Everything CartoVox does, including the parts nobody finds.

New in 0.8.3

Shape the world, then draw inside it.

0.8.3 is the rename release, and also the largest authoring release since 0.8.0. The short list, before the workspace-by-workspace walk below; the full account is in the release notes.

• Settlement Studio — villages and towns are planned street-first: the street network comes first, blocks become plots, every building faces its street and shares a frontage line. Eight plans (street village, green, crossroads, radial, organic, harbour, hilltop, twin neighbourhoods) are chosen from the approach roads, water and relief the saved world already records; quarters — market, green, craft, townhouse, gentry, manor, temple, dockside, poor quarter, crofts — set their own plot size and forms. Steer density, plot size, coverage, irregularity, the poor-quarter share and how far the countryside reaches; redraw one quarter and leave the rest; place features that turn to face the nearest street. Water systems and approach roads load from the saved hydrology, and the countryside scales with population under an editable land budget. A 57-piece catalogue with roofs built from each building's own footprint; a 40,000-person city generates in about a tenth of the time.
• Scenes and encounter maps — standalone scenes from the Library, no world required, in square, landscape or portrait; parent/child hierarchies to eight levels with clickable hotspots between them; up to 32 named drawing layers with opacity, Normal/Multiply/Screen blending and erase masks; up to 32 scene lights with Warm interior, Moonlit exterior and Dusk moods; Illustrated adventure, Engraved parchment and Clear tabletop art directions applied as one Undo step; original vector kits (village exteriors, stone fortifications, terrain and landscape, rooms and furnishings); a shared structure and art library across worlds; reference images with two-landmark calibration; one 40-step Undo across maps and scenes.
• Lettering in Render Studio — label saved realms, terrain regions, rivers, roads and sea lanes from a guided chooser; adaptive hierarchy-aware placement that tries eight sides before dropping a lower-priority name, with Spacious, Balanced and Detailed presets, leader lines, forced overlaps and direct nudging; the result leaves as editable labels.svg.
• Terrain into artwork — convert saved relief, tectonics, biomes, canopy, wetlands and snowline into editable native mountains, hills, volcanoes, trees and reeds in Light, Balanced or Rich passes; one Undo restores the procedural map, and the simulation is untouched.
• Sculpt: Protect area and Preserve terrain — protect a circle from later brushes; keep saved elevation through regeneration, glaciation and erosion; and review a rebuild before Apply, with measured pending changes, preserved areas, the full rebuild scope and a local runtime estimate.
• Rebuild review — build an isolated comparison draft from pending sculpt edits and see exactly where terrain, climate, coasts, rivers, lakes and biomes changed; review which settlements and routes correspond across the rebuild, pair unmatched ones by hand on synchronized maps, and transfer names, rulers, mottos, culture, faith and place-of-power canon, campaign reveals and regional references into the rebuilt copy — the original world is never written to.
• Codex → Import lore — CSV rows and Markdown files become author-owned vault pages with typed place, character, faction and event records, pins on the world map, and reviewed relationships (Related to, Member of, Located in, Participated in) within and across batches.
• Map — Mercator as a live saved-world view; mountain belts grow as connected systems of ranges with their own grain; drawn cities keep the exact spot chosen on the canvas and a drawn realm absorbs the settlements inside its border.
• Manuscript — imports keep italics and turn notes into native notes; Word export writes real footnotes and delivers tracked changes as a reader sees them.
• The rename — new name and artwork, a new data folder, cartovox-* file formats, and existing beta keys stay valid.

Orientation

The desk

One window, four destinations, one record. The left rail carries Search, Create, World, Write and Library; each workspace has its own contextual tabs across the top; the bottom of the rail holds Layout, Settings and Help.

• Search — a command palette and a library-wide index in one. Type a world, realm, settlement, natural region, lore entry, Chronicle era, campaign or aquifer and jump to it; type an action (“Describe an empire”, “Define a tongue”, “Write what the world is about”) and it opens the panel. Matching is whole-word and prefix, never a guess.
• Workspaces resume — World reopens on the tab you last used (Map, Atlas, Travel or Campaign); so does Write. Settings can turn the memory off without erasing it.
• Layout — a drawer that hides regions of the interface: the top bar, rails, panels. Choices persist; a fixed handle always leads back. Focus map strips every piece of chrome and restores it exactly on exit.
• The generation dock — a long build keeps running while you work elsewhere; the dock shows phase, plate, ETA and queued jobs, and survives navigation and reload.
• Help — the manual, known limits, the licence, third-party notices and a task-based capability tour that points at climate investigation, tectonic direction, import, sculpting, travel, writing, campaigns, publication and scientific export.

Create

Four ways in, then a purpose.

Create opens with a choice, not a form: Generate a new world, Import a map, Draw a world or Begin with Deep Time. A second choice — campaigning, climate study, an illustrated atlas, a base for external artwork, or writing and worldbuilding — tunes visible options rather than hiding a preset system. Skip — I know what I want goes straight to the sheet.

• The route bar keeps a stable “Creation path” caption and a Change button, so Generate, Import, Deep Time and manual setup are saved choices, not different builds.
• Setup guide — an optional five-step guide (choose how to begin, write the brief, name the peoples and their tongues, preview a seed, find strong matches) that shows which simulation systems each setting affects.
• Reset Create settings restores the entire creation surface, not a hidden subset. Draft recovery brings back unsaved Advanced-settings work after an accidental Back.
• Create Quick world vs Create full-resolution world vs Generate publication atlas — the gold button says which cost you are committing to.

