Bigger On The Inside / Video Games

Bigger on the Inside in Video Games.

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• Marathon, Descent, and Duke Nukem 3D:
  • The game engines are based on connected spaces, not Euclidean geometry. This allows for impossible physical arrangements, like a circular hallway that must be traversed 720 degrees to get back to the starting point, a Klein bottle-shaped room, or a Mirror World in the same space as the normal level.
  • Behold this in action. Most of the level is in a closet in a room, itself in a closet in the aforementioned most of the level.
  • This occurred with ZX Spectrum games as well; for instance, the Attic in Atic Atac had two overlapping rooms in the same space. This may have been done deliberately to make mapping difficult.
• NetHack, Slash'EM and similar roguelikes. The full games rarely go past 5mb, but without extensive knowledge of the game or cheating and, of course, luck, you can spend an entire year trying to finish it.

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• In Animal Crossing: Wild World and City Folk the closets in the game were capable of storing 90 items, while the closets in New Leaf can hold 180 items, a stark contrast to the closets in the original game which stored a measly 3 per storage item. New Horizons has player storage increasing to over 2,000 items in home storage. In all the games, buildings are shown to be at least slightly larger on the inside than they are on the outside.
• In Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey, there's Sophie's portable atelier that she gives to Firis as a parting gift. From the outside, it just looks like a small, ordinary tent, so Firis's reaction when she enters and sees a huge work and living area is "Huh...!? I'm inside a tent, right...? Why's it so spacious... What's going on here!?" Sophie apparently made it by "bending space using alchemy." The quest to craft the atelier tent was later made into a DLC for Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book.
• Baldur's Gate is pretty common with this. A house looks like a pathetic slum on the outside. You send somebody in (usually to loot the place) and it turns out on the inside it's got a dozen rooms and, while still being a pathetic slum, it's a pathetic slum about the size of a small mansion. One instance where it's acknowledged as an in-universe thing is the circus in Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn — its insides are transformed by a powerful illusion spell, and contain a building that the game says wouldn't even fit within Waukeen's Promenade where the circus tent is, and certainly not in the tent. When the illusion's creator is defeated, it becomes just a tent again.
• Banjo-Kazooie does this a lot as well. Most notably inside the circus tent in Witchyworld in Tooie.
• Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain: The structure in the center of Dark Eden, explicitly. One of its architects was a sorceress whose primary power is the ability to warp reality.
• Broken Reality: The waterslide in Love Cruise 64. Entering it sends you falling into a terrifying subspace for several seconds before appearing at the bottom.
• Bug Fables: The Ancient Castle and the Wasp Kingdom Hive are sprawling dungeons whose exteriors are dwarfed by just the first interior room of each.
• Inverted for laughs in the tie-in adventure game for Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. In one stage you have to hijack a friendly alien's saucer. Unfortunately it's smaller on the inside than the outside, because "his race hasn't got the technology straightened out yet."
• Most transports in Dawn of War can carry up to three infantry units (upwards of thirty men) while their tabletop counterparts are restricted to one squad of usually no more than ten.
• Same thing with the Ishimura in Dead Space. When the shuttle approaches the ship in the game's opening, the model is much smaller than it is supposed to be, and probably too small to house all the game's levels.
• In Deltarune, to date, the school supply closet represents a moment, in a world of fantastic creatures living in an otherwise very normal-seeming town, where Kris and Susie are sent to retrieve some chalk, darkness comes out, they go in, and keep going; Susie cracks a smile and thinks "this closet is, um... broken". Then they fall into the Kingdom of Darkness and all bets are off... before eventually making it out to what looks like an adjoining school room with suspiciously familiar elements scattered around them and they're both confused about what just happened; it hasn't really been explained yet.
• In Daze Before Christmas you're a Badass Santa who battles assorted enemies, and if you use a crouching move, you can disappear inside your hat.
• The player’s house in Disney Dreamlight Valley can be expanded up to 20 floors, yet the exterior only upgrades to two floors.
• Donkey Kong 64 did this a lot. Most notable is K. Lumsy's island. On the outside, it's small enough that one could probably jump on top of it. On the inside, the ceiling is probably at least 20 to 30 times the height of the Kongs. Same goes for the diameter.
