Most big online competitive shooters top out at around 50-60 players. PUBG can have up to 100, Warzone can have some limited-time modes with support for up to 200 players, but that’s generally where things hit a technological barrier. After that, the game starts having trouble keeping everyone connected and you start getting lag, dropped players, or both.

Scavengers normally limits its matches to 60 players, but it recently just wrapped an event where it managed to stuff 4,144 players into a single map. The “Winter Sports” event was hosted in the ScavLab, Scavengers’ built-in experimentation mode. It allows developer Midwinter Entertainment to easily throw in limited-time events and test out new tech they plan to integrate into their game.

In the “Winter Sports” event, Midwinter was testing new technology that allows them to create a single instanced world with thousands of players. And as Midwinter explains in a press release, this is way more difficult than it sounds.

“Because every player is visible to every other player, a tenfold increase in player numbers causes a significantly greater than tenfold increase in complexity,” writes Midwinter. Huge advancements were required across the entire Scavengers system, including networking, server infrastructure, and even in-game rendering so that each connected computer didn’t slow to a crawl.

Although the event didn’t include a massive 4,000-player free-for-all, the devs did ask players to perform simple tasks like jump, dance, and slide down a mountain. There were also a few thousand Threshers killed just to see what would happen.

And amazingly, it just worked.

Over 4,000 still isn’t a record for a single multiplayer event. Eve Online still holds that title with over 8,000 players fighting in a single space battle. However, giant Eve battles can play out over the course of hours as the servers slow to an absolute crawl. Scavengers is looking to maintain a shooter’s performance with thousands of players taking part.

Scavengers might have just implemented our first steps to truly huge virtual worlds.