Quick Start Tutorial
The tutorial is for version 1.0
Fantasy Map Generator is a tool that creates highly customizable fantasy worlds for you. It runs in a browser and does not require any software installation. It’s free and you can use created maps for any purposes including commercial ones. You can even download the Generator and then run in a browser without Internet connection available.
The tool generates a new fantasy map on opening. The map is auto-generated, but it doesn’t mean that you cannot control the generation. To open the controls click on the arrow button at the top left corner on the screen or press Tab. You can either change the generation parameters and generate a new map, or edit the current map. You can also create a new map from scratch using paint brushes.
The map is generated fully zoomed out. Double click on the map to zoom into the clicked area. Double click again to zoom in even more. The maximum zoom level is 20x by default, but it can be changed in the options. To zoom out hold Shift and double click. Click and drag to move around the enlarged area.
The same operations can be performed using keyboard. Press + to zoom in, - to zoom out. Use 1-9 number keys to set an exact zoom level. Press 0 to reset zoom to default. Use arrows keys to move around.
By default the map shows the world’s political situation, but it’s not the only available preset. Open the first tab of the menu – Style – to change the preset. Preset is a bunch of sets of different map layers to use. There are 5 presets available for selection: political map, cultural map, heightmap, biomes map and the pure landmass view. You can either select one of the presets or use buttons below to display or hide a particular label.
To make it simple each of the layers has a hotkey assigned. Hover mouse over the layer button to see a tooltip showing what the button does and which key is assigned to it. Check the Hotkeys wiki-page to get a full list of shortcuts.
Some layers may not be visible if a higher layer is toggled on. You can drag the layer button to change the layer's order.
There are cases when you may want to see multiple full layers simultaneously. The only way you can do it is to make the upper layer partially transparent. Choose the required layer from the Select element drop-down list and change the opacity slider. Note that this may not work if clipping is enabled.
The same approach is used for styling all the map elements. For example if you want to change the color of state borders, select Borders element and click on the color box to set a new color. Here you can also change the border's stroke width, its style and apply a visual filter. Different map elements have different styling controls.
Using the section below the styling drop-down you can apply a filter to the whole layer.
Some users report performance issues on map dragging and zooming. These are number of tips that will allow you to avoid problems with performance.
- Toggle off unnecessary layers. Especially take care of the Relief Icons layer – it’s the most resource-demanding one.
- If you have a wide screen, open the Generator in a separate browser window, make it much smaller (about 900 x 560 pixels) and re-generate the map. Then zoom in to see the map in detail. It will reduce the rending area and improve the performance drastically.
- Generate maps with Points number = 10K. Points number highly affects performance.
- Toggle off map and element filters.
- Close all irrelevant browser tabs and applications.
- Use the top-edge browser. As for now the best performance is observed in Chrome. Firefox is also pretty fast, but there are some minor UI issues specific to this browser.
If you like the current map you will probably want to save it for later use. There are 3 saving options:
- Save as .map. It is an internal file format that stores all the map data including your manual changes. It can later be loaded directly into the Generator and used to proceed with the map creation. It is highly recommend to save the map you are working on at least every 30 minutes. The generator is still in beta and a critical error with data loss or even a browser crash may happen.
- Save as .png. It makes a screenshot of the currently displayed map fragment. Just an image and nothing more. The png resolution can be set in the Options tab. By default it is 5x of the map size. The file can be opened and edited in any image editor.
- Save as .svg. It is a vector image that can be rescaled to any size without quality loss. The Generator naturally renders maps in svg, so there is no conversion and hence saving as svg is faster than saving as png. To just open and view a saved file it is recommended to use your browser, not a vector images editor. To edit the file you need special software – the most common are Inkscape (free) and Illustrator (proprietary).
Please note all these 3 options use popups for saving. So please allow browser to show popups for the site and ensure they are not blocked by your adBlocker, if you use one. Please don’t worry, there are no ads on the site.
Let’s move to the settings overview. Open the menu and open the Options tab. There are multiple options split into 2 categories: map generation and user interface. Map generation options require a new map to be generated. UI options are applied immediately on change.
- Map size: the size of the map canvas. By default the map size is the browser window's size, but it can be changed to any value. The button on the right expands the size back to the window size. Please note that the size the map was generated with cannot be changed later.
- Map seed: a number defining random values generation. If options and map size are the same, two maps generated with the same seed will be exactly the same. Obviously, the map seed cannot store user’s changes, so please don’t use the seed number as a save function.
