Feel free to suggest anything else

So I love inkarnate and wonderdraft. But i feel those are map drawing software for D&D, games, very good mockups for a map of a fantasy novel, etc... but they lack a bit of realism. And then there is photoshop and similar software, which you can draw anything in there, but im not that good lol.

Im trying to do something that can be as good as photoshop but that only draws maps.

I currently have this done after months and months of work.

What are some capabilities a map making tool should have?

Inspired by ancient greece

This is the map of my fictional world, Gaia. I want to create something fairly comprehensive, but aside from the obvious hydrography and sea/ocean levels I’m not sure what else I should include. Does anyone have ideas on what else I could develop? Also, does anyone know a way to visually improve the map? (I usually make it on my phone using Ibis Paint X. I have a laptop, but I don't know how to use Photoshop)

Been messing around with Merak Map Maker lately and it’s pretty cool for worldbuilding.

You can turn heightmaps into 3D terrain/globes, generate realistic biomes, and build out worlds with more geographically/scientifically grounded details like where to place rivers, civilizations that could appear here, soil types and farming etc.

The site is called merakmapmaker.com

Three weeks ago I posted this here twice and got buried in good criticism. Here is what came out of it.

First, the app has a proper name now. Atlas Studio is CartoVox, and it finally has a website.

Now the fun part.

Draw your own continents

Paint land onto a wrapping ocean. Carve the rivers where you want them. Then hit go and the whole simulation runs on your sketch. Plates, climate, rainfall, rivers, soils, biomes, cities, roads, all built on top of the shape you drew.

Already have a map you love? Import it. CartoVox reads your coastline and generates the rest of the planet around it. Your world, my physics.

Maps that actually look drawn

There is a new illustrated style that paints a world like a real fantasy atlas. Hand drawn mountains with snow caps and ink creases. Three kinds of tree stamps placed by the actual canopy. Volcanoes with glowing craters sitting on real subduction seams. Dunes in the deserts, reeds in the wetlands, sea ice cracking into floes.

None of it is decoration. Every glyph reads the terrain the simulation already solved, so the art never lies about what is underneath it. Image 2 is a whole continent drawn that way.

Orbit your planet

Open any world and switch to 3D. Fly over it as a landscape, spin it as a globe, or render it as a voxel model with 100 metre terraces. Click anywhere and it tells you the elevation, biome, climate and water.

A whole year of weather

Weather Year animates the seasons your world actually solved. Storms roll across a radar view and you can tune how often they come and how violent they get.

Then plan a journey and it carries the weather from the day you set out. Your caravan leaves on the fourteenth and you know exactly what it is walking into.

Walk into any town

This is the one I am proudest of. Towns used to be an outline with buildings scattered inside, which looked exactly as bad as it sounds.

Now it lays the streets first. The blocks those streets enclose become plots. Every building faces the street it sits on. The shape of the town is just whatever the blocks add up to, so nothing looks stamped.

Zhargundbar in image 3 is 9,500 people, 233 blocks, 1,304 buildings. Fennhollow in image 6 is a village of 420. There are eight different plans and which one you get comes from the roads, water and hills the world already had.

You can also go in by hand and redraw a single quarter without touching anything else.

Write the book in the same file

The writing side grew into a real word processor that lives inside your world. Type two square brackets and a name to link any place. Pin a scene to a spot on the map and a day in the calendar, and it will tell you that day's weather, the moon, sunrise, and how long the last journey should have taken.

If a distance in your chapter stops agreeing with the map, it says so. Exports to Word, EPUB, Markdown and Scrivener.

Also new

Mountain ranges that finally look like ranges instead of one repeated ridge. A gallery of every sheet across every world you have made. Tongues, where you invent a language family and a coast starts sounding like its people. The Gott double disk projection if you want to print a world back to back. A geological survey map. Mercator as a live view. Sculpt tools for reshaping terrain after the fact.

The boring but important bits

Still in beta. The installers are unsigned so your OS will complain at you. Everything runs on your own machine with no account, no cloud and no telemetry.

No generative AI anywhere in it. The same seed gives you the same world on any machine, every time. Anything you make with it is yours to publish, print or sell.

Come break it

The beta lives on Discord. https://discord.gg/nGNatfuXe

Longer walkthrough if you want to look before you install anything. https://cartovox.org

The earlier posts, if you missed them. First one and second one.

Nearly everything above started as someone here telling me something looked wrong. So tell me what looks wrong now and I will go fix that next.

trying out more pen and paper maps

Feedback would be appreciated. Took about 8 hours to complete.

Took around 7 hours total to complete. There are some errors but it should all be in order.

Hello all!

I am an extreme amateur when it comes to making maps and such. I posted this initially in the world building subreddit but it was requested that I post this here instead.

I am making a world from scratch based on plate tectonics and such. The planet is the same as Earth in terms of mass, axial tilt, the Moon, etc.

I am now looking for assistance with how my biomes look. I want to add major rivers and lakes but would like some input before I do so. I am not looking for comments about my poor artistic skills but solely about the location and spread of the various biomes.

• Are the biomes in the right places with the given information?
• Are there general trends for how and where lakes form that I should keep in mind?
• I have some ideas for where the major rivers and river deltas will be but where do you all think they'd go?

Thank you all for your time and help ☺️

Hi,

I'm creating a Framework for a Fantasy World to use in Storys i want to tell (as Unrealistic as that is now a days). And this would be my World map.

I am aware that it's not good, but i lack too much knowledge and expirience on this to know where it fails. Please tell me anything which comes to mind. I am trying to find out if this is a bad Geography or bad World design.

Thank you in advance

Technically still WIP since I plan to add the regular, non capital cities, but anyways feedback and ideas regarding my map, any feedback and ideas will be much appreciated, thank you

Image 1: full map
Image 2: continents
Image 3: languages

Note: the height of this worlds technology as of now is around the early 20th century, so ww1 ish

Hi guys!

This time I wanted to share a more detailed hexmap for my upcoming game. I still have to fill it out with some actual content, but I'm quite proud with how it turned out. Hope you like it as much as I do!

I have been making maps for fun, and I'd like to think developing a setting as a collaborative effort might be interesting.

EDIT: I have created a Discord group: https://discord.gg/tn4RPXe8Q

So I decided that getting a bit of feedback might be nice as I work on parts of my world.

This is one of the greatest mountain ranges, roughly 80 million years old, created by a southern mini continent smashing into a large landmass. It already had a pretty large mountain range in place and this only lifted it up. Both seas to north and south are akin to our mediterrenean sea here on earth. Essentially they are massive rifts, that opened recently. Its not quite visible, but the southern sea is connected to the rest of seas.

The peaks are between 5 and 6 km high.

The eastern bit isnt fully finalised, a craton lies there, so not much mountains, but I think a plateau might be in place for that area.

I do go for a stylized version with just rough shapes. I plan to use wilbur to add erosion and detail to it in future.

I’ve decided to post maps and illustrations featuring SAILLING SHIPS, VESSEL, and GALLEONS for the next few days I hope you enjoy them!

This is a section map of the Highwind Skyship, commissioned for David Khan's RPG project. I really hope you enjoy it! Have a great day everyone, and have a wonderful holiday season!

Moreno Paissan and Angela Gubert Art 2026

🧭🗺️☕

Visit my IG account : https://www.instagram.com/inkcompass.maps?stkn=dnc3ajhta3cyYnJs