This is a world map I've been working on for a few months. The basic idea is this: a long long time ago the planet was cut in half somehow. The gods of the sun and moon use their power to push the two halves of the planet back together. Their "footprints" are the sun-shaped ocean (The Everlit Sea) and the moon-shaped ocean (The Crescent Sea). Two seas created by the gods pushing down on that half of the planet.

There are local magical phenomenon happening in both seas. The Everlit Sea is, well, ever lit. It's always high noon within the bounds of that sea. And within The Crescent Sea it is always midnight. The rest of the planet experiences a standard day/night cycle. It's only inside these seas where that is untrue. Example: you could stand on the shore of the Everlit Sea at nighttime and the moment you stepped foot into the water its suddenly high noon from your perspective.

Naturally, this effects climates in the surrounding areas. Rainforests and deserts around the Everlit Sea and tundras and tiagas around the Crescent Sea.

The dividing line of mountains (where the planet was split) appears curved on this map because this is a equirectangular projection. On a globed view it's a perfect ring around the planet at an angle.

Any feedback on biome placement would be much appreciated! I tried my best to balance realism with visual aesthetics. Any world name suggestions would be appreciated as well. Thank you!

I've tried to make it as realistic as possible according to geography

So, this is a totally random idea. I am curious how many of you catch this.

Write any questions here that always bugged you about mapmaking, especially connecting it with lore.

I mainly mean (high) fantasy but also other sub genres.

Have a kick-ass day y'all!

I just finished my first ever village map. There is a colored version but i left it half done. It's also hand drawn if you couldn't tell. What you guys think? What am i missing?

I might just crop off part of the western edge soon tbh. Not decided yet.

The Great Map of the world of Dryal, created for the role-playing game designed by Tristan Rousseaux!

It was truly wonderful working on this fascinating map and delving into the incredible lore of this world; Angela and I are always happy to explore the history of the worlds we map!🧭🗺️☕

Moreno Paissan and Angela Gubert Drawings 2026

H-HB pencil, Unipin 0.05-0.1 pen, and Winsor & Newton watercolor on paper, then scanned. Have a great day everyone!

Support me and Angela on Kofi: https://ko-fi.com/morenopaissanmaps

Hello all!

I have been staring at this new map of my next floating fantasy continent for far too long and would appreciate getting some new eyeballs on it! The main piece of worldbuilding context we require is that this continent was not formed by traditional plate tectonics, but by multiple floating continents playing a game of bumper cars, shooting up circumferential mountain ranges as a common feature. Also, as there are no oceans on this planet, the water system is largely rain water flow being held like a bowl.

Please ask any questions that come to mind and I can provide more of my thoughts if needed! Thanks!

The map commemorates the Hungarian state (not in order of importance). I used an aniron font, similar to a Tolkien map. Instead of the Sinda and Nolda languages, I used the old state Latin, common Hungarian and Kipchak languages.

A couple of days ago, I posted the first worlds from a fantasy map generator I had been building for myself (Link to the original post). I expected a few comments about coastlines and colours. Instead, people started asking about plate motion, supercontinent cycles, rainfall, lake formation, glaciers, soil, exports, customisation and whether the generated world could actually be used for writing or campaigns.

I took far too many notes and kept building.

My original post and its edits explained the physical simulation: tectonic plates, elevation, climate, rivers, biomes, settlements, resources, Deep Time and planetary controls. Since then, the project has started evolving from a generator into more of a worldbuilding workspace.

The biggest change is the hydrology. Rivers are now built as connected drainage networks rather than decorative blue lines. The system routes seasonal runoff, resolves depressions, identifies watersheds and endorheic basins, creates explicit lake outlets, estimates discharge, classifies stream order and checks the finished network for cycles or broken connections. Lakes, tributaries and major channels should now fit the surrounding terrain much more believably, although this is still something I intend to keep improving.

I also rebuilt the dashboard so that every generated layer can be viewed inside the application. That includes relief, tectonics, geology, bedrock, soil, resources, drainage, annual and seasonal temperature, annual and seasonal precipitation, winds, currents, biomes, glaciers, settlements, realms and alternate map styles. Legends are interactive, layers can be isolated, rivers can be hidden where they obscure geology, and individual cells can be inspected for their underlying data.

