Welcome to my liveblog of The Lost Metal! Intro post here, beware of spoilers.

MAPS! We have maps, people. 

I don’t remember the maps super well from the previous books, but it looks like the map of the Elendel Basin hasn’t changed. The rail lines might be longer? And I don’t recognize the name Tinweight Settlement, so it and a few other locations may be newly noted. Then again, I could just be failing to recall the last version.

The map of the City of Elendel definitely has new notations. I recognize that handwriting! How are you doing, Nazh? Still put-upon, I see. Khriss is driving you really hard, isn’t she? 
I expect we’ll learn more about these locations soon, but it does seem to me that the rail lines are more extensive than before. I’ll have to pull up the old versions to check at some point.

The third map, though. Whoo-wee! We’ve got a view past the Basin, including the southern continent and beyond! Yay!
…Although, is it just me? Was anyone else expecting there to be an actual ocean between the continents? It feels a little silly that everything is so connected by supposedly navigable coastline, even if those mountains and the intervening roughs appear to block easy foot travel. It’s hard to believe that nice climate and available resources is enough to preclude all exploration outside the Elendel Basin area. If the SoScads (Malwish consortium, apparently) have had time to develop airships, surely some intrepid soul would have at least sailed a boat around? 
Gasp! Allomancer Jack? You volunteer? Good luck, sir, and I look forward to reading of your exploits in the broadsheets

I’m particularly intrigued by the presence of a landmass beyond the Malwish, here denoted only as “The Maskless.” That little detail suggests that there are a lot more populated regions of Scadrial than had been expected. Elendel may have Harmony’s blessing and attention in a lot of ways, but it’s hard not to consider them provincial when looking at this map and remembering that Scadrial is the closest thing to an Earth analog. There’s got to be a lot of room for the population to have expanded since the Catacendre, from Harmony only knows how many hidden pockets of survivors. 

I do wonder if the southern landmass where the Maskless live is similarly frigid to the Malwish’s tundra-like home. There are no latitude indicators on the map, and I wouldn’t know what units to use anyway. The map grid is extremely regular, with no attempt to compensate for planetary curvature. That could be an artifact of the chosen projection, or it could be an indication that these “continents” are not as large as that term would lead us to believe. The apparent size of the Elendel Basin suggests the latter to me.