unfortunatly not what it's doing, i'll go to another island and walk around and it doesn't show up
I think this is a resolution error. In the properties files for servers and game, there's an entry called MapTileResolution.
The value there is probably too high. With a value of 1024, these problems shouldn't occur.
Unfortunately, I can't find any entry for this in the game settings via the menu, so it would have to be changed in the properties file in the single player game as well.