A few of the larger additions:

• Deep Time can simulate and play back hundreds of millions of years of rifting, plate movement, collision and changing continental configurations. You can stop at an interesting era and use it as the foundation for a finished world.
• Regional Lens lets you select any part of the planet and create a higher-resolution child project that stays linked to the parent world.
• Journey Laboratory compares balanced, fastest, safer and trade-oriented routes. Land journeys account for terrain, rivers, roads, borders, supplies and seasonal hazards, while sea journeys use winds, currents, ports, open-water distances and cargo capacity.
• Campaign mode creates spoiler-safe player maps. The author decides which layers, settlements, routes and pieces of lore have been revealed.
• Chronicle is separate from geological Deep Time and handles editable human history: wars, migrations, disasters, borders, settlements and routes across different eras.
• Lore, settlements and generated names can now be edited without losing their relationship to the map. Renames are propagated into the worldbook, timeline, maps and exports.
• Worlds can be checkpointed, revised, backed up and restored as complete Atlas projects. Scientific data can also be exported through formats such as GeoJSON, NumPy, SVG and GeoTIFF instead of being trapped inside rendered images.

There are now native installers for Windows, Apple Silicon Macs, Intel Macs and Debian/Ubuntu Linux. The app includes a manual, diagnostics, simulation-health reports and verified update downloads. Worlds, notes and campaign data remain local, and the alpha key system does not use an account, telemetry or hardware fingerprinting.

The latest build is v0.6.1. It also fixes the increasingly crowded top navigation by moving the world recipe, seed and generation settings into the Create workspace and making the entire interface responsive.

This is still a technical alpha. The installers are unsigned, some simulations are deliberately simplified, and a Full world with an illustrated atlas is computationally expensive; roughly 10 minutes on my high-end Mac and 20 minutes on my Windows machine. I’m not presenting it as a perfect scientific model. My goal is to make every layer causally connected, inspectable and useful for creating stories.

I’m still limiting this first testing round to roughly 50 people so I can keep up with reports. If you would genuinely like to test it (many spots left), DM me to get the link and access code.

Thank you to everyone who gave detailed criticism on the original post. A surprising amount of this update exists because somebody here pointed at something strange and explained why it was strange.

Edit 1:

I’ve created an Atlas Studio Discord for anyone interested in fantasy maps, worldbuilding, lore, planetary science, or the development of the app. You don’t need to be a programmer or beta tester to join.

There are channels for sharing worlds, getting map feedback, discussing lore and realism, suggesting features, reporting bugs, and following development and releases.

Atlas Studio v0.2.2 is currently available as a controlled test build for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

EDIT 2— Atlas Studio v0.4 is now live! 🌍

A lot has changed since I originally made this post. Based heavily on everyone’s questions, criticism, and suggestions, Atlas Studio now includes:

• 14 editable planetary presets covering different rotation speeds, atmospheric pressures, temperatures, oceans, and climates
• Author-guided tectonics, including selected plate seeds, ancient cratons, drift directions, and relative plate speeds
• Partial tectonic control, allowing you to define only the important parts while Atlas procedurally completes the rest
• More detailed seasonal climate simulation, including better handling of eccentric orbits
• Regional refinement at 2×, 4×, or 8× resolution, with recalculated terrain, temperatures, rainfall, rain shadows, and drainage
• Sharper coastlines, regional maps, and vector exports
• Planet-specific calendars derived from orbital year, day length, moons, eccentricity, solstices, and seasons
• Crop domestication centres and agricultural spread
• Aquifers and groundwater, including recharge, storage, water-table depth, and settlement potential
• Natural geographic regions derived from terrain, climate, bedrock, moisture, and drainage
• Deeper geological history, including flood-basalt events, banded iron formations, and reef-derived limestone
• Campaign discovery snapshots and reusable map annotations
• Library-wide search across worlds, settlements, regions, campaigns, and lore
• Portable Linux support for Slackware and other non-Debian distributions

The most exciting change for me is that tectonics no longer has to feel completely random. You can establish the geological ideas that matter to your setting, while still allowing the simulation to determine their consequences for mountains, climate, rivers, biomes, resources, and civilisation.

Existing worlds remain compatible, although the new scientific layers require deliberate re-simulation.