The World Brief

• World thesis — a paragraph about what the world is, what is scarce or contested, and what the map must show. The reading finds landforms, climates and ways of life it names and checks them against the structured brief, one Apply per cue and Apply all for the lot. A worked example thesis exists for every silhouette.
• Must have / Prefer / Avoid — hard constraints and soft ones. A standalone continent count counts connected landmasses of at least 2 million km²; matches come before alternatives, misses state the actual count, and the saved world re-checks the final simulation.
• Story frame — epic world history, and other frames that shape the generated lore's emphasis.
• World shape — 14 planetary starting points (Balanced Earth-like, Pangaea, Archipelago, Inland Sea, Twin Hemispheres, Ice Age, Tropical and more), each carrying distinct climate and hydrology, plus your saved recipes in the same list.
• Planet type is chosen separately from continental geography, so changing the kind of planet does not have to masquerade as changing its landmasses.
• “Lush” means few deserts — it weakens subtropical subsidence and strengthens inland moisture recycling instead of merely raising rainfall. “Few deserts” in a thesis and “Avoid: deserts” pull the same lever.

Nations, cultures and tongues — and the Tectonic Director

Two panels most people never open, because they sit below the brief. This is where an author's empires go.

• Nation Brief — name realms and capitals before generation; request homeland traits, biome preferences, resources, trade goods and cultures; drop a homeland pin on a map with a visible search area and plain-language size choices (exact latitude, longitude and distance stay optional). Accepted homelands enter the civilisation pipeline as founding hearths; locked names flow through the naming registry so maps, dossiers and lore agree.
• Tongues — define a language by blending ten real-language-inspired flavours (French, Russian, Latin, Old English, Spanish, Cherokee, Greek, Old Norse, Arabic, Japanese) by weight, describe it in a sentence and watch the chips follow, add words you like, and preview a dozen names with glosses and pronunciation before the world exists. A tongue travels with the brief and can be preferred or locked to a realm.
• Tectonic Director — an interactive coordinate map for craton nuclei, plate seeds, requested convergent, divergent and transform margins, drift bearings and speeds, locks and mantle hotspots. Partial intent is fine; CartoVox fills the rest. Preflight flags contradictory requests before a long build, and the finished world reports which intentions were satisfied, compromised or impossible.
• Domestication — whether wild-crop packages may relocate civilisation hearths is an explicit choice on the route, not a hidden setting.

Seed search

• Preview this seed draws one candidate; Find strong matches scores reproducible seeds against every measurable requirement. Search depth is Quick (about twenty seconds on a fast machine) or Thorough (about 45).
• Candidate cards — Preview, Compare and More in one row; the consequential creation button on its own row. Cards distinguish measured checks from constraints that still need author review, and previews are labelled approximate because the production grid can change small islands.
• Show 24 controlled variations — structurally distinct alternatives of the same brief. Shortlist filters narrow the set.
• Favourite, reject, annotate — favourites and rejections become an adjustable taste signal for later searches; notes and rejection reasons never leave the browser. Hard constraints stay authoritative.
• Compare lays candidates side by side with a coast-complexity scale and the same measured/review badges.
• Results stay between visits; a run's settings are preserved even when it fails or is cancelled, and the completion panel offers Adjust these settings.

Advanced settings, presets and recipes

The sheet has 288 inputs, grouped in the order the simulation uses them, each with a note and its allowed range. Nothing is hidden in a module.

• Planet — radius, gravity, rotation and day length, orbital year, axial tilt, eccentricity and periapsis phase, star luminosity and distance, land share, tides, atmospheric pressure, an explicit greenhouse forcing, ocean salinity, and one dominant moon's mass, distance, period and inclination. Authored year lengths are allowed; a Kepler mismatch is shown, not corrected.
• Ice is emergent by default; ask for a global cover from 0 to 0.98 and the dossier records the temperature adjustment it took.
• Seasons — climate at 4, 8 or 12 samples per orbital year, weighted by orbital residence time so eccentric worlds are not over-counted at perihelion.
• Tectonics, relief, hydrology, lakes, glaciation, erosion, shelves, coasts, hearths — every lever has a plain-language row: more islands, higher mountains, more perennial rivers, more closed saline lakes, an ice age, a greenhouse world. Settings are bounded only where a value would break the simulation; a 62° tilt with tropical poles is still reachable.
• Recipes — Save as recipe keeps the preset plus only the settings you changed (up to 24, 64 KB per import). Export recipe / Import from file moves one between machines; imports preview and ask before applying. Last generated is written automatically at the start of every run in a reserved slot, so the settings behind a disappointing world are never lost.
• Terrain image interpretation, magic source and cost, naming-family rules, apostrophe policy, atlas label density, lake detail and map palette are dropdowns with friendly labels over stable internal values.
• Changing the World shape asks “Discard 3 changed settings?” first; Clear overrides says how many it will lose. The whole sheet survives a reload, and the Advanced settings button on Create carries the override count.

Preflight, finish, plates and lettering

• Preflight reports the expected output range and free disk for the chosen grid, finish and sheet set, keeps a 1 GiB reserve, and learns from completed builds of the same shape on this machine. Reference bands: 45–100 MiB Quick, 180–360 MiB Full without plates, 337–883 MiB with every publication plate.
• Atlas finish — Draft or Publication. Sheet groups — world, continent and regional sheets, selectable. Village label density for the minor names.
• Atlas lettering — Labeled only, No labels, or Both from the same illustrated base; the choice applies to world, continent and regional sheets, and the missing variant can be added later without re-simulating.
• Stop after this plate finishes the active image cleanly and stores the rest; Render remaining plates in World → Atlas draws them later from saved data.
• Best-quality drawings rebuilds a Quick world's eligible maps at 4× drawing density from the exact saved simulation; Rebuild at full simulation resolution makes a separate project from the same seed and recipe.
• Progress weights phases by measured wall time — naming gets its real share — and recalibrates the ETA from completed plate timings. Interrupted runs are detected and can be resumed from their stage checkpoint or removed.

