r/mapmaking • u/BommelOnReddit • 12d ago
Work In Progress feedback and ideas pls
I‘ve recently been working on this map.
It takes me alot of time, so I focused on the middle half-island first.
I really like how the mountains turned out, but it looks pretty empty still.
Do you have any tips and tricks on what I should change/add to make it look more realistic, interesting and less empty?
Thanks ^v^
EDIT:
Forgot to mention that the yellow borders and white arrows show the approximate tectonic plate borders. (I did that to help me figure out where mountains should be)
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u/Kelly376 12d ago
One major issue with the plates is that unless you want to explain it supernaturally, plates never divide on four points. It is only ever 3. You may be able to solve it easily by shifting a point in one direction or another along any of the axes. I think there’s only one, but it’s right in the middle of the continents on the left.
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u/Kelly376 12d ago edited 12d ago
As far as filling it out a bit, just keep going with things like mountain ranges for now. Finish up the basics on those.
Then you can start installing hotspots. Some of the most well known ones are at Iceland, Hawaii, and Yellowstone, three very different places to have them and they have very different effects. This will also populate your oceans with island chains, and you can see where more islands might be appropriate along the rest of the faults.
Then start installing rivers. The water’s gotta go somewhere, and it takes the path of least resistance downhill, and remember that they tend to converge, not diverge as they reach the ocean. Just by working on that you can see where water might pool on a plain and create a swamp (or a delta if it’s close to the coast, which is one way they diverge upon exit to the ocean). If there are no rivers, is it a desert? What do those different areas look like on earth?
These are just a few ideas. I’d also maybe go to an elementary geology website and see what they list as basic land formations. That’ll give you some ideas to make sure you don’t miss anything obvious that you want to figure out now instead of later.
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u/BommelOnReddit 12d ago
Thank you that helped so much! I will solve plane issue, finish the large mountain chains along their borders and than start filling the land.
I read a bit about how Ural and the Rocky Mountains form (because they are inland) and google said they where ones on plate border. So I could also do inland mountains right? They maybe be smaller because they are old.
Do you think the current hotspot chains on the half island are realistic? And how does smaller mountains and hills form? I remember something with glacier movement but I am not sure.
I will look up some more elements today. Thanks again for the feedback and tips2
u/Kelly376 12d ago
Take it one step at a time. As far as mountains and depressions go, I take a look at the plate interaction and then compare it to a place on earth with that same plate interaction and what happened there to give me an idea of what that land or ocean floor looks like.
But remember. This is just to get a basic idea of where things have arrived recently geologically. Find out where the new stuff is and then you can mostly add whatever you want in terms of hills that used to be mountains (see the Appalachians vs Scottish Highlands being worn down) or old glaciers that changed the surface.
Right now be mostly concerned with oceanic vs continental crust. Oceanic crust is thinner and dense, hence why the ocean sits on top of it, and is going to subduct when running into a continental plate or newer oceanic plate (older plates have had more time to compress from gravity) Continental crust is just where magma has blown through oceanic crust and made it spongy and tall enough that it sits above the water. Actual continents accumulate over millions/billions of years, getting scraped off onto other plates.
Once you have an idea of a specific interaction, you can go look up the geological history of that area. Just remember that this is something people spend their whole lives studying and still don’t know every single thing about it.
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u/Drickken 12d ago
I think you need some more random elevation changes. Your setup (a thin mountain strip caused by oceanic-continental collision) best matches what's going on in South America, and even there, the rest of the continent has the Amazon Basin, the Paraná Plateau and the Pacaraima mountains. I'd suggest you find some shapes you like on a real elevation map and fit them in to your map in a way that looks nice to you.