- Points number: the number of generated cells. The more points are generated, the more detailed is map. Points number highly affects performance, so the only recommended value is 10K.
- Map template: the set of rules applied on heightmap generation. Basically a type of the landmass to be generated: high island, continents, archipelago etc. You can create your own template or change the existing in the Template Editor (part of the Heightmap Editor tools).
- Cultures number: the number of cultures to be generated. Cultures then can be edited via the Cultures Editor.
- States number: the number of countries/states to be generated. States then can be edited via the States Editor.
- Size variety: defines how much states area should be different. The lower value, the more uniform state areas are.
- Growth rate: defines how far states and cultures will expand into neutral lands on generation. The lower value you have, the more lands will stay politically neutral.
- Towns number: the number of towns to be generated. Towns are non-capital settled areas (burgs). If there is not enough suitable space to put a requested number of towns, the Generator will place only a limited number of towns.
User interface options:
- Interface size: size of the control panes
- Tooltip size: size of the tooltips displayed at the bottom of the screen
- Transparency: opacity of the control panes
- PNG resolution: relative size of the png image saved. 1 means the downloaded image will have the same resolution as map size, 2 – 2x the size and so on.
- Zoom extent: minimal and maximal zoom levels. Click on the button on the right to restore the default values There is also the Reset to defaults button. The button cancels all user changes and refreshes the page.
Click on Configure World to set up map position on a globe and world climate. Toggle biomes, precipitation or temperature layers on to see how changes affect the world.
The Globe on the right shows relative position of the map as a brighter area. The position is calculated based on two inputs: equidistance and equator. The North is always on the top, the West is on the left and so on. Equidistance controls the distance from equator to poles in pixels. Equator is the Y coordinate of the line in pixels. It’s easier to understand with an example. Let’s say the map has a Y size equal to 1000. The Equator Y is set to 500, so the Equator will lie through the map center. The equidistance is 750 pixels, while the top and bottom edges of the map are distant from the Equator in 500 pixels. It means that the map covers the area between 60°N and 60°S latitudes.
The map latitude affects the temperature gradient and winds applied to the map. You can change the temperature on Equator and Poles and it will be re-calculated based on map position on a globe. To change winds use the arrows on the right. Please note that wind is also latitude-dependent.
The precipitation value defines how much vapor clouds can bring and spread across the map. The bigger the precipitation value, the greater number of rivers and fewer deserts you get. With precipitation equal to 0 the entire map will be an unlivable desert.
If you don’t like the heightmap generated automatically, you may edit it or even create a new one from the scratch. Open the Tools tab in the menu and click on Heightmap. Now you need to select an edit mode. All secondary data like rivers, burgs and state depend on the height values, so changing the height manually will break the default generation logic. The best practice here is to use the Erase mode, create the heightmap you want and let the system to re-generate the secondary data based on a current heightmap. It will remove all the changes made for burgs rivers and so on, but it will guarantee the smooth generation. Please take note that this also erases custom markers.
If you want to perform just a minor change, select the Keep mode. You won’t be able to change the coastline, but all the data, including manually placed relief icons and rivers, will be kept as is. So it’s more like a visual change without changing the basic data. This mode is also safe.
If you have manually edited data and still need to change the coastline, you may use the Risk mode. As the title says, it’s not safe and can cause some issues. So please use this mode only if you really need to.
Heightmap editing process has multiple build-in tools. These tools won’t be covered in this tutorial, just note that they allow you to use brushes to “paint” the map, to edit and apply heightmap template and to convert any image into a heightmap.
The Heightmap Editor tools are not the only available ones. From the same Tools tab you can also open Biomes, States, Cultures, Namebase, Burgs and Units editors. All these Editors work in a different way and won’t be covered in this tutorial.
The same tab contains tools to re-generate map elements. If, for example, you have added and moved some burgs, the burgs won’t be connected with roads anymore. You can click on initiate routes regeneration to get them connected. You can also re-calculate State Labels positions, relief icons, population, rivers, burgs and states.
The next Tools section allows adding elements like burgs, labels, rivers, routes and markers. Select the tool and then click on the map to add an object. Hold Shift and click multiple times to add several objects.
The last section, which is collapsed by default, provides some info about the map cell your cursor is over.
Individual map elements such as rivers, routes, relief icons, labels, burgs and labels can be edited on mouse click. The editor screen that is opened is different for each element and it’s also out of this tutorial's coverage.
That was a pretty brief overview of the main Generator elements and approaches. It’s not full by any meaning and just serves as a starting point. You can always find more details and help on our supportive Discord server and Reddit community.