I've been working on for the last few weeks... trying to make a grid style world in Pygame.
Terr-aria or Rimworld or Dungeon keeper come to mind, thought I'm trying to do this Map style, or overhead... so Rimworld would likely most closley represent what I'm trying to do.

At game start... a world is created, and it has a list of 'cubes'. Cubes are 32x32 and they are the blocks that make up the grid. From there they can contain 'stuff'.... ie: grass, tree, fire, an npc, etc. I have to imagine Terraria does this similar to this - as it has to keep track of what is in a space.

The entire world is 1000x1000 or 100,000 cubes.

I only want to render around 714 of them at a time - the view window, or camera I guess you would say.

I am having a heck of a time figuring out how to pick out the 714 cubes I should be seeing. I guess it boils down to .... I only want to render the cubes in the camera, but.... still update logic for the surrounding area. Looping 100,000 cubes every game frame seems to be a bit much.

Has anyone done something similar?

My other issue is addressing the cubes... I wasn't sure if on creation they should be given their X, Y co-ordinate,
or should they just be id'd..... 1, 2, 3, etc.

Hoping someone might be able to explain how they would tackle this.

Welcome to data structures. Your exact solution may depend on some specific requirements but the general idea that all solutions to this problem is to have a hierarchy of grids. I.e. you group your grids into larger buckets that can be retrieved very quickly. If you had, for example, a map that was 1024x1024 grids big, then you might start grouping into buckets 16x16 in size. You create a data structure that can easily take your view's coordinates and find the final set of 16x16 buckets that your view can see - which depending on where your view is located and how many grids you can fit on the screen might be as small as 1 or much larger - - this is where you need appropriately pick the size of buckets to match your problem.

[ this is a psuedo description of on possible solution - look at quad-trees online for a more general idea]

The complexity of how you solve this can vary quite a bit depending on if you want to include moving entities or just the world grids.

DR

Would I still be able to scroll across the grids though?

I get what you are saying (I think).

I'll look into Quad Trees.

I wish there was a good Pygame book that dealt with OOP and walked through an entire 2D RPG game... I know there are 10+ Pygame books... but I never find anything in depth enough.