Settlements & roads

Towns and roads are the layer that turns terrain into a settled world. This page covers how they’re drawn, and how to change them.

Settlements

Every settlement draws as a cartographic mark sized by its tier — a walled compound for a capital, a towered keep for a city, a cluster of roofs for a town, down to a single cottage for a hamlet. The name sits just below the mark.

Find these under Build → Settlements.

Control	What it does
Settlements	How many towns the generator places.
Labels	How many of them get a name on the map.
Settlement style	The drawing treatment (see below).
Mark size	Scales every mark. Turn it down on a crowded world map.
Mark shadow	The cast shadow under each mark.
Mark contrast	How hard marks read against the terrain.

Styles

Match map style follows whatever map style you picked, which is usually what you want. The named styles apply one treatment regardless — Hand-inked, Cartographic, Engraved, Storybook, Heraldic — so you can borrow another style’s town look without changing the whole map.

Plain dots is the pre-illustration look: a simple filled circle. It’s worth reaching for on dense world maps where drawn marks crowd each other.

Marks feel too loud?

Turn Mark contrast down. It tones the whole mark toward the paper colour so towns sit in the map rather than on top of it. Around 0.3–0.5 reads as a softly-drawn map; 1 is a hard, graphic look.

Colour

Marks take their ink from your map’s label colour by default, so towns and their names read as one layer. To colour them separately, use Build → Palette overrides → Settlement ink. There’s a Road ink row right beside it.

Giving one town its own icon

Some places deserve their own symbol. In the Decorate tool, turn on Edit, click a town, and pick from Map icon: the five tiers plus Port, Fortress, Abbey, Mine and Ruined Town. Default puts it back to the tier mark.

Note

A custom icon is baked into the map image. If you save the map as a scene, the scene’s pin still uses its own icon set — the two don’t share artwork.

Roads

Roads come in three tiers, and the generator decides which is which:

• Royal roads connect capitals and cities — the boldest, darkest strokes.
• Trade roads add regional links between cities.
• Local tracks run from villages and hamlets to the nearest larger town.

Under Build → Roads:

Control	What it does
Road style	The stroke treatment (see below).
Road weight	Scales every road’s thickness.
Road casing	The pale halo that keeps a road readable across forest. Set it to 0 for bare lines.

Road style offers Match map style plus Hand-inked, Cartographic and Engraved; Cobbled (paved) draws a solid verge under a broken core, the classic paved-highway convention; Dashed routes breaks every tier for a survey-map look; Minimal is uncased hairlines for very busy maps.

Road names

Royal and trade roads get names that curve along the road, the way river names follow the water. How many are named follows the Labels slider.

Local tracks are never named — there are dozens of them, and a map captioned with every cart track is unreadable. To name one anyway, select it in the road editor and promote it to a trade road.

Fonts and curving for road names live under Build → Label typography → Roads, alongside every other label family.

Editing roads

In the Decorate tool, turn on Edit, then use the Roads row. Only one road tool is active at a time.

Select and re-route

Select, then click a road. Handles appear along it — drag one and the road bends around it, with nearby stretches following so you get a curve rather than a kink. The inspector shows its name, its tier, and a reset route button that puts it back on the generated path.

Connect two towns

Connect, pick a tier, then click two towns. The new road routes itself around the terrain using the same pathfinding the generator uses — hugging valleys, fording rivers at sensible points, avoiding mountains unless it has to climb.

If nothing appears, the two towns probably have no land route between them.

Draw a road by hand

Draw, then drag across the map. A hand-drawn road isn’t tied to any town, so it’s the tool for caravan tracks, ferry approaches, or a road to somewhere that isn’t a settlement.

Removing roads

Select a road and press Delete. Hand-drawn roads are removed outright; generated ones are hidden and can be brought back with undo or Reset all feature edits.

Your edits are saved with the map

Town icons, hand-drawn roads, re-routes and renames all travel with the map, so re-opening it from My Maps brings them back.