CartoVox Delta V9

Your Delta access code carries over and the licence is unchanged. Linux now needs glibc 2.34 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 35, RHEL 9 or a current Arch).

Delta V9 is the ninth Delta release. Everything below is new or changed since Delta V8, which was shared with invited testers on 12 October 2026. Worlds made with Delta V8 open as they are, but the generator changed a great deal in this release, so Library offers Update to this version for every Delta V8 world. Updating or rebuilding changes almost everything a world derives from its ground: rain belts sit where Earth's do, rivers carry an Earth-like share of the rain, soil water carries rain from season to season, lakes settle with their rivers, ice sheets stand above the ground, deltas, dunes and braided rivers take new forms, and so biomes, rivers, lakes, towns, realm borders, names and lore can all move. A world you have edited by hand keeps your edits; a rebuild reports what moved.

Highlights

• Sculpting rebuilds only the part of the world your edit reaches. Rain, rivers, towns, roads, realms, names and lore away from the edit stay exactly as they were, and a small edit on a Quick world rebuilds in about half a minute.
• Rain falls where it does on Earth. Deserts sit in the subtropics, the tropics and the storm tracks get Earth's rain, frozen seas no longer drizzle, and rivers carry about the share of the rain Earth's do, flooding in spring where the ground thaws.
• Soil water carries rain between seasons, so a dry-summer Mediterranean coast grows open woodland and a monsoon coast with the same rain grows closed forest.
• Ice sheets rise as domes, deltas take river, wave or tide shapes, dunes read the wind, and rivers braid with their floods, on every map and export.
• Add or remove a river's branch, and drawn or imported rivers are river lines that cut their own valleys and can be edited afterwards.
• CartoVox speaks German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish almost everywhere, server messages and tooltips included.
• Bring in your own map one decision at a time: Coastline, On the planet, Guide layers and Details are pages of their own, every guide says it arrived and how it was read, and a Köppen climate map reads by the standard palette.
• A Nations panel lists every nation to rename, recolour, add, paint, remove or merge, and a nation is the same colour on every map.
• Exports carry no grid you did not turn on, a Rivers button hides the rivers, and a downloaded map's key takes far less of the sheet.
• Each continent speaks its own languages, and an ocean can keep an old world and a new world out of contact.
• Tilt a planet past 90°, as Uranus is, and find each world's folder by its name.
• Full builds take about half as long, and the bar no longer sits at 17%. A faster, compiled climate step does the heaviest work while the seasons share your computer's cores, and every saved number comes out the same. The progress bar moves and Cancel works inside every season.
• Place mountains, deserts and forests where you say. "Mountains in the northwest, a desert to the east" becomes areas you can adjust on a small map, and every candidate card draws the areas you apply.
• Set measured limits before you search, from continent counts to the highest peak, and find 24 close variations of the world you chose.
• Worlds with permanent day and night: one side always faces the star, and temperature, winds, rain and water-shaped ground follow.
• Hex maps of child maps show that map's own rivers, ground and towns, with your pins, and a players' copy leaves out what players should not see.
• Drawings and drafts are kept on disk, tracing a new picture no longer paints over your drawing, and CartoVox saves your work before it closes.
• Render Studio combines shapes, keeps their holes, and styles a single landmark, region or division.
• Polar, Albers, Lambert-93, World Mercator and Dutch RD New maps import, and a separate tectonic plate map can guide an imported world's mountains.
• Collect books into one omnibus, download Insights as a spreadsheet, and let book checks point out places a rebuild removed.