Import a map

• Formats — PNG, JPEG, TIFF, numeric height grids, GeoJSON land outlines, and OBJ or STL terrain surfaces (X east, Y north, Z metres). Limits scale with free disk and are reported before the import.
• The coastline reader distinguishes pale oceans, dark silhouettes with lakes, sepia maps, painted biome maps and true heightfields; painted-map imports learn blue water shades including bathymetric bands, keep continents that touch the edge, and detect a rectangular map inside a dark interface border (Use detected map area). Map lettering that reads as land is cleaned out; round islets are left alone.
• Zoom & inspect opens the upload and the interpreted coastline in a full-window viewer. Paint land / Paint water, Protect region (frozen in gold, with its one-pixel rim), Undo correction and Reset corrections correct the reading and survive another detection pass.
• Trace the coastline yourself — click corners or sketch freehand over the faded upload; Magnetic tracing follows nearby image edges between anchors; Auto trace offers Fine, Balanced or Smooth outlines and a minimum island area, and reports what it removed. Tracing saves recoverable drafts automatically; Resume tracing reopens them after a restart, and Save draft file writes a portable .cartovox-trace.json with the reference image embedded.
• The questions the map leaves open — where borrowed relief should gather, how high the peaks reach, whether the land is young or worn, how deep the seas are, how wet and warm the world is, how closely climate should follow painted colours. Every answer is an ordinary Advanced setting; an unanswered question keeps the preset.
• A region of a larger planet — set the map's width in the world from 5% to 90%, preview planetary land coverage, and choose generated surroundings or Ocean only. Generate mountains, valleys and sea depths for a coastline-only drawing, or Keep my elevations for a sculpted one.
• What a map does not say is simulated: climate, rivers, biomes, settlements, names and lore. Provenance records that the coastline was imported or traced, and over which file.

Draw your world

• Brushes — Land, Water, Islands, Outline, Raise, Lower, Smooth, Flatten, with size, strength and hard-edge controls, undo and redo, and a seeded starting shape to sculpt. The ocean wraps east–west, because it is a planet.
• Rivers are carved as descending valleys so the hydrology solver has a lowest path; the finished world reports how much of each drawn river it actually followed.
• Labels (place, region, sea, mountains, river), kingdom borders, cities, land cover, roads and landmarks return as an author-canon layer on the finished map; drawn borders and cities are honoured by the build and reported when they cannot be.
• Reference image — drop a map and the coastline is previewed automatically (colour map, line drawing, light/dark mask or transparency readings); Mark land / Mark water and Detect coastline correct it, Apply coastline is one undoable change. Magnetic outlines follow the picture's edges.
• Save drawing as PNG heightmap, GeoJSON, STL or OBJ, and reopen it later; Use this drawing hands it to the same coastline review as an import.

Deep Time

• Paint an initial supercontinent (or let one be built), run hundreds of millions of years of breakup, spreading, subduction, collision, suturing and erosion, then scrub every saved era with play, pause, four speeds, looping and a narration of each era's dominant events.
• Promote an era and the finished world inherits its plate inventory, welded groups, terranes, crust age and thickness, rift progress and relief — then runs the full climate, rivers, biomes, settlements, names and lore on top.
• Milankovitch forcing stores each era's tilt, eccentricity and precession; the promoted era carries that exact orbital state. Ice, isostasy & sea level (v1) is an opt-in feedback model that saves the era's elevation relative to its own sea level, so the world inherits an ice-age coastline.
• An import and a Deep Time era cannot be combined: they are competing foundations, and the app says so.

Reseed, replicate, build another like this

• Reseed this world (World tab, under How this world was built) builds a new world beside the current one from the same inputs under another seed, in three scopes: everything the seed decides, the story only (places of power, names, realms and lore on identical land) or the land only. Imported and drawn foundations travel across; lineage.json records where the new world came from.
• Build another like this loads a world's preset and settings into Create without the seed. Replicate a saved world with one click from its recipe.
• Every world writes a world recipe beside itself: seed, preset, every changed setting, the brief and thesis, nations, tectonic intent, output options and the imported or drawn foundation. One Save, one Export, one Import for the whole sheet.

World → Map

The map is the workspace.

World opens around the map. The world panel on the left carries the thesis, the headline measurements, project findings and simulation health; the Planet card floats at the top right; the dock along the bottom holds View, Export and Tools. Everything else is a mode that comes to the front when you ask for it.

Forty-nine views, one geography

The Map library (toggle it from the toolbar) groups every generated view. Each has a reading key, a plain-language source method — Simulation output, Calculated from simulation, Planning estimate, Rule-based interpretation, Visual presentation, Author-edited layer or What-if preview — its projection, working scale, limitations and a downloadable Provenance JSON. Views whose saved fields an older world lacks are marked unavailable rather than invented.

