hub world

From hub, meaning the central point or are of an activity, region, or network.

hub world (plural hub worlds)

1. (video games) An area in a video game from which most or all of the game's levels are accessed.

   Peach's Castle in Super Mario 64 is an early example of a hub world.

   • 2009, Game Informer Magazine: For Video Game Enthusiasts, page 62:

     First of all, the game is split into discrete levels joined by a hub world.

   • 2010, EZ Guides: The Games of the Decade:

     The loot system is as constant and unyielding as the endlessly respawning enemies: it's an obsessive's nirvana, leading to as much time navigating the inventory screen as the game's hub world and dungeons.

   • 2014, Tobias Winnerling, Early Modernity and Video Games, page 206:

     Souls, which function as both currency and experience points, are slowly collected as the player works through a stage, and can only be spent at Nexus, the hub world that players are transported to between stages.

2. (science fiction) A planet which serves as a hub.
   • 1965, John Wood Campbell, editor, Analog Science Fact/science Fiction, page 43:

     Otherwise, our beautiful tree might become a definite nuisance on any Hub world to which it is introduced.

   • 2007, Aaron Michael Fanthorpe, Genesis Project: Prelude to Destiny, volume 1, page 8:

     A hub world in the Kasna Republik, Kasnearfar was a cosmopolitan port for beings across the Four Galaxies.

   • 2012, Ted White, Sideslip‎:

     But something was shaping up—something incomprehensible and vast, concerning the Hub Worlds, something that was apparently tangled in and directly related to tens of thousands of years of interacting histories.

• hub
• (video games): overworld