What changed
Interactive scientific maps
- Rainfall, biome, soil, bedrock, resource, and realm colour keys are now interactive. Select individual classes or use All and None to isolate exactly what you want to inspect.
- Rivers and lakes can be hidden independently, including on the soil and bedrock maps, and a 30 degree reference grid can be added when useful.
- Filtered maps update the 2D workspace, globe texture, full-size view, and PNG download without changing the saved simulation.
- Bedrock now has its own dashboard view. Resource filtering reads every overlapping prospectivity field instead of only the dominant resource class.
- Iron remains rust-red while geothermal prospects are now magenta, eliminating their previous visual ambiguity.
- Large keys have an explicit More/Less control, so no class is hidden behind an invisible scroll area.
Dashboard and atlas navigation
- Long map and atlas view lists now have visible previous/next controls, keyboard navigation, and automatic active-item reveal. All ten atlas plate choices remain reachable at compact window sizes.
- The generated-map catalogue now distinguishes the clean authoring base, simulated realm territories, soils, and bedrock instead of combining unlike concepts.
Cleaner cartography
- Clean land & water base replaces the misleading blank political map. It contains only white land, blue water, and the outer coastline—no accidental mountain seams or invented internal borders.
- Simulated realm territories is now a separate map with travel-cost territories, distinct colours, frontiers, and unclaimed wilderness.
- Grimdark maps no longer draw political boundaries as crimson danger lines. Red is reserved for volcanic, blighted, or supernatural hazards.
- Existing compatible worlds automatically rebuild outdated clean-base, realm, and Grimdark styles when opened.
Deep Time usability and resolution
- The geological-era scrubber has a substantially larger interactive track and thumb, making long 420–600 Myr histories practical to navigate.
- A new Timeline detail setting offers a faster standard grid or a sharper detailed tectonic grid.
- Deep Time frames render at higher resolution with smoother terrain, clearer captions, and readable text. Compatible low-resolution histories are upgraded lazily from their saved numerical archive.
Compatibility
Older worlds remain readable. Interactive filters appear when the corresponding scientific arrays exist in world_data.npz; otherwise Atlas keeps the original static map and clearly marks products that were never generated. Re-simulate an older world to add missing soil, bedrock, or resource arrays.
Technical verification
- 132 automated tests pass, including dynamic-map rendering, API isolation, atlas navigation, derived-style refresh, and high-resolution Deep Time reconstruction.
- The release workflow validates that the
v0.1.4tag matches the application and installer version, builds macOS Apple Silicon, macOS Intel, and Windows installers, and publishes a SHA-256 manifest.
Invited alpha access
This prerelease is limited to invited testers who received a unique CartoVox beta key. The key is entered once on first launch and verified offline; no account or internet connection is required.
Full generation is intentionally heavy and may take longer than expected. On current high-end test machines, a Full world with its atlas takes about 20–25 minutes on macOS and 50–55 minutes on Windows. Hardware, world settings, and atlas size can change that time. Use Preview or Quick mode while exploring settings, and leave CartoVox open until the progress log reports completion.