CartoVox 0.8.0 is the professionalization release: a broad pass over creation, the World workspace, maps, authoring, science reporting, import and export, accessibility and reliability, followed by four days of new capability an author asked for.
Draw and import a whole world
- The blank canvas now takes kingdoms, cities, land cover, roads, landmarks and a reference image, on a full-screen desk with an icon rail.
- Illustrated maps are read as their authors meant them: a hypsometric reading of painted colour, coherent land classes and surface drainage that no longer drowns or speckles a map.
- Importing asks whether the map is the whole planet or one region of it, with a width and centre-latitude to place it.
Maps shown un-stretched
- Every world is presented in Equal Earth by default, with Robinson, Mollweide or the stretched grid a click away; data maps, styles, dynamic sheets and the illustrated world plate follow, and every overlay, hover reading and measurement lands on the same spot.
Rivers, deserts and the brief
- Rivers follow a continuous course: smooth through the routed cells, wandering where the physics allows, arriving at their trunk on the tangent.
- "Lush" now means few deserts: it weakens subtropical subsidence and strengthens inland moisture recycling instead of only raising rainfall. "Fewer deserts" in a thesis and "Avoid: deserts" reach the same lever, and county-sized desert specks fold into the steppe around them.
Tongues
- Define a language by blending real-language flavours (French, Russian, Latin, Old English, Spanish, Cherokee, Greek, Old Norse, Arabic, Japanese), add words you like, hear names before the world exists, and give the tongue to a realm so its rivers, cities and kingdoms speak it.
- The Nations panel now says that it is where an author's empires go; the setup guide and command palette lead there.
Polish
- Custom theme swatches are controls with a picker; the map HUD fits two rows; atlas plate cards select as a whole; the finished-generation dock stays dismissed; a new mark opens the Library desk and watermarks empty workspaces.
Compatibility
- Windows builds use native peak-memory diagnostics and byte-stable build provenance, fixing test collection and frozen SBOM verification on Windows.
- Atlas is pre-1.0. This release changes the default presentation of every existing world and re-keys the plate cache; no migration shims are kept. Regenerate a world to pick up model changes.
- Generating city plans increases saved-world size and peak generation memory. This is an accepted 0.8.0 cost; the measured cohort and reviewed baseline changes are documented in
docs/releases/v0.8.0-validation.md.