Terrain & detail
Below the world setup, the Build tool holds all the terrain tweaking — grouped into category cards you expand as needed. Only the cards that apply to your current map kind are shown at any time. This is where most of the day-to-day adjusting happens.
Top-level terrain knobs.
- Water amount — sea level. Higher = more water, less land.
- Terrain drama — how rugged peaks and valleys are. Low = rolling hills; high = jagged shapes.
- Mountains — how much of the land is mountainous.
- Forests — how much of the land is forested.
- Coastal islands — density of tiny offshore islands along the coast. At 0 the coast is clean; at 1 the offshore band fills with seamounts and islets.
- Coastal island scatter — how spread out those offshore islands are. Low = clusters (Hawaii-style); high = many small, well-separated islets (Maldives-style).
- Coastline fidelity — how closely the coastline stroke hugs the underlying terrain. See the coastlines guide for the detail.
- Coastal features (toggle) — when on, the renderer tags each coastline segment as cliff / beach / cove and draws each with a distinctive stroke. See coastlines.
World feel
Section titled “World feel”High-level character of the world, in the World feel card. These sit over the amount sliders above — they change how the terrain forms, not how much of it there is. Each defaults to the middle, so leaving them alone changes nothing.
- Tectonic activity — how hard mountains rise along the plate boundaries. Low = a quiet, old continent where relief is spread out and gentle; high = young, violent tectonics with mountains slammed up along the fault lines.
- Continent definition — how sharply landmasses separate. Low = organic, ragged coasts with islands bleeding between continents; high = crisp, well-separated continents. Only affects World maps with more than one continent.
- Weathering — the age of the mountains. Low = raw, jagged young peaks; high = ancient, worn-down, smoothed massifs.
Rivers
Section titled “Rivers”- Rivers — global density. Higher = more independent rivers carved into the heightmap.
- River flow (0–2) — multiplier on rainfall feeding flow accumulation.
1 means bigger, faster rivers across the map.
- River width (0–2) — visual ribbon thickness.
- Lakes — how many inland bodies of water get placed.
- Lake shore (0–1.5) — how strongly the waterline is drawn. It banks the shallows and raises a rim where the ground outside the lake sits below the water, so a lake on a hillside doesn’t read as though it were about to spill out. 0 leaves lakes as a bare fill.
- Waterfalls — where a river leaves a lake over that rim, draw it as a cascade. Which is what it is.
Settlements & roads
Section titled “Settlements & roads”- Settlements — overall density.
- Labels — how many settlements and callouts get a name.
How towns and roads are drawn — mark styles, road styles, road names, and editing roads by hand — has a page of its own: settlements & roads.
Local settlement names live inside the basemap PNG; world / regional callouts can be exported as editable text features at save time. See saving a scene.
Kingdoms
Section titled “Kingdoms”A whole section to itself — see the kingdoms guide for render mode, border alignment, count, compactness, fill opacity, and colouring options.
Climate detail
Section titled “Climate detail”- Climate band warping — how wavy the latitude-driven climate bands are. 0 = perfectly straight horizontal stripes (clean Hadley-cell); 1 = heavily warped, so a “temperate forest” band reads as a meandering region rather than a strip.
- Coast irregularity — loosens the rigid half-plane on coastal maps so headlands, capes, and offshore islands punch through.
Climate (Wind)
Section titled “Climate (Wind)”Inside the Climate detail card you’ll find:
- Wind from (compass degrees) — drives orographic precipitation. Default 270° (westerlies) matches Earth’s prevailing wind at temperate latitudes.
- Wind strength (0–1) — 0 = isotropic slope boost (legacy behaviour); 1 = strong rain-shadow effect with steep windward/leeward contrast.
- Light from (compass degrees) — hillshade direction. Default 315° (NW) is the conventional cartographic light.
- Sun elevation (0–90°) — 0 grazing, 90 directly overhead. Default 45° gives clear shadows without crushing detail.
Viewport
Section titled “Viewport”Lets you pan and zoom into the same world to re-frame without re-rolling.
- Pan X / Y (−1 to +1) — offset in units of map widths/heights.
- Zoom (0.3–3) — 1 = identity; >1 zooms out (more world in the frame); less than 1 zooms in.
Aesthetics
Section titled “Aesthetics”A card of multipliers on top of the chosen style’s defaults. 1.0 = the style’s value, 0 = off, 2 = double.
- Forest stipple density — how dense forest dots / hatching is.
- Land mottling — within-biome noise modulation (macro + micro).
- Paper grain — high-frequency grain overlay.
- Ocean opacity — 0 lets the depth ramp + hillshade show through; 1 fills every ocean cell with a single flat blue (stylised look).
- Mountain obliqueness (0–1) — at 0 the basemap is flat top-down; at 1 mountains visibly “lift” toward the top of the screen for a fantasy-map feel.
Below the multipliers is the Palette overrides section — see the custom palette guide.
Kind-specific sections
Section titled “Kind-specific sections”These show only when their map kind is active:
- World — Continents (1–8 integer slider).
- Archipelago — Island layout, Number of islands, Island size, Island size variation, Pattern conformance, Spread across map, Water level.
- River valley — River width, River width variation, River edge noise, Branching / tributaries.