I suspect there’s one orb per resource type - given that he’s got a bunch of different ones all lined up on those shelves
The noise texture on each one is subtly different from the looks of it—not just intensity.
Might be both? The noise on those looks a hell of a lot like the resource distributions that were posted a while back (see below)
Agree that the masked areas make it seem unlikely that it’s a complete map (would suck if there were large areas of the world that spawned nothing). However, my hunch is that the masked areas represent the water level of the world, so that you can more easily orient the distribution with the terrain of the world
Also, mapping a square map to a sphere is mildly difficult if you want to avoid bizarre warping/seams - so if this is depicting resource distributions, it’s probably only showing some of it (centered on the player’s location, perhaps? That’d be a cool effect as you run around)