• Dragon Quest: Unexpectedly averted in the first game of the series by the shops and marketplaces in villages. Any time you step through a door, rather than being taken to a separate screen, the surrounding area goes black and its roof essentially turns invisible, allowing you to see the inside.
  • However, all towns, dungeons, and caves are represented on the world map as a single tile.
• There's an interesting psychological employment of this trope in EarthBound (1994). The Tenda of the Lost Underworld believe they have built a cage around the dinosaurs there, even though they are the ones actually inside said cage. Therefore, to them, the cage is bigger on the inside than the outside. EarthBound (1994) itself, as well as predecessor EarthBound Beginnings, also played this trope straight in the usual sense. Its sequel Mother 3, however, did a pretty good job of averting it, or at least making it not particularly egregious.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Downplayed by the series as a whole. Cities generally avert it, though the structures themselves are sometimes bigger on the inside than their exterior would indicate.
  • In Morrowind, the buildings inside the cities are usually bigger on the inside. The biggest offender is the Under Skar in Ald-Ruhn, which is the hollowed out shell of an ancient sentient Emperor Crab. While it's exterior is quite massive, it still isn't large enough to house everything within the actual interior.
  • In Oblivion, almost every castle in the cities are bigger on the inside. The most noticeable is of course Cheydinhal's castle, of which the exterior is wider than the interior and the interior could certainly not fit in what appears to be the exterior.
  • Skyrim:
    • The Dwemer Lockbox in Septimus' Outpost is this. The inside of the cube is at least twice as big as the outside. Even the tunnel leading into the cube is longer than the cube itself! Justified because it houses Hermaeus Mora's Oghma Infinium, and as such is an Eldritch Location.
    • The Hearthfire DLC averts this with the houses you can build. You build a house one section at a time, and each section stage by stage (foundation, flooring, frame, walls, roof), and only after the section you're building is completely walled off does it become a separate "cell" which you can only access through a door and a loading screen. Once you go through that door, though, the inside is exactly as big as it looked from the outside while you were building it.
• Odd as it may seem, EVE Online. The containers (or "cans") that you buy on the market allow you to store, in the smallest can, 120 m³ worth of stuff, in an item that only takes up 100! The jettisoned containers ("jet cans") also count, as they can hold 27,500 m³ worth of items, from a shuttle that may only have a 10 m³ cargo hold. (Even positing that the jet cans are collapsible, like cardboard boxes, 27,500 m³ is roughly equivalent to the capacity of the largest of the industrial haulers, heavily modified for additional cargo space.) Partly, this is Hand Waved by freight containers having a "compression field" (for the same reason, you can't put livestock, passengers and some foods in them).
• The barns in the online game Farmville. If one chooses, they are capable of holding dozens of entire buildings inside them, each much, much larger then the actual barn itself.
• Final Fantasy
  • The 2D game maps are more of an abstraction than a 1:1 recreation so even starting from the first game you'll have things like towns being far larger than their map icons suggest, shops/houses/rooms taking up more space on the inside, dungeons being far larger than the surrounding land implies there is space for (even accounting for parts of said dungeon to be underwater), and so on.
  • Final Fantasy XIV does this fairly often with certain dungeons. The Wanderer's Palace looks big enough on the outside, but when you go inside, the giant stone structure in the middle looks even more massive. Likewise, the city of Ala Mhigo has a lot of details on the inside like stairs, barricades, tents, and so on. When viewed from the outside, all the details are missing (stairs are now a ramp for example) and the area itself looks smaller than it actually is compared to how it usually looks in the duty.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: There is an upper bound on how long and/or wide maps can get before the AI stops working on it, so this results in some silliness where you visit the indoor areas of many locations that are far, far, bigger than their outside walls suggest they "should" be.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia implies this for the party's second airship, which by the time it is obtained has to accommodate over seventy people—a number which is continually increasing. The logistics of this is addressed in Act 2 when a newcomer is told that the vehicle somehow never runs out of room and also provides sufficient food and gear for them all. (This is justified by the world being run on The Power of Creation.)
• Played for Laughs in Fur Fighters. Juliette has an absolutely colossal wardrobe that should not be able to fit in her house.
• In Genshin Impact, the Traveler can eventually obtain a Serenitea Pot that can serve as their house. Keep in mind that this magical device is the size of a regular tea pot, yet can still fit a pretty large grassy pocket dimension inside.
