Chapter and story size limits? - The Writers' Group (2024)

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A question I never knew I had

Since there's a 999-chapter limit to a story, I would guess there's also a limit to how many words or characters a chapter or story can have, but the longest chapter/one-shot story I know of was over 35,000 words (I think I saw a 50,000-60,000-word chapter once, but I could be misremembering it) and the longest story clocked in at over 4,500,000 words. If there is a limit, it's probably one of those irrelevant limits that would practically never come into play. If I were to guess about a word limit, a story limit would be 9,999,999 words (low-end) or 999,999,999 words (high-end) if I use the 999-chapter limit as a base. If a chapter limit would be shorter than a story limit, then I'd guess its limit is 999,999 words.

But as for character limits, I got no guesses on that one. It might actually be limitless, or for all intent and purposes limitless if one story would ever realistically challenge it.

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Thanks!

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I found a message on the fimfic discord from 2018 where Xaquseg mentions the character limit for chapters is arbitrarily large - "probably at least 5-10mil" and the bbcode parser has a byte limit that reduces it further, but knighty said it's only 100kb, which reduces the character count to more human levels. According to an online converter, that's about ~100,000 characters? Doubt that's accurate, but it's probably around that order of magnitude.

We can assume there's no hard character limit for stories per se, since it's the chapters that contain story text. But since a story can only* have 1000 chapters, and there's a potential limit of ~100,000 characters per chapter, we can extrapolate that to ~100 million characters.

Some other unusual char limits:

• Story long descriptions have a stated limit of 10,000 characters, but the actual limit is 9,930.
• User bios have a stated limit of 250 characters, but the actual limit is 200.
• Quote labels can have 2001 characters. I don't know if this is stated anywhere.

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There is a soft* limit of 1000 chapters.

*not actually a limit. If you know, you know.

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Ah, perfect! This is what I was looking for. Thank you

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Using Unicode UTF-8 a character may occupy from one to four bytes, so depending on what characters you use it may be difficult to give exact numbers in case it's a byte limit and not character limit.

Could be it has limitations for both characters and bytes, while also implementing automatic compression, and then it would also depend on entropy. (I know creating books in Everquest II will have a character limit dependent on how well it can be compressed.)

For reference: The Ptoloemy chapter linked by PaulAsaran is 364640 bytes in default UTF-8 and 354918 with ANSI. Identical text in both versions as no non-ansi character was seen. (And both with CR/LF combo for newline.)

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:3

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I've seen an entire 100K+ story in one chapter before it was properly split up. This one to be precise:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/53281/the-final-crusade

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Big enough that I've never seen a story legitimately need to worry about hitting them, so for practical purposes, there probably isn't much of a limit.

Academically? 999 chapters per story, and each chapter can be... uh, I don't know how long, but really long.