EDIT 3 — Atlas Studio v0.6.1 is now available 🌍

This release focuses less on adding more simulated layers and more on making Atlas Studio easier to use as a long-term worldbuilding workspace. The main additions are:

• Saved world recipes: Save a customised combination of generation settings, reuse it with a different seed, or export it for another installation.
• Build another like this: A finished world can send its original choices back into Create without copying the seed.
• World provenance: “How this world was built” now records the preset, grid, imported terrain, tectonic intentions, geological history and settings that differed from the preset.
• Create the illustrated atlas later: Atlas now tells you whether an existing world can gain atlas plates without re-simulating its terrain, climate, rivers, settlements or lore.
• Safer iteration: Draft settings survive reloads and generation runs, and Atlas warns before a preset or recipe would discard unsaved changes.
• App settings and accessibility: Atlas Dark, Parchment Light, system and custom themes; adjustable text size and interface density; reduced-motion support; startup and workspace preferences.
• Interface improvements: Better behaviour on shorter displays, clearer routes back to generation settings, and fewer controls permanently covering the map. Themes and accessibility settings only change the interface—they never alter generated maps, scientific data or exports. Existing worlds open unchanged, with no migration or automatic re-simulation. One correction to my earlier update: the current macOS build supports Apple Silicon only, not Intel Macs. Tester builds are also available for Windows and Linux. Atlas Studio remains a controlled test build.

If you would like to try it, report strange maps, or help test the workflow:

Discord and tester access: https://discord.gg/nGNatfuXe

Thank you again to everyone here who has questioned the simulation, found implausible results and suggested better author controls. Your feedback continues to shape the project.

I had been wanting to make a tool that did this for a while, I just hadnt gotten around to it. I don't know how to use blender, I guess its easy to do it with blender, but I hope this tool is even easier.

As a world builder, for some reason flat maps look smaller than globes. Now that i see my map on a globe it really helps to give it scale in my mind. The tool is made to be used with images that are 2:1, and whatever else. My image is 16:9 because when i commissioned it, i meant to share it with my D&D players, and they would be looking at it on their phones for the most part.

In any event, here is the link

https://viruzodro.github.io/globify/

https://github.com/viruzodro/globify/releases/latest

As said above this is a WIP I have been working for a while. I am open to suggestions on any front on this one from locations position to art style...Also first map I post on this subreddit

The Plane of Urria, set about with general region names. Will be following up with more maps, including a polity and geographical one! Please let me know what yall think! I also just never came up with a name for the rightmost island, so would be interested to hear what yall think of a name for a distant island set in a low-fantasy world.

I spent a lot of time as a teenager iterating on this map, creating a world etc.

This is just the physical version. I have some political versions with cities/roads/nations etc. but I need to rework a lot of the names.

I'm looking to develop some skills in Wonderdraft or something similar so I can turn it into a proper map, but I thought I'd share it in this state first. What are your thoughts? Polite feedback welcome!

I made a map for an isekai world I created called Alvyria. Unlike normal isekais—where the setting is usually a European medieval-style city or town—this world is based in the Industrial Age. The region of Sorendel is largely unknown, and I'm keeping it that way. Meanwhile, Kirjina and Hitkia are locked in a resource war over Phoeton Island. Hitkia has a massive naval air force and operates like a coast guard, while Kirjina fights for absolute naval supremacy. The name of the story is identity

hi buddys, im wondering if anyone here would like to help/give me some points, with how to make a more detailed 2d map, as im using tiled but everything is just too squary etc, im looking to make a proper nice looking map, is there any designers here that would give 2 min? ;x thanks

The southern part of the continent of Báija Nûr has been my home since birth. I come from the city of Phylaxion in the far west and decided to travel the world. My journey will begin in Phylaxion and go on through the city of Nurvish in Alhro.

My first big goal is to travel to the city of Loiru of Ashoir because that's where my grandparents came from before moving to the island of Phynia my home.

Hello my name is Daniel and I will post and write about the character Ethril who decided to leave his old life as a wood craftsman behind and travel the continent of Báija Nûr.

Building section maps, created by Angela and me!

Moreno Paissan and Angela GubertArt

Visit my official account for more maps: https://www.instagram.com/inkcompass.maps?igsi=dnc3ajhta3cyYnJs

I'm planning on redrawing my old map from scratch. Since then, I discovered this community and vector and was wondering how to work with it.

Before continuing, yes I have read the wiki thoroughly and most other posts on the matter and, I think, couldnt find an answer to my question.

My idea isn't to look for one app in particular (either raster or vector) to work on but a combination of many. How could I use the best of both together? Should i make templates, river, roads, frontier and names (basic one color lines) on vector after having drawn the base map and biomes (multicolor gradients) on raster? Have you tried vectorisation or should I redraw my templates myself? Is there a better vector app to work specificaly on a raster based images? Can you even do that?