• In God of War II, the player faces off against a colossus statue brought to life. After finally receiving a weapon able to pierce the outside deep enough to enter it, the player and Kratos enter the statue, which is somehow several more stories tall and far larger overall on the inside. The face itself is far larger as well. In fact, the inside of the statue, compared to the inside size of the face implies the entire thing is disproportionate.
• Averted in the Gothic games. Every city and house interior is part of the overworld and exactly the same size on the inside as on the outside.
• Glint's lair in Guild Wars. On the outside, it's a single grain of sand, hidden in a vast desert. On the inside, it's a huge labyrinth filled with traps.
• The test rocket chamber containing the giant alien tentacle monster in Half-Life is bigger than the cylindrical chamber that houses it. This was done by surrounding it with airlocks and transitioning between separate maps (with a pause and a loading message) when the player activates them. The Fan Remake Black Mesa accomplishes the same feat less conspicuously by teleporting the player between identical copies of the same airlock.
• Halo:
  • Halo: Combat Evolved:
    • The outside model for the Pillar of Autumn is smaller than the (inferred) distance the player has to travel in the final level. Lookit.
    • This trope is also inverted if you consider the level where you have to run from the bridge in the very front of the bow to the engine room in the stern. By that level the Pillar of Autumn is actually considerably SMALLER then the outside model.
  • The Spirit of Fire from Halo Wars, considering the amount of resources and forces it sends down. The Elephant too for that matter. You can train 40 soldiers out of it, despite the fact it looks like it can hold no more than 20, maybe 30. and even that's pushing it.
• Harvest Moon is a massive offender. The player's house is always pretty darn small in all of the games, especially on the outside. Particularly in Magical Melody and A/Another Wonderful Life, the player's house on the outside looks so tiny that you'd think they can't possibly have any room to lay down straight. The inside, though, is more than large enough to hold a bed, a television, a refrigerator, a kitchen, a bookshelf, a storage closet, and more. This don't improve much with house size upgrades you get later on, either.
• In Hell Pie Nugget lampshades that the inside of the whale — appropriately called Inside Out — is much larger than the whale itself.
• Some developers can create games, or certain parts of a game, that only take up a very small amount of space yet the content of the game is much bigger than it appears. Treasure's Ikaruga features impressive 3D scenery and a high-quality soundtrack yet the original arcade game only took up about 18MB; the Xbox LIVE Arcade re-release of the game features 720p high definition visuals and only takes up about 50MB, smaller than other high definition titles on the service.
• Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass: Mr. Beaver's house, in Smile, as he says:
  It's quite a bit larger than it looks like from the outside. I bet it's bigger than you'd ever guess.
• Killer7: The dimensions of Harman's house trailer do not match between the exterior and the interior. Not just in the sense that the inside is bigger, but because the wall layout cannot possibly line up with how it appears from outside. As if that weren't enough, the last level reveals the trailer has a basement. Something is wrong with this trailer.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Monstro the whale is much bigger on the inside than the out. This is especially evident in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], where Sora fights a boss battle that takes place on an icy ring around him, and you can see that he's small enough that about four or five of him could fit in some of the areas that Riku explores within him.
  • Castle Oblivion, featured in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and appearing in a few other games, only looks about twice as large as the Twilight Town mansion, but inside are 25 floors (12 basement levels and 13 aboveground) with an unknown (and not consistent) number of rooms.
• A Knight's Quest for Milk: There's a tent that has three large floors inside.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the whale-like Jabu Jabu has a sprawling dungeon inside his bizarre digestive system. The Deku Tree seems bigger inside as well, but still resembles a tree, somewhat.
  • And again in The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games.
  • In many games, houses look a lot smaller on the outside. Especially the 2D games.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds has an odd variation with the House of Gales. It is located in the middle of Lake Hylia, and you can swim all the way around what appears from the outside to be a building barely over 1-story tall. Like most Zelda dungeons, the inside is actually a large sprawling labyrinth. However, the upper levels of the dungeon take you to outside ledges, where you can see the structure towering over the lake on a much larger scale than it appeared from the lake itself. So the House of Gales somehow manages to be "bigger on the outside of the inside", if that makes sense.
