Build tool

The Build tool holds the choices that shape the whole map — its kind, style, and climate — plus the terrain sliders further down, grouped into category cards. Changing anything near the top typically rebuilds the whole map.

Detail

The Detail control sets how finely the map is sampled:

Low (~12,000 points) — fastest, good while you paint or explore.
Medium (~30,000 points) — the default, balanced.
High (~60,000 points) — slowest, finest coastline detail.

Higher detail means a slower rebuild on every slider change. Pick low while exploring; bump to high before saving.

Map kind

Picking a kind re-seeds the shape sliders — water, ruggedness, mountains, rivers, offshore islands and so on — to values that read well for that kind (an archipelago starts wet and islanded, a mountain map rugged and dry, a river valley around one dominant river). Your style, palette, and climate are left alone. Tune from there, or start from a preset for a fuller look.

The eight kinds drive the overall layout:

World — multiple continents separated by ocean. The Build tool gains a Continents slider (1–8).
Continent — one major landmass.
Archipelago — chain or cluster of islands. Adds archipelago-specific knobs to the Build tool (Island layout, Number of islands, Island size, Spread across map, Water level).
Region — a more zoomed-in section of land.
Coast — half land, half sea, parallel to one canvas edge.
Inland — no ocean; rivers terminate in lakes.
Mountain — a single range fills the canvas.
River valley — one carved river with tributaries. Adds river-valley sliders (River width, River width variation, River edge noise, Branching).

Style

Picks one of seven baked palettes. Each one is a complete look — fonts, line weights, ocean colour, biome tints, hand-drawn textures.

Parchment — warm cream paper, ink linework.
Antique chart — sepia mariner’s chart.
Atlas — high-contrast modern reference.
Painterly — soft brush textures.
Clean digital — flat colour, no texture.
Dark fantasy — moody ink-and-shadow.
Cosy hand-drawn — Ghibli-inspired soft pastels.

You can override individual palette channels — see the palette overrides guide.

Climate

The Climate bias select shifts biome distribution:

Temperate — vibrant inland forests, mixed biomes.
Tropical — rainforests near the equator, savannahs at mid-latitude.
Arid — desert-heavy; sparse forest cover.
Frozen — tundra and snow dominate.
Mixed — cycles through all of the above by latitude.

Climate works with the Wind from direction (in the Build tool’s Climate detail card) to drive orographic precipitation — windward slopes get extra rain, leeward sides sit in the rain shadow.

Aspect ratio

The output canvas shape:

Square (1:1)
Atlas (4:3) — the default. Reads as a printed-map aspect.
Wide (16:9) — fits a 16:9 display without letterboxing.
Banner (2:1) — wide enough for a long coastline view.

Aspect ratio + pixel size together determine the resolution. Pixel size is fixed at 1024px for the live preview and 2048px for the save render.

Terrain & detail — the slider categories that depend on the kind you picked here.
Locks — how to pin parts of the map while you keep rerolling.