The cell inspector

• Click any cell: elevation, plate and boundary type, climate, seasonal runoff and discharge, snowpack, groundwater, permafrost, watershed and depression IDs, stream order and channel form, lake depth and outlet status, biome, realm, settlement suitability and fantasy intensity. Metric or imperial units.
• Explain one climate cell — why it is warmer, colder, wetter or drier than latitude predicts: elevation, continentality, upwind terrain, moisture supply and the saved circulation, with the upwind moisture path traced on the map.
• Read the dossier for the settlement, realm, natural region or biome under the click, straight from the gazetteer.
• Rename the feature at the clicked cell, move or remove a settlement, or place a named settlement on any land with at least 20% saved suitability. Canonical names propagate to maps, dossiers, lore, routes, tongues and exports.
• The hover reading, the reading key and the coordinates stack without covering each other; the inspector retries with fresh data if a revision changes underneath it.

The toolbar, the dock, and the View and Tools menus

Above the map, the toolbar: 3D terrain, Sculpt, Render, Show Map library and the name of the current view. Below it, the dock: View, Export, fit-to-window, the measure ruler, the select-feature pen, Tools, zoom out, 1:1, zoom in and Fullscreen. Nothing in either ever re-simulates.

View — Map appearance

• Map colors — Natural (sage, sandstone, deep teal), Verdant, Parchment, Dusk, Tropical, Ember, Aurora, Illustrated (sapphire deeps, cyan shallows) and Classic. Each world remembers its own; live class swatches, continuous scales, world cards, globe textures and new Render Studio compositions follow.
• Projection — Equal Earth by default, Robinson, Mollweide, the stretched equirectangular grid, and Gott: the two hemispheres as double-sided disks sharing the equator as their rim, mirrored so coastlines meet when printed back to back. Overlays, hover readings and measurements land on the same spot in every projection.
• Detail — Auto, Original, 2×, 3×, 4×. Continuous fields interpolate bicubically, categorical ones stay nearest-neighbour, river reaches redraw as vector lines weighted by discharge. The persistent badge states the simulated cell size, always.
• Planet — show or hide the globe card.

Tools

• Landmarks — overlay capitals, settlements, ports, places of power, author story pins and mountain passes; select a marker for its lore, realm and culture context. Filters are remembered locally.
• Explain climate — pick a cell and read why it is warmer, colder, wetter or drier than latitude predicts, with the upwind moisture path drawn.
• Regional lens, Climate Lab, Weather (the Weather year) and Erosion Lab — the four laboratories, below.
• Tectonics — the saved tectonic evidence: plates, motions, boundary measurements and, when a Tectonic Director brief exists, which requests were honoured.
• Advisor — the Planet Advisor reads the finished world against your brief and thesis and says where it agrees, where it does not, and which setting would move it.
• Report — report this place: the current map or cell, expected versus observed, a short checklist and a preview of exactly what would be collected; nothing is uploaded on its own.
• Split view — two views of the same world side by side. Time strip — the seasonal frames as a strip you can scrub. HD region — a high-density crop of the region under the cursor. Minimap and Grid toggles.
• Measure (the ruler in the dock) — great-circle distance on the saved planetary radius, correct across the antimeridian and near the poles, with per-leg distances; Finish path (or Enter) locks a route without closing a shape.
• Sea-level explorer — a bounded, reversible preview of coastline change and spherical exposed or submerged area, reached from the map's scenario views. Canon is never touched.

Labs and the Regional lens

• Climate Lab — seasonal temperature, pressure, wind and rainfall frames to scrub; moisture-path inspection; located plausibility checks; a bounded what-if that estimates how selected climate controls would change the saved world, clearly labelled an approximation; and a review bundle (seed, resolved configuration, model response, findings) written locally for a specialist.
• Weather year — the saved seasonal climate as an animated year with a selectable frame count; a radar view follows precipitation and seeded storm systems; storm frequency, intensity and variability under a reproducible seed. Save it as a named weather sheet that Travel and the manuscript share.
• Erosion Lab — the same stream-power, hillslope-diffusion and floodplain-deposition kernel as generation, on a non-destructive coarse bench: before/after relief and drainage, what moved, mass balance. The world changes only on an explicit accept-and-re-simulate.
• Regional lens — click anywhere, or pick a named atlas region, for a wrap-aware high-density crop with measured elevation, temperature, rainfall, dominant biome, realm, resources, water and nearby lore; four layers and several radii, across the date line if you like. Regional downscaling refines a window at 2×, 4× or 8× with fine terrain, lapse-rate temperature, windward rain and re-solved drainage, labelled separately from the coarse truth.
• Promote a lens to a child map — a parent-linked regional project with stable world coordinates, inherited settlement and realm identities, its own notes, local pins and hand-drawn routes; refresh inherited features after the parent changes.

The Planet card and the 3D terrain explorer

• Planet — a live globe in the corner with spin, a link to the map's centre, a light/dark printable background, and a switch between a sphere and two Gott disks you can drag around their shared axis. It hides independently of everything else.
• 3D terrain (map toolbar) — three views from one saved sample: a rectangular Landscape, a displaced-sphere Planet you can orbit into either hemisphere, and Voxels in 100, 250, 500 or 1,000 m terraces. Detail presets from 96 to 2,048 samples on the longest edge; natural colours or biome, elevation, realm and climate palettes; vertical relief, smoothing, seabed relief, water opacity, rivers and lakes; sun direction and lighting presets; perspective, orthographic, top and low-angle cameras; an inspector that always reports saved cell values; PNG export of any view. Select a region on the planet to open it as a landscape. Rendering is local, in a worker, and never exceeds the saved simulation grid.