  • The Divine Beasts in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have a somewhat similar dynamic to the House of Gales, though you have to take advantage of Good Bad Bugs to discover this. If you use various gliding glitches to land on and in Vah Naboris or Vah Medoh, you'll find that the exteriors and interiors rendered when you're in the main game world are much smaller than when you access the dungeons the proper way.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: the Zonai Shrines of Light, on the outside, appear to be simply a large boulder. But when Link activates one, a portal appears on the side of the boulder, containing the shrine's interior, which is much larger.
• This is quite common in Little Big Adventure (both games), with the buildings looking rather small from the outside but being surprisingly spacious from the inside.
• The village of the Weavers in Loom. Despite being simple tents (roughly as large as a pup tent), the insides are much larger. The main temple housing the Loom is a veritable cathedral. Justified, since the Weavers are capable of warping the fabric of time and space.
• The inside areas from the Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario series. In Superstar Saga for instance, Beanbean Castle, Chateau de Chucklehuck, Woohoo Hooniversity, Fire Palace, Thunder Palace, Guffawha Ruins, and Joke's End look fairly small on the outside, but are absolutely enormous on the inside, having hundreds of rooms and covering what must be miles of land. In Bowser's Inside Story, Bowser's Castle, Tower of Yikk, and Peach's Castle appear fairly moderately sized outside (to the point you can fight them in a giant boss battle), but are way, way bigger on the inside. Bowser's entire body is bigger on the inside, too. And in Dream Team, Pi'illo Castle and Neo Bowser Castle are absolutely huge when you compare the interiors to the sizes seen in the cutscenes. Paper Mario examples include Dry Dry Ruins, Boo's Mansion, Tubba Blubba's Castle, the Palace of Shadow, and Castle Bleck among others.
• The Normandy in Mass Effect is also larger on the inside. Even while the second Normandy from Mass Effect 2 is over twice the size of the original, the exterior still falls short of being the correct size to house the interiors.
• Mental Omega: The Allied Nations' Paradox Engine can carry far more soldiers, tanks and aircraft than anyone would've thought possible given its size, thanks to using the faction's signature Chrono technology to warp space and create a Pocket Dimension within itself that houses whole bases worth of production, power and research facilities along with the aforementioned tanks, aircraft and troops.
• Mega Man 8: How does Astro Man fit inside his ship without getting crushed by the ship's interior...?
• The trucks in the NES version of Metal Gear. Go inside, and instantly you notice the scale have started to move. The MSX2 version had this as well.
• Happens in some games of Might and Magic. Especially egregious in some instances, like Titan Stronghold in Might and Magic VII, the interior of which is probably bigger than entire Avlee, the map on which it is located.
• Obsidian involves simulations of dream worlds built by nanobots at the cellular level, and all of them are inside a 50-foot crystalline structure that looks like the titular rock. There is no sense of scale between the real world or these dreams.
• In Outer Wilds one of the planets you can visit is Dark Bramble, which some time ago was destroyed from the inside by a seed which grew over time. Despite the main seed in space looking much smaller than the other planets, entering it reveals that the seeds warp space with there being multiple smaller seeds inside that lead elsewhere. Trying to navigate it can be difficult at first as you have to use signals and probes to make sure you find a seed your ship can enter and so you can avoid the giant anglerfish who live in Dark Bramble.
• Grandmother's House in The Path. On the outside, it's a small, perhaps one-and-a-half story cottage; inside, it's impossibly tall and narrow, going up six or seven stories and containing a pair of endless corridors.
• Pokémon is a prime example. If you can go inside it, expect it to be a lot larger inside unless its outward appearance is intended to be imposing (such as a department store.) Some of the gyms even have interiors bigger than the towns they're in. That is, if you take the depictions literally and not as an abstraction. The anime averts this by showing realistically sized buildings and cities.
• For Portal 2, Valve developed a method for seamlessly connecting nonadjacent areas in a level, purely to simplify the development process. When the game was being finished up, they replaced all of these links with physically-connected areas except one, a room that is imperceptibly bigger on the inside.
• Przygody Reksia: The Inventor Rooster builds a space vehicle (known as Wajchadłowiec in Polish) out of a washing machine, so you'd expect its interior to be pretty small. Except it's spacious enough to have a computer and carry three passengers at the same time.
• One of the biggest changes to the rerelease of the first Quest for Glory game was the addition of this quality to Baba Yaga's hut. In the original, it's a cramped, claustrophobic space, but in the VGA remake, it's just one corner of a vast, gloomy cavern that definitely isn't there on the outside. Both quickly turn out to be a scary place.
