Multi Room Caves on a Single Map

So I was thinking of making some caves, I dont want the maps to just multiply for tiny rooms,

What do people think of a big cave map where you can 'enter' a door way and it takes you to a different room but its on the same map, rather than having say 4 small cave rooms attached to a big room.

Its all 1 map with map transfers at the door ways to different parts of the map?

If you want to have a lot of events in the caves, it's better to make a lot of smaller maps.  Otherwise, yes you can make a single large map which has smaller cave sections in it.  As long as the map sections are far enough apart so the player can't see from one to the other, the player won't know the difference.

What Whitesphere said is how I do it in my games. Most of my towns are one map for the town, one map for all the shops you can enter, with a gap of 20 tiles in each direction so the player cannot see the fact that it is all on one map. Seems to have worked well so far in my opinion.

Yeah it's what I was thinking, as I know there is 1000 limit of maps, but I dont want to use loads of maps for the shops for each town!

Think I might have to use your idea with shops, also make it easier to manage everything having it all on one map, cheers guys :)

This is how they did it back in 2k3! Cool.

The only problem, though, is that the screen will focus only on the character! It can look a bit ugly.

Normally in small rooms the camera doesn't pan.

I used to do it for shops within a single town... :)

It's perfectly fine to do multiple rooms in one map. It's also a necessity if you're planning a very large rpg and might run into hitting the 999 limit by making every 17x13 map it's own. But what others said is also true.

If you have a large dungeon, trying to cram everything into one map might make the map harder for the developer to fix if something goes wrong. Too many events could cause lag, although with Ace this is less of a concern than in previous installments. But there is also trying to locate events when you need to add changes or connect it with other events.

Of course, for smaller maps, trying to toggle each separate Map ID for single event changes can also be tedious as well when it's easier to grab and paste or change in one map.

From a player standpoint, just keep an eye out for potential lag. From a developing standpoint, use whichever feels the most comfortable and doesn't add too much headache to playtesting, fixing, and updating your game.