Sculpt, Select feature, revisions

• Sculpt — coast, peak, ridge, plateau, basin, strait, river-valley, flatten, smooth and detail tools, plus island building with real shapes. The brush previews its footprint, falloff, bearing, radius, cumulative elevation delta, affected area, raised and lowered cells and provisional coast crossings on the map before anything is applied; several operations stack with undo and redo.
• Select feature reads the editable terrain, water, ecology, settlement, route, realm and magical-region features under a point. Remove or reshape land, islands, lakes, rivers, biome regions and mountain terrain; move or remove settlements; reshape routes and realm borders; edit magical regions. An operation that cannot honestly preserve a generated feature says so and stages the closest supported change.
• Re-simulate states which downstream systems will be rebuilt before it runs, uses the world's recorded seed, can be cancelled while it is still safe, renders new plates in staging and swaps them only when they exist. Every apply creates a restorable revision under revisions/r####/; author canon, locked names and lore overrides survive it.
• Checkpoints can be named; continuity diffing after a sculpt reports what moved: planet stats, landmass areas, hearth movement in km, realm territory shares and any name that changed.

Simulation health and provenance

• Simulation health scores a world out of 100 with evidence-backed findings about tectonics, climate, terrain, biomes, rivers (reaches flowing uphill, branching outside the dendritic band, Hack's exponent) and data integrity. View jumps to the layer and cell; Prepare repair stages a conservative sculpt or focuses the exact generation setting, and the resulting revision records whether the finding resolved, improved, persisted or worsened.
• How this world was built — seed, preset, grid, whether it came from an import, a Tectonic Director intent or a saved geological history, and the handful of settings that differ from the preset; whether the illustrated atlas can still be created; Build another like this; Reseed.
• Project findings distinguish generated facts, inferred material, author canon, unavailable data and deliberate open questions.

Render Studio

One custom whole-world composition at 1K, 2K, 4K, 8K or tiled 16K, delivered as documented transparent PNG layers with world files, a compositing manifest and a flattened preview. It says what it creates before it renders, and it never claims a bigger drawing is a finer simulation.

• Nine recipes — Physical atlas, Pastel kingdoms, Banded heightmap, Biome atlas, Antique parchment, Survey blueprint, Print outline, Pure landmass and Illustrated realm. Save named recipes on this device or share them as small JSON files with their stamps embedded.
• Layers — ocean with depth bands, land, biomes, relief, lakes, rivers, coastline, borders, realm colours, land-elevation contours, graticule, labels, settlement symbols, compass rose, equatorial scale bar, vignette, roads, sea lanes, landmark symbols, and the illustrated layers: painted land cover, mountains/hills/volcanoes, forests, mountain mist. Reorder them; set opacity, colour, line width, size and label halos; choose grayscale or sepia; keep alpha in transparent exports.
• Illustrated realm paints watercolour land cover with snow above each biome's snowline; places original hand-drawn mountains, hills, volcanoes with glowing craters, conifer, broadleaf and tropical trees, dead trees on ash and blight, reeds in wetlands; cracks ice into floes and salt pans, ripples dunes, streaks grassland, shows reef shallows. Glyphs are placed from the world's own seed so a 1K preview carries the same forests as the 16K export.
• Titles and captions — positioned text that can rotate, curve up or down, use its own typeface and tracking, or follow a copied drawing path; click the preview to place a caption, compass or scale bar. Place-label editing — search a saved name, change its display text, typography or size, hide it, or nudge it, without touching the canonical name or the settlement's position.
• Stamps and shapes — a decoration canvas with twelve original vector symbols, imported PNG/JPEG/WebP stamps organised into shareable art packs, freeform paths, polygons, Bézier curves with editable handles, brush strokes and soft dabs with Normal, Multiply or Screen blending, eraser objects and paintable masks, textures and shadows, groups, snapping, canvas zoom, 40 steps of undo, and full keyboard control. Up to 200 objects per recipe.
• Scene paper — editable keep-interior, woodland-encounter and village-square layouts with square or hex encounter grids, colours, spacing and author units, on paper that keeps its drawing scale.
• Bundles include captions.svg and objects.svg beside the PNG layers, so lettering and artwork stay editable; render manifests record the appearance and palette for reproducibility.

Everything that exports

The map dock's Export menu, plus the downloads scattered through the Codex, Atlas and manuscript. Nothing here needs a re-simulation.

World → Atlas

The illustrated atlas

Painted base, inked coastlines, terrain built from stamped symbols — drawn from the saved fields, so terrain, climate, rivers, settlements, names and lore are never re-run for a sheet.