• Pulled off exactly as unexpected in ROBLOX, in this. Notably, it's a see-through object that becomes much, much less see-through on one side. And you can step into it. A see-through, white square composed of lines. There is literally nothing inside it, and yet there is. It's called the Paradox Box for a reason.
• Rodina, a space exploration game, though the developer says it's not an intended feature.
• Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew: Descending into the lower decks of the Red Marley leads to the Below, an otherworldly Eldritch Location that can only be reached by the Cursed. The Below appears as a haphazard arrangement of decks and bulkheads floating in a vast space, and only Team Pet Estelle seems to be able to navigate it without getting hopelessly lost. Even Marley mentions that she loses track of everything in her lower decks, and she relies on Estelle to keep track.
• Lampshaded in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (the Alien Crossfire expansion) with the "N-Space Compression" technology. Effectively, it allows larger payloads in missiles and Planet busters. The tech description claims that the extra mass is stored in other dimensions.
  "Humans : there is no space inside rocket. Progenitor : space exists around all things with mass. Space : "here". Inside rocket : "there". Secret: bring here to there."

  — Caretaker Lular H'minee
  "Secret : Space"
• The Room series is based on this: you might think a puzzle game set in a single room would be limited in scope, but the puzzles revolve around the Null, an alien element that distorts space, resulting in puzzles inside puzzles inside puzzles...
• Played for horror a few times in Silent Hill, and justified by the titular town's reality-warping nature. The biggest example might be the Historical Center / Toluca Prison / Labyrinth, a long series of subterranean dungeons that require the protagonist to keep jumping down holes, until it seems like he's at least a few miles underground with no escape. And then, he goes through the final door and finds himself back outside, only a short distance from where he entered.
• Averted and played straight in the second movie-based Spider-Man video game. Restaurants, diners, flower shops, banks—those are just as big on the inside as they "should" be based on the outside. The two Shocker hide-outs, however, clearly are Bigger on the Inside.
• Spirits of Anglerwood Forest: Outside, you could walk circles around Phoebe's house, inside, just her library seems to be bigger than her whole house.
• StarCraft:
  • At the end, the inside of Tassadar's ship is significantly larger than it's seen on the outside. Of course, in most RTS games the buildings are churning out battle ships 5 times bigger than itself, so some distortion is necessary.
  • Also in the same game, during the original Zerg campaign, Kerrigan (now infested) goes with a small Zerg force inside of a Science Vessel to get a classified Ghost Program data to break her ghost conditioning to access psionic powers. A Science Vessel is about the same size of a Siege Tank in the game? How about in this mission? It's quite huge.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Ebon Hawk in Knights of the Old Republic is noticeably larger on the inside than the outside. However, considering it is based on the aforementioned Millennium Falcon, this could be contrived as a something of an Affectionate Parody.
  • In Star Wars: The Old Republic, full-scale models of the Republic frigate can be seen up close in various places. There is absolutely no way that the interiors of the Esseles and Black Talon flashpoints, both of which partially take place in one of those frigates, could fit inside.
• Stardew Valley:
  • Your home looks about as big inside as it does on the outside... at first. Once Robin's upgraded it, you get more and more rooms, but the outside never changes. When you get married, your spouse not only moves into your home, but installs their own room next to yours. Many other houses in town are similarly bigger on the inside. Even Linus' tent is slightly bigger inside.
  • Want to create a distillery farm? You can now almost double your output by putting your kegs inside sheds, thereby making more room for crops. Or upgrade them to Big Sheds, which doubles the interior size again without any change to the exterior size. Barns and Coops are also larger on the inside than the outside, but not by as much as Big Sheds, and they have interior walls and machinery that make it hard to place layouts.
• Super Mario 64:
  • There's a sub-area in the level "Snowman's Land" which is reached by going into an igloo which is so tiny, Mario has to crawl to get in. But inside, it's almost a quarter the size of the main level itself.
  • And there's the Black Room of Death inside the front wall of the castle, which is bigger than the wall is on the outside.
• The castle levels from the original Super Mario Bros. are several screens in size on the inside, but the castles that Mario enters in the previous stages are small enough that the entire building appears onscreen. Even more so in the SNES remake, where their walls actually no longer extend offscreen.