Create

• Ask for two worlds across a wide ocean. The World Brief's new Ocean divide lays the continents in two groups with about 2,600 km of islandless ocean between them; across four test seeds the gap measured 2,700–3,400 km. Describing "an old world and a new world" or "an undiscovered continent" suggests it, together with Out of contact. One world, the default, leaves the land shape as it was.
• Keep an old world and a new world out of contact. Contact between continents says what an ocean over 1,200 km wide means. Distant peoples keep language families of their own; Out of contact adds that no sea lane, trade route or relation crosses it, and each realm's dossier says who lies beyond the ocean. Connected keeps today's behaviour, and the description hears "out of contact" and "only by rumour".
• Every continent speaks its own languages. A world used to draw two to four language families at random, and a continent with no founding city spoke its nearest neighbour's tongue across the ocean. Each settled continent now grows its own tongue, and the land decides how many families there are, one per region of peoples, within the brief's range, now two to six (eight test worlds went from 3.25 to 5.25 on average). Islands still speak their mainland's tongue; names, the Tongues page, dossiers and the culture map follow.
• Place key features from your description. Write "mountains in the northwest, a desert to the east, forests in the south" and Place your key features offers each as an area on a small world map; adjust it and press Apply area. Up to eight areas guide terrain, climate and forests. "Northern mountains" means mountains in the north, two features in one sentence are both offered, and compass directions mean the whole map. Every candidate card and variation is drawn and checked with your areas, so the card you choose is the world you build.
• Set limits before searching. Create's Limits offers 18 features, such as many islands or land near the poles, 17 measured ranges, from continent and island counts to the highest peak and the deepest sea floor, and five suggested combinations. Put each under Must have, Prefer or Avoid and review every check in one list; a range under Avoid passes only outside its bounds. Limits that cannot all be met stop the search before it starts. Limits choose among worlds; they do not sculpt terrain.
• Find 24 variations replaces Find 24 more worlds. It keeps the chosen world's seed and plate layout, tries small changes to its coasts and relief, and shows the closest matches first. Each variation keeps its own settings through choosing, favourites, reload and building. Candidates also shows the search seed that found your shortlist.
• Choose shows when a measured number moves between the card, its sharper preview and the built world. Choose and the World panel show each value; a number that moved but still meets your check has its own arrow, and only a check that now fails is marked as changed.
• Permanent day and night. In Planet & climate, switch on Permanent day/night and click the map or type the star-facing point. Temperature, winds, rainfall and water-shaped terrain follow the fixed light, and so do the weather year, scene cards, dossiers and the UV map: no sunrise or sunset, and no UV on the dark side. Axial seasons stop, though an eccentric orbit still changes the heat.
• Planet choices bring their starting description. Choosing a planet fills in the description choices you have not touched; your own choices, words, rules and tongues stay. Reset all starts again from Earth-like and Balanced. Advanced now says it compares your overrides with these starting values.
• A grade your planet already gives is not applied twice. Towering mountains on a Young and violent planet keep the planet's relief instead of multiplying it again, and Cold on an Ice age planet no longer cools its seas further. The World panel says when the planet already supplied a grade.
• Release an old land target without resetting your brief: Land coverage shows a fixed target and offers Use land shape & planet. Other edits keep your exact custom ranges.
• "No oceans" checks follow Advanced land coverage. If Advanced asks for a dry or inland-sea world while Land is left at From land shape & planet, the checks that need a world ocean are left out, as they are when you pick No oceans.
• Wastes keep their meaning. In Create and in described regions, "wastes" alone reads as dry desert, "frozen wastes" as cold, "ashen wastes" as ash, and "blighted" or "cursed" wastes as magical blight. A saved region described only as "wastes" asks for desert when it is next rebuilt; call it a "blighted waste" to keep magical blight.
• Rift valleys stay yours to judge. Rifted cards ask you to look at the rift valleys yourself, even when every number passes. An Ice age planet offers glacial story suggestions with any land shape, and the Drowned land shape has a new example picture.
• Return to a build from the Build step. After Work elsewhere, View generation beside the Build status reopens the same progress window, for generated, imported and drawn worlds, without starting another build.
• Deep Time runs in the background. A cycle shows its progress, reconnects after a page reload and runs beside a world build. Cancel cycle stops it at a safe point and keeps the histories already finished. A cycle cut short by CartoVox closing is reported as interrupted, and its leftover files are cleared.
• Give painted plates a starting speed. Select a painted plate in Deep Time and set its starting speed in degrees per million years (0–2), or leave it blank to use the run's tempo. Collisions and welding can still change it later.

• A card's continents match the world built from it more often. Inland seas and deep gulfs now sit in the same places on the card and at every build detail, so a card showing one great continent is less likely to build as two, and Sketch, Quick and Full builds of one seed agree more closely. Rebuilding an existing world may move its gulfs and inland seas.
• A placed cold country reads on its card as the built world has it. The card treated its coasts as far inland, so its winters ran a few degrees colder and a cold zone looked frostier on the card than it came out.