• Three scales, three languages — a world sheet (>12 km/px) paints biomes, inks the coast, draws great rivers and city dots; a continent sheet (4–12 km/px) adds ridge-aligned peaks, forest masses with decorated edges, realm tints and named rivers; a regional sheet (<4 km/px) uses the full stamp language, interior forest, third-tier towns, ports and the keeps that hold the passes.
• Nothing invents geography — peaks follow the ridgeline with snow above the local snowline, trees follow canopy and switch species by biome, dunes follow the ergs, volcanoes sit on real arcs, rivers carry width from real discharge, and deltas appear only where the hydrology reports one.
• Coast and sea — a crisp inked shore, a pale halo, concentric hachures, the shelf break, engraved isobaths and a faint portolan rhumb web. Gulfs, bays, inland seas and straits are found by closing the coastline at 760 km and named by measurement, so a strait is called a strait because it measures like one.
• Type — four sizes, three treatments: water italic, political tracked caps, physical small caps; river names set glyph by glyph along the channel. A name that cannot satisfy the neat line, its feature mask and the busyness under it is dropped and reported; nothing overlaps.
• Seven styles — ink on parchment, painted relief, modern hypsometric, nautical chart, working ink, grimdark and the clean coastline base — and a separate realm map grown by travel cost.
• Six reading desks — Royal Surveyor, Bluewater Navigator, Field Naturalist, Court Chronicler, Monastery Copyist, Forbidden Archivist: curated sets of views for a purpose, each listing only what actually exists for this build.
• Labelled and unlabelled variants are grouped under one sheet name; redraw the lettering after a rename, add the missing variant later, or Create publication atlas for a world built without one. Render remaining plates finishes a stopped run.
• City plans — a plan per major settlement, drawn from its site, and available to the manuscript's Insert map.
• The impossible layer — blighted wastes downwind of settled country, ashlands downwind of volcanoes, firelands on young rock, fungal forests in hot wet closed canopy, silverwoods deep in old forest, frostbound reaches, glass wastes on desert floors, floating isles over broken crust, drowned ruins on the shelf, a maelstrom in deep water — each placed by rule with its cause in the dossier, leylines joining them as a spanning tree. Switch it off entirely or drop one kind.
• Map gallery in the Library shows every plate, style render and city plan from every world on one wall, newest first, filterable by world, kind and lettering, with a lightbox and a jump to the sheet's own Atlas tab. A sheet drawn before a later edit says so.

World → Travel

The Journey Laboratory

• From / To any named settlement, with suggestions; Swap endpoints. Mode — on foot, horseback, caravan or sailing ship. Season — typical year or a specific one from a saved weather sheet. Objective — Balanced, Fastest, Safer or Trade-minded. Party size. Map beneath the route — any physical view.
• Land journeys report distance, time, ascent and descent with an elevation profile, realm borders crossed, river crossings, established-road share, dry stretches, food, water, fodder and reserve capacity — and say when a route needs staged caches. Market stops, local goods, toll exposure and expected border delay are named.
• Ship journeys use nautical analytics instead: wind and current assistance, open-water legs, port intervals, sea hazards, cargo and potable-water capacity.
• Journey weather follows the trip from its departure day to its wind-adjusted arrival; routes beyond the 400-day planning window still solve and say why forecast detail is unavailable.
• Alternatives can be selected as the active result; Save journey to campaign keeps it as an authored story track whose gold handles can be dragged on the map.
• Routes take the cheapest ground — slope, altitude, marsh, river crossings, magical hazards, resource provinces — which is why they hug valleys and find passes, and why realm frontiers fall on ranges and straits.

World → Campaign

The Campaign desk

• Profiles — several per world, each with an author name, player title, introduction and base map. New profiles reveal only relief by default.
• Visible map layers and Visible lore categories — tick what players may see. Secret pins and wonders reveal individual places only when the story reaches them.
• Known regions and Known journeys — saved Regional lenses and solved routes attached to the campaign.
• Discovery snapshots — save the world as the party knows it at a point in play and compare two snapshots to see what became known.
• Present player view — a focused presentation that hides the authoring interface and survives reload, restart or crash; only Exit presentation clears it. Player-region links are inert while presenting.
• The Chronicle can lend the campaign its eras, and journey weather rides along with saved journeys.

Write → Codex

Codex and lore

Measured geography, suggested lore and your own decisions in one place. Generated social history is a proposal until you accept or rewrite it; everything you write survives re-simulation.

• Sections — Overview, Questions this world raises, Your canon, Lands, Gazetteer, Realms & geopolitics, Cultures, History, Faith questions, Trade & economy, Places of power, Story hooks, Naming studio, Physical dossier.
• Questions this world raises — measured author questions the simulation cannot answer (who decides how water is shared, what proves a right to the frontier), each with Show on map and Write answer. They are a first-class writing surface, not empty sections.
• Lore Editor (under Your canon) — rename the world or any realm, city, place of power, culture, religion, continent or ocean; edit a realm's motto and ruler; append timeline events, story hooks and private notes; or paste raw JSON. Renames rewrite every cross-reference and are idempotent at name boundaries; lore, handbooks, the worldbook, GeoJSON, SVG and the vector bundle refresh together, and raster labels are marked for a later redraw.
• Naming studio — every name with its stable feature ID, generated form, pronunciation, gloss, alternatives, lock status and reader-confusion audit. Names come from language families whose morphemes carry meanings (khaz — stone-born); a glacier is built from words for ice, a name that collides with somewhere a reader has heard of is refused, and border rivers are named twice, once in each bank's tongue. Name review lists high-conflict names to settle.
• Lands — one connected page per natural region with terrain, climate, water, neighbours and lore, reachable from the map, search and the Codex.
• Gazetteer — a writer's dossier for every settlement, realm, culture, tongue, continent, natural region, range, desert, biome, river, lake, sea and place of power: where it is and what it is like, the name's roots and the names it nearly had, a season-by-season table of temperature, rain, daylight and wind, the river at its door and how it floods, soils, crops, ore and groundwater, who holds it, the sky and calendar, neighbours with distances and travel days by foot, horse, caravan or ship, landmarks within reach, and every hook, question, faith, trade route and event that names it. A sensory palette turns measurements into what a character would see, hear, smell and feel. Every fact carries its status: measured, derived, suggested, canon or prompt. Write with it carries a dossier into the manuscript.
• Characters — private pages under codex/characters/ with aliases, pronouns, home, realm, culture, tongue, birth and role; they become gazetteer entries the manuscript recognises.
• Downloads — the Illustrated Obsidian vault, Scrivener and Ellipsus transfers, realm handbooks and WORLDBOOK.md.

Write → Chronicle

Chronicle

• Geological Deep Time and the human-scale Chronicle are kept separate. Initialize from Lore timeline imports the generated history as editable eras with stable links to their source entries; Add authored era starts from scratch; Refresh Lore events pulls in later lore edits.
• Eras carry a title, date or age, summary and a base map (relief, realm territories or others). Events are points, routes or areas — war or battle, migration, border change, settlement change, route or expedition, disaster, political and other — with persistent consequences that remain visible after the era in which they began.
• Play steps through the eras on the map; the legend explains the symbols; the scrubber names the era and its date.
• Chronicle maps, campaign maps, regional projects and lore maps share one annotation model, so a marker made in one is understood by the others.

Write → Manuscript

The world-aware word processor

A book is a folder of Markdown chapters inside the world's vault, so a chapter is at once an Obsidian page, part of the vault zip and a page in the Scrivener transfer. Manuscript writes never touch a world field.

The formatting bar

• [[ ]] — type [[ and a name to link any vault page: realms, cities, cultures, places of power, natural regions, characters, your notes, other chapters. Link… separates visible text from a web address or a vault page.
• Place text — align, indent, page breaks, and paragraph styles: plain, first paragraph, verse, letter, epigraph. They ride on inert comments in the Markdown, so Read, Word, HTML and EPUB honour them.
• Insert map… — any whole-world sheet, plate or city plan, with caption, width (quarter to full) and alignment; Edit map & caption on the figure.
• Lenses — tint the prose in place: sentence rhythm, dialogue, overused words, dialogue tags, world names. Local, never saved into the text.
• Note (⌘⌥N) — anchor a private note to selected words; notes never appear in Read or any export. Focus (⌘⇧F) dims everything but the paragraph you are in. Sprint counts down minutes against a word goal. ? (⌘/) lists every shortcut.
• # , > , - and --- convert as you type; the usual shortcuts apply; if the editor bundle ever fails to load, a plain text editor takes over.

The Chapter panel and the binder

• Book — new, import, rename, trash; Read, Insights, Outline, Export book…; the chapter list with status (Outline, Draft, Revising, Done), word counts and session progress; ＋ Add chapter, duplicate, reorder; Trash with restore — never emptied automatically.
• Chapter cards — synopsis, point of view, setting, labels, word target and private notes. Daily goal per book, with a streak.
• Scenes — Scene or ＋ Scene break starts one at the cursor; each has a title, point of view, place (searches the gazetteer) and when (day of year, hour, year in the world's own calendar). Move scenes with ▲ ▼ without losing history; the binder expands the open chapter into its scenes; Open beside shows another chapter read-only next to the one you are writing.
• The world card under a located, dated scene — the calendar day and month, the season as locals feel it (south of the equator is half a year out of step), the moon, sunrise and sunset from tilt and latitude, the saved weather for that day and the three after it, climate, biome, realm, culture and tongue with a few roots and meanings, and the distance, bearing and travel days from the previous scene, with a warning when fewer days pass than the journey needs. Every fact has Insert, Dossier, Map and Insert map (a 400 km relief crop as a figure).
• Versions — every save keeps the previous copy (the newest fifty); name one, compare it paragraph by paragraph with changed words marked, restore a paragraph or the whole chapter.
• Find — across every chapter and card, with match case, whole words and regular expressions; Find next (⌘G), Replace, Replace all in chapter, Replace in whole book… with history for every changed chapter.

The World panel

• The gazetteer beside the chapter: search any named thing, or click a link in the prose, and read its dossier without leaving the manuscript. It lists the world pages already mentioned in the chapter and inserts a selected page as a portable link at the caret; the vault page and realm handbook render beneath.

Insights and Checks

• Insights — chapter, book or series scope: words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, letters per word, words per sentence, pages at 250 words, reading time, the longest sentence; sentence-length tiers with a chart per chapter; most reused word families with per-1,000 rates and an ignore list; dialogue share, line length, longest run, tagged lines; dialogue tags ranked (only real speech verbs count); names from the gazetteer and other capitalised names (＋ Name makes a character page); habits — repeated phrases, adverbs, filter words, sentence openers. Measured in the browser; Save report writes CSV, Markdown and JSON.
• Run checks — missing vault links, unavailable map references, word-target progress, and scene continuity against the world: a scene dated before the previous one, a journey that needs more days than pass between scenes, snow in a warm season, heat in a cold one, monsoon rain in a dry one. Suggestions, never blocks.

Import writing

• PDF, Word (.docx), RTF, OPML, Markdown and plain text. Chapters are detected by their headings — chapter numbers, viewpoint titles, prologue, epilogue, front matter — and created in order, with the original upload preserved inside the world. PDFs lose their running headers and page numbers, wrapped lines rejoin into paragraphs across page breaks with hyphens mended, and short capitalised lines become headings; scanned PDFs need OCR first.
• Italics and bold survive; footnotes come through and leave again as real footnotes in Word, HTML and EPUB; an imported Word file's tracked changes deliver the book as it reads.

Style, Read, Print, Export

• Style — editor zoom (local), then the book: author and subtitle, font (Georgia, Palatino, Baskerville, Times, Charter, Inter, Courier, the CartoVox display face), heading face, size, line height, text width, paragraph style, alignment, margins, page size (US Letter, A4, Trade 6 × 9), running header and footer presets or custom text with {title}, {author}, {chapter} and {page}, first page number, chapter numbering.
• Cover design — include or omit a cover, any map, plate or city plan as its image, fit, shading, text colour and background, title size, alignment and placement. World card in Library can show this book's cover, or its cover map alone, as the world's face.
• Read flows the whole book with its cover; Print / PDF paginates at the chosen size and margins with running headers and page numbers where the browser supports them.
• Export book… — Word with headers, page numbers, embedded maps at page resolution, clickable links and real footnotes; Markdown with relative images; a Scrivener package; a self-contained web page; an EPUB 3 e-book. All under renders/manuscript/.
• Autosave after a pause, on blur and on ⌘S; a save based on a stale copy is refused with both texts shown; unsaved text is mirrored in the browser and offered back; chapter changes and exports wait for the latest writing to save.

Library

The Library

• World cards — name, seed, continent count, land area, revision, status, a favourite star, and the face you chose (relief, a book cover, or a cover map). Open, trash, and the revision badge that refreshes as you work.
• Trash — completed worlds are recoverable for 30 days, cancelled or failed ones for seven; a 5 GB soft limit warns and never silently deletes; Restore prefers the original identity and makes a fresh one if it has been reused. Deleting moves to worlds/.trash/, never straight to oblivion.
• Map gallery — every illustrated plate, style render and city plan from every world.
• Import project backup — a .cartovox file comes in under a safe new identity with its revisions, lore, campaigns, Chronicle and regional state.
• Resume tracing — beside the map picker: reopen a coastline tracing session after a restart, or load a portable draft.
• In-progress and failed generations have their own cards, cannot be opened as finished worlds, and can be recovered or removed.
• Search spans every saved world: names, realms, settlements, natural regions, lore, eras, campaigns, aquifers.

App settings

Settings — ⌘,

Seven sections that change how CartoVox looks and behaves on this computer, and nothing else. Changes apply immediately; there is no Save button that could disagree with the screen.

• Appearance — CartoVox Dark, Parchment Light (warm paper, not a white inversion) or Follow system. Custom themes: create, duplicate, rename, export and import small JSON files of named colours with an in-app picker; up to twelve; contrast is checked before a theme can be applied and a failing pair is named with its ratio. Themes change chrome and never output — a world's 121 files hash identically across every theme.
• Accessibility — text size 100%, 110% or 125%; Comfortable or Compact density; reduced motion (a system request always wins); every text colour clears WCAG AA.
• Workspace & layout — open at the Library, Create or wherever you were; remember the section within each destination; open or reset the Layout customiser.
• Creation defaults — the same record Create edits: quick mode, atlas finish, lettering, sheets and village density for new runs.
• Data & privacy — Storage and display cache measures bytes by world and category (fields and saved maps, author content, plates, the rebuildable display cache, exports and renders, revisions, backups, trash); only the display cache can be removed, after a preview lists every file; a retention preference bounds it by size and age. Move the data folder. Local diagnostics with privacy-aware redaction; Copy app info copies name, version, build and platform and never paths, keys or world names.
• Updates & support — the once-a-day update check can be switched off while Check now keeps working; About; the Licence and third-party notices, offline.
• Release notes — the full history inside the app, starting at the running version, with Older / Newer navigation, offline.
• Reset all app settings clears preferences and layout — never worlds, lore, revisions, drafts, backups, recipes or an unsaved sculpt.

Keyboard

Shortcuts worth knowing

On disk

What a world writes to disk

Your work is a folder in an open, documented layout — not an account. Everything below lives under the world's own directory in the CartoVox data folder.

Coastline tracing drafts live in tracing-drafts/ under the data folder, custom themes and recipes in the browser or installation's storage, and the trash under worlds/.trash/. The data folder can be relocated from Settings, and CARTOVOX_DATA_DIR overrides it.

Read before you lean on a number

Known limits

CartoVox documents what it approximates, at length, inside the app. The short version:

• Desktop is the authoring target. The mobile layout reviews a world; it does not build one.
• Drawing density is not simulation detail. 2×–4× and Render Studio interpolate the same saved cells; only a full-resolution rebuild adds simulated cells, and it does so in a separate project.
• The default tectonics is one kinematic snapshot, correlated around generated ridge systems. Deep Time transports crust for hundreds of millions of years but does not solve mantle convection.
• Four seasons, not twelve months; Köppen thresholds are applied per season. Orbital cycles are forcing, not an N-body integration. Tides are climatological, not a tide table.
• No thermohaline circulation — currents are wind-driven only. Erosion runs two passes, so valleys look young. Hydrology is regional: a directed reach graph with lake nodes and morphology classes, not fluid dynamics.
• Soils are regional pedology; resources are prospects, not proven reserves; glacial history is reconstructed, not integrated through every ice age.
• Land needs crust to stand on. Asking for more land than there is continental crust drains the sea until seafloor is exposed, and the run says so.
• Atlas labels are placed, not typeset: a name that will not fit at any rung of its shrink ladder is dropped and reported rather than broken over two lines. Stamps are procedural; mountains read as massifs rather than chains; sub-cell coastline crinkle is a deliberate, switchable invention.
• A long thin landmass near the pole is usually the projection, not the terrain — measure it on the sphere.
• Reproducibility is checked two ways: the same seed in two processes must give byte-identical plates, and a seed must render identically whether or not another world was drawn first.
• Publication cost depends on the selected outputs. A Full build with every plate currently takes about 8 minutes on a high-end Apple Silicon Mac and about 13 minutes on a high-end Windows machine; the preflight measures your own machine as it goes.

Version-by-version model changes are recorded in the release notes, each versioned in the world's configuration so a saved world always states which model produced it.