demonstration.
• Both of the above limits are much larger in JC3, allowing the player to have an unknown number of vehicles several kilometers away.

Heavy drop

In Just Cause, it's impossible to order another vehicle from the heavy drop, if the previous one has yet to cease to exist. The game will say that "one Agency vehicle is currently in operation".

Extraction

JC1 has a time limit for Extractions. It's not known how long it is, but it's not possible to get extracted twice in short succession. The game will say that "all the Agency helicopters are busy".

Vehicle handling

The helicopters in JC1 seem to be faster than the ones in JC2 in every way, but as a disadvantage, they can't fly sideways. This is usually negligible and easy to get used to, but it's inconvenient when trying to land into a narrow space in a settlement.

In JC2 all land vehicles have their center of weight very close to the front end. This is only realistic for private cars and makes most vehicles terribly unstable at high speed, especially when taken off road.

Ground vehicles in JC3 are at times unable to climb even the tiniest vertical obstacles, when at very low speed. Lighter vehicles have much less trouble, because they accelerate faster and bounce over the edges of sidewalks, but heavy vehicles (like buses and the Stadt-Tresor ST 8530) can become completely stuck if they're blocked by an edge like that. The Stria Rustico, which has no components forward of the front wheels and has 4-wheel drive also suffers from this.

In JC3 and JC4, the monster truck has its center of mass well below the vehicle. This means that if the vehicle should slide down a steep hill sideways, the vehicle will tilt by more than 90 degrees while sliding, but will never fall over.

In JC3 and more so in JC4, ground vehicles can drive up impossibly steep hills. Like, an SUV can drive up an 80 degree dirt hill and such.

Game difficulty

JC2 has difficulty settings that change how many enemy units spawn during heat and how difficult it is to hack various consoles.

JC4 has a higher level of difficulty when the player starts a second game in "new game +". This affects the Black Hand units.

Limited view

In JC1 it is not possible to see more than a few kilometers, because your view will be obstructed by clouds. Most open world games of that era were programmed like that in order to help limit the amount of game world that the game needs to load at any one time. This can also make a smaller map look much bigger, because the player might be forced to travel long distances along curvy roads, with out seeing the actual total distance to the destination. A famous example is the fog in GTA III.

Later games, like JC2 and GTA IV load the entire map, but the distant areas will have a very low Level Of Detail. This can allow players with better gaming devices to see further in good detail. The disadvantage of this is a less realistic looking game, where a player can, for example, stand on top of Desert Peak and see the Berawan Besar Mountains which have a snow line much lower than the desert mountains.

Newer games, including JC3 (see the galleries at Just Cause 3 and Medici), have again been given clouds and fog to limit view to improve realism, but these games also fade the more distant areas.

Vehicle seating and number of passengers

Many vehicles have several seats, but in most cases most seats are not programmed as being usable. See also: Vehicle seating.

• Most vehicles in the Just Cause game series have 2 usable seats that are often both occupied by NPCs.
• Some vehicles have 1 usable seat: Motorcycles, most planes, some military vehicles, buses, tractors, and most boats.
• Very few vehicles have usable extra seats that are never used by NPCs. It is often something to do with Cut game content. Examples include:
  • Viper boatworks Seaserpent III - Usable back seat. Reason unknown.
  • Tuk-Tuk Rickshaw - Usable back seats. There was originally going to be a usable taxi service in JC2.
  • Tuk-Tuk Laa - Usable back seats. There was originally going to be a usable taxi service in JC2.
  • Pell Silverbolt 6 - Usable back seat. Reason unknown.
  • SnakeHead T20 - Usable passenger seat.
• All vehicles have a Stunt position and some have additional clinging positions. See Vehicle seating for more about this.
• Many vehicles have an additional position for a Mounted Gun, or minigun operator. Winstons Amen 69 and CS Powerrun 77 have two of these.

In Just Cause 3, most extra seats are now usable because it was made with the possibility of Just Cause 3 Multiplayer in mind, and because NPCs can use them when the player uses the horn.

JC4 has a lot of military helicopters and ground vehicles with unusable internal seats for up to about 8 passengers, but these seats are not coded to be usable and are mere textures. They can only be seen if the camera is clipped into the vehicle.

Weapon spawn points in JC3

Each of the weapons at the Simpsons locations at sea are at about sea level, but they each have a large underwater pedestal under them. This could indicate that a weapon spawn point can only hover a set height above a solid platform.

Moving obscure objects

In JC3, random interactable objects that spawn at specific locations, like the large anchor at Weapons Shipment Yard, can be transported to great distances using vehicles. However, if the object is not connected to the vehicle by grappler cables, it will cease to exist if the player looks at the game map.

NPC and item spawn range in JC3

The JC3 grappler cables break if you go above 800 meters away from them. Beyond 800 meters NPCs who get hit by a sniper rifle might not actually get hurt and chaos objects can look deformed in the sniper telescope.

Vehicle trailers

Just Cause 4 is the first in the series to have usable vehicle trailers. There are 5 types of usable semi-trailers. These trailers are adequately functional, but rather poorly programmed.

• One of their limits is that a truck can never turn more than 45 degrees in comparison to a trailer.
• Another limit is that the trailers seem to be programmed as separate vehicles, which means that if a tank is driven onto a flatbed trailer, then the trailer will catch fire and explode, because disappointingly, the trailer can not handle the mass of a tank.

Video