• The jars in Super Mario Bros. 2, where on the outside, they are as wide as your character, but inside, they take up the whole screen, with sand, wood blocks, planted items, and enemies inside them. The GBA remake even has ones with Ferris wheels inside them.
• The Comet Observatory domes from Super Mario Galaxy.
• Subtler example: The map Well in Team Fortress 2 has bases that are bigger on the inside, though not very much. More significant is that the rockets that clearly exceed the roofline from inside are not visible from the outside. There's no special trick of non-linear geometry going on (the engine didn't even support such a thing at the time); they just hid part of the interior behind a Skybox and projected the rest of the building's façade onto it.
• Happens at various structures when entering them in Titan Quest, the game doesn't even try to hide it and the Tower of Judgement in Hades takes the cake in this regard.
• The alien spaceship you explore, in Tomb Raider III, looks pretty small on the outside, but the inside is three times larger than the exterior.
• Touhou Project:
  • Eientei and the Scarlet Devil Mansion. The head maid of the Scarlet Devil Mansion likes to play with time and space, expanding and contracting dimensions to do her housework. Eientei contains (or contained) at least one hallway whose length is impossible and whose ultimate destination is the moon.
  • Possibly the ultimate example is Miko's pad, Senkai. It's an infinite space contained in a tiny crack.
  • Fanon often depicts Kisume's bucket in this manner. While it looks like an ordinary wooden well bucket, and her head is poking out the top as if she's simply sitting in it, fans have interpreted the bucket as Kisume's home, which she can duck down inside of and find everything a person would need to survive.
• Ultraverse Prime have a stage where your character infiltrates a moving container truck, which seems to be at most fifteen meters in length. But once you're inside, you're moving forward through a corridor that stretches miles and miles and miles until the end.
• In Unreal, whenever the game loads a new level while entering an enclosed space (mostly spaceships, but some structures too), you can expect the level itself to be much larger than the structure you saw from the outside before the loading screen - and not to follow its geometry very precisely, either.
• The Wake of the Ravager series had magic tents that were explicitly bigger on the inside.
• Warframe dropships were built by the Tenno with technology that does this. As the updates progressed, the interior has become even bigger, having at least doubled compared to the first release. Eventually, this was Retconned into the ships being two separate parts: the small, stealthy "lander" which is basically a cockpit with engines and an airlock, and the larger "orbiter" which contains the Tenno's arsenal and manufacturing equipment, and which the lander must attach to for interplanetary travel.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The game generally averts this. Instances (that is, dungeons, but they're often not dungeons in story terms) are generally inaccessible aside from the one designated entrance, and are generally underground or in enclosed buildings, but if you go to one that's not an enclosed building and if you find a way to access them anyway you'll generally find that they take up as much space in the outside world as exists inside the instance. However, there are a few exceptions. Most notably, places controlled by mages are likely to be bigger on the inside - a notable example is the "Tower of Karazhan", which is positively palatial inside. The Mage Tower in Stormwind lampshades this trope by limiting the tower itself very strictly to what could be contained inside - but at the top is an explicit portal to a much larger extradimensional space.
  • Probably played straight with Blackrock Spire, a huge instance even for the mountain that contains it. And then there's Blackwing Lair and Blacwing Descent...
  • Blackrock Spire and Blackwing Lair (technically part of the same instance map) itself is actually an aversion. Careful examination of the instance map files (the instance contains a copy of the mountain from the exterior world, only without the entrances) reveals that the instance JUST BARELY fits into the mountain.
  • The mage city of Dalaran, on the other hand, completely averts this trope: it's exactly as large as the outside suggests.
  • Played Straight with the Bilgewater Cartel's Town-In-A-Box, which is a box of about 1 foot by 1 foot by 1 foot, but is able to contain several buildings, multiple people, and according to quest-text, a dock and an oil rig.
• In XIII, the submarine is absurdly large on the inside and tiny on the outside.
• Ships in the X-Universe series use subspace compression technology to make the cargo bay bigger. This means that an M5 scoutship not much bigger than a modern F-16 can carry at least a dozen people in a space roughly the size of a refrigerator. The process, incidentally, is fatal to lifeforms unless an additional life-support package is installed, and it remains rather unpleasant to undergo.

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