• A cold country you place turns cold wherever it sits, even on the equator: its winters go below freezing across the zone, so near the equator it becomes tundra with some ice instead of a cooler forest, and the card shows it as the built world has it. Placed on ground that was already colder, it no longer warms it, and its check now asks for the same 60% as a placed desert.
• Rifted and Twin Hemispheres candidates are checked for what makes them that shape. A Rifted Continent is checked for its rift valleys themselves, how far the rift floors sink below the land beside them, so a plain supercontinent with inland seas no longer passes as rifted. Twin Hemispheres is checked for two great lands on opposite sides of the globe, each gathered round its own centre, and its continents' arms are shorter so the two lands no longer weld into one or sprawl into many: far more of its own worlds pass, and fewer worlds of other shapes do.
• Deep Time collisions push crust out sideways as far as the collision front is wide, up to about fifteen degrees instead of four: big collisions squeeze out new coastal land the way India pushed out Indochina, and more of that crust reaches the sea instead of piling up inland. Worlds started from a new Deep Time history come out differently.
• The Ice age planet builds a true glacial maximum. The seas stand about 120 m lower, so shallow shelves become land and land bridges join coasts under any land shape; ice sheets reach well into the mid-latitudes; the cold bites hardest near the poles while the tropics stay warm; and the land is drier, with grass and cold steppe taking over from forest around the ice.
• Deep Time has ice ages. Each era is an ice age or a greenhouse, decided by whether a continent sits over a pole and by the run's carbon dioxide: in an ice age the polar continents ice over and the seas fall, and the history's frames say so and draw the coast where that era's sea stood. A world kept from an ice-age era starts glacial.
• Deep Time plates are moved by the mantle beneath them. A supercontinent slowly warms the mantle under it until the heat breaks it apart, and the pieces drift until they gather again, so supercontinents come and go on their own schedule (every three to five hundred million years, as on Earth). Hotspots come and go too: a new one arrives with a burst of flood basalt, leaves a chain of volcanoes on the plate above, and can split a supercontinent. A world built from a Deep Time era places its flood-basalt plains and hotspots where the history put them.
• Deep Time: the air's carbon dioxide now has a thermostat. Rain and warmth wear away the rock of the land and draw carbon dioxide down, fastest on warm, wet ground, on new mountain ranges and on fresh volcanic rock, while the volcanoes keep putting it back. Each era's carbon dioxide settles where the two balance. A great range rising in the tropics, or a flood basalt, can now tip a world into an ice age, and a dry supercontinent lets the air warm. Eras swing further between ice ages and greenhouse ages than before. Worlds started from a new Deep Time history come out differently; other worlds are unchanged.
• A candidate card's climate now counts its rain once more of the sea's moisture has reached the continent's interior, so the dry land a card shows outside a placed climate is closer to the built world's.
• A desert or dry country you place on a candidate card now covers the whole zone the card measures, and the built world matches the card: the card's promise and the finished world agree to within about a point. A climate written into a drawn region now fades in over the same 100 km at its rim on the card and in every build.
• The finish of a world built without an atlas now names the tier it was built at (Sketch, Quick or Full) instead of always saying "Quick world ready".
• The example world's progress window now says "Quick simulation · Draft atlas", the finish it really uses, instead of "Publication atlas".

