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Full release notes · 2026-08-24

CartoVox 0.1.6

invited technical alpha

The application was called Atlas Studio until version 0.8.2. Builds are shared with invited testers on the Discord server; these notes are also readable offline inside the app.

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What changed

Correct world recipes and honest candidate scoring

  • Generated worlds now retain their actual recipe—such as Inland Sea, Archipelago, or Ice Age—when the initial revision is recorded and when the project is reopened. A later Generate no longer silently falls back to Balanced.
  • Selecting a starting silhouette preserves the thesis, story frame, Must have, Avoid, and author notes already written in the brief.
  • Candidate cards now distinguish measured checks from constraints that still need author review. Atlas no longer calls a candidate a 100% brief match when part of the request could not be evaluated numerically.
  • Candidate previews are explicitly labelled approximate and disclose that the production grid can change small islands, coastline detail, and continent counts.

Lake topology and export confidence

  • Seasonal appearance is now independent from hydraulic topology: a seasonally variable lake can keep its physically solved outlet instead of being incorrectly treated as closed.
  • The repeated “lake outlet inconsistent with water regime” health failure is fixed at its source. The same open/closed topology is now used by basin routing, diagnostics, GeoJSON, the scientific bundle, and hydrology_graph.json.
  • Lake-outlet health failures now include a View location when a real inconsistency is detected. The hydrology graph schema is version 2 and exports hydrologically_open explicitly.
  • A reduced end-to-end world-generation regression now verifies the saved lake graph and simulation-health report together, in addition to the synthetic hydrology suite.

Candidate and map-workspace usability

  • Candidate previews show a Building preview state and no longer invite cell inspection before a world has been generated and saved.
  • Changing a map category immediately opens its first available layer, avoiding a mismatched category, image, and legend.
  • Mobile map height follows the map’s real aspect ratio, reducing the large black letterbox seen on narrow screens.
  • Compare now says Remove from comparison, explains the coast-complexity scale, and uses the same measured/review badge language as candidate cards.
  • Completion messages list what was actually built and explicitly say when the illustrated atlas was skipped. Cancel is removed from keyboard and screen-reader navigation after a run ends.
  • The Atlas description now correctly refers to seven cartographic styles.

Better story signals and cleaner diagnostics

  • Ice Age candidates now emphasize refugia, fjords, migration corridors, relict islands, and meltwater landscapes instead of receiving generic rival-continent prompts.
  • Realm names that already imply an institution—Sultanate, Caliphate, Province, Kingdom, March, League, and others—now produce a compatible government type and ruler title.
  • Cradle selection seeks ecological variety among comparably suitable sites, and rain-fed cultures expose their local niche rather than repeating one identical archetype.
  • Repeated continental-crust adjustment notices are deduplicated during candidate searches.

Compatibility

Existing worlds remain readable. Opening or revising them no longer changes a saved non-Balanced preset. Re-simulate a Hydrology V2 world if you want the new lake-topology field in hydrology_graph.json, GeoJSON, and regenerated scientific products.

Technical verification

  • The release is covered by 151 tests, including a real reduced-resolution generation, manifest preservation, lake topology, candidate scoring, brief preservation, lore consistency, and UI regression checks.
  • JavaScript syntax, Python compilation, whitespace checks, and desktop/mobile browser interaction were also verified before tagging.
  • The tagged workflow repeats the full test suite on macOS Apple Silicon, macOS Intel, and Windows, builds all three installers, and publishes a SHA-256 manifest.

Invited alpha access

This prerelease remains limited to invited testers with an CartoVox beta key. Verification is offline; no account, telemetry, hardware fingerprint, or activation server is used.

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 while exploring settings and keep CartoVox open until the progress log reports completion.