Kingdoms

Kingdoms partition the land into territories anchored on settlements. The Kingdoms card in the Build tool gives you full control over how they’re generated and rendered.

Render mode

The Render mode select decides how kingdom polygons are drawn.

Off — no kingdom layer.
Border — dashed outline (the legacy look).
Fill — a translucent wash with no outline.
Border + fill — wash with a dashed border on top.

Kingdom borders that run along the coast are suppressed automatically — the coastline layer already draws that arc, so the dashed outline only shows where two kingdoms meet inland.

Border alignment

How the seat-assignment walk decides who owns which cell.

Straight-line Voronoi — pure nearest-seat by distance. Cheap, ignores rivers and ridges.
River-aware — a Dijkstra walk over the mesh that treats rivers as high-cost crossings. Borders tend to settle along riverbanks.
Terrain-aware — same Dijkstra walk, but mountains and steep slopes act as the high-cost frontier. Borders gravitate to ridges.
Rivers + terrain — both penalties stacked.

The cost-field modes use the same triangle-by-triangle Dijkstra under the hood. River crossings get a 3× penalty, mountain steps get a 3× penalty, and steep slopes pay a soft cost proportional to the elevation delta.

Count (0 = auto)

How many kingdoms to carve.

0 — use the legacy cascade: capitals + cities first, fall back to towns if there aren’t at least two capital-tier seats.
1 to 30 — take the top K candidates ranked by tier (capital > city > town) then by distance to the land centroid. Useful for pruning a busy continent down to “five major powers” or expanding a sparse one with regional fiefs.

Compactness

A 0–1 weight on the seat-assignment penalty. At 0 you get pure Voronoi — regions sprawl. At 1 regions are pulled toward circular shapes around each seat, and straggly territories get reassigned to closer seats.

Compactness works with every Border alignment mode. In the cost-field modes it scales the base distance term so a long detour around a river is no longer “free” terrain-wise.

Minimum size

A 0–0.2 fraction of total land area below which a kingdom polygon is dropped. Raising this absorbs single-cell slivers that read as “kingdoms” but are really just artifacts of the assignment walk. The default 0.003 matches the pre-MVP floor.

Border smoothness

0–3 Chaikin smoothing iterations applied to kingdom polygons.

0 — the polygon follows the underlying mesh tightly (jagged).
3 — heavily smoothed (rounded).

Default 2 matches the legacy look. The mesh path gives finer-grained control than the grid path, which only toggles smoothing on or off.

Fill opacity (when fill mode is on)

0–1 opacity of the kingdom wash. Default 0.12 — low enough that the basemap reads through clearly. Pushing higher gives a more “political map” feel.

This slider only appears when Render mode is Fill or Border + fill.

Colouring

How kingdom colours are picked.

Single colour — every kingdom uses the same hex. Defaults to the palette’s outline ink. Below the select, a colour picker + text input lets you override.
Per-kingdom palette — each kingdom gets a distinct hue distributed by the golden angle (137.508°) on its stable seat index. Adjacent regions always read apart, and the colours are stable across regens of the same seed.

The single-colour input accepts any six-digit hex (#aabbcc). Empty input restores the palette default.

Tips

For a clean cartographic look, pick Render mode = Border with Single colour matching your style. Border alignment = Rivers + terrain makes the dashes follow natural frontiers.
For a political map, pick Render mode = Both with Per-kingdom palette and Fill opacity around 0.15–0.20. Compactness 0.4–0.6 keeps the regions readable.
For fewer kingdoms, set Count to a small number (3–5). The system picks the most central seats.
For more kingdoms, push Count up — the system pulls in towns as additional seats.

Edit generated features — rename, recolour, delete, or reshape a single kingdom’s border after it’s generated.
Terrain & detail — the parent section.
Coastlines — kingdom borders along the coast are suppressed in favour of the coastline stroke; this guide explains the coastline side.
Saving a scene — kingdoms become editable region layers in the saved scene when the Kingdoms → regions conversion toggle is on.