Imported and drawn worlds

• Use your drawing as a guide. After you draw a map, a third choice sits between generating the heights and keeping yours: Use my drawing as a guide keeps your coastline and where you drew ranges, highlands, basins and plains, then builds its own ridges along your crests, cuts valleys and sets natural peak heights, so plains roll instead of sitting flat. How closely to follow it runs from Loosely to Closely. On three test drawings it kept the broad shape almost as well as Keep (large-scale correlation 0.96–0.99) with fine detail as natural as Generate. Imported heightmaps get the same choice. The two existing choices build exactly as before.
• Bringing in your own map now takes one page per decision. The single "Confirm coastline" page is now four steps: Coastline, On the planet, Guide layers and Details, each saying what it decides and what happens next; nothing is simulated until Build. Confirming the coastline opens the next page, and Build opens from any later page. Placing the map or adding guides keeps the confirmation; a change that re-reads land and sea says so and confirms again in one click. Every control from the old page is still there.
• See that a guide layer arrived and how it was read. Each guide has its own card: "Reading…" while it loads, then the file, its size and pixels, what it was read as, the classes or zones found with their shares, any proportion warning and a picture of the reading, or why it cannot be used. The step bar counts the guides you added. Before, the upload status was written where the page could not show it.
• Add a Köppen climate map, and know beforehand how it will be read. Every pixel is matched to the standard Köppen–Geiger palette (Beck et al. 2018) instead of being guessed by hue. Each zone sets what grows there and leans warmth and rainfall toward that zone; colours that match no zone are reported and left to the simulation. It does not set monthly temperatures or the season rain falls in. The page explains every guide's rules before upload, and the Köppen and biome colour keys download as a picture or a GIMP/Krita palette.
• More map projections import. Shapefiles, GeoJSON and GeoTIFFs in these systems are turned back into longitude and latitude and land where they belong:
  • polar stereographic maps of the Arctic and Antarctic (EPSG:3413, 3031, 3976, 3995, 3032 and the UPS zones), and the variant used for Antarctic charts (EPSG:2985);
  • Albers Equal Area, such as CONUS Albers (EPSG:5070);
  • Lambert Conformal Conic, such as Lambert-93 (EPSG:2154), and US state-plane zones written out in full, in metres or US survey feet;
  • World Mercator (EPSG:3395) and other Mercator maps, including the form ArcGIS writes with a standard parallel;
  • Oblique Stereographic, such as the Dutch RD New (EPSG:28992).
• A continent round a pole covers its polar cap, so Antarctica on an Antarctic map arrives as land. A file may name one of the codes above or spell its projection out in the forms ArcGIS, QGIS and GDAL write; one with contradictory details is refused with the reason. Datum shifts are still not applied, and the import report says so.
• Fixed: an island across the 180° meridian keeps its shape. In a GeoJSON or shapefile, an outline drawn across the date line rather than split there became a strip of land round the whole planet.
• Fixed: small islands survive flat blue-and-white maps. White land and thin islands were cleaned away as pen marks; they are now kept. Channels CartoVox cannot be sure of stay water, with a note in the review, and an accepted trace keeps its water boundaries.
• Better first coastlines on muted colour maps. Auto-detect recognises maps shaded in soft, distinct colours and reads their coast by colour instead of treating the shading as height. Greyscale heightmaps and your explicit choices read as before.
• Fixed: a cropped relief map keeps its pale highlands. A bright highland on a single picture could be taken for photographed paper and cut away. The importer now checks the background first; photos of paper on a plain table still straighten as before.
• Combined paper photos. The combine window shows each sheet as prepared, without the table round it, and removes a patterned tablecloth only when the sheet's edges and drawn lines are clear. Your choice for the gaps between sheets (Generated with the world around it, or Sea) now carries through tracing into the build, and a failed trace can be retried.
• Numeric heightmaps keep the coastline you confirmed. NPY, CSV and ASCII grids carry the land and water you reviewed into the build and later rebuilds, through crops, rotation and flips. The ground beside the coast keeps its real heights; only spots where you redrew the coast are set just above or below sea level. A source sea level you set moves the coast with it.
• Fixed: a river you drew cuts its bed instead of raising the ground. Rivers carried into an import cut down by up to 400 m and no longer lift low ground on their way. Where a ridge is higher than that, the import says the river cannot descend there.
• Import a tectonic plate map beside your coastline. Under Guide layers, add a Tectonic plate map drawn as Boundary lines or Plate colours (an opaque PNG up to 4 megapixels, 2–16 plates, each at least 1% of the sheet) and review the plates before Build. Mountains and rifts follow your plates; your coastline and heights keep priority, and plate motion is still simulated. Lines of any pen width may run to the polar edges. The import workshop offers example files.

• Drawings & drafts. Open it from Library or the drawing canvas, or choose Resume a drawing or draft in Create. Drafts are saved on disk with everything on the canvas, reference pictures and undo history included, so a cleared browser cache no longer loses them, and after a crash the newest version comes back. Name drafts, copy them, keep portable backups, and delete any drawing except the open one; only the five newest automatic copies are kept. Delta V8 drafts in browser storage move in when you open them.
• Trace a new picture without losing your drawing. Trace image starts a fresh canvas; Clear beside it returns to the original drawing, and the traced version stays in Drawings & drafts. On the largest canvases the tracing picture is limited (about 15 MB at 3072 × 1536) so autosave keeps working.
• STL and OBJ exports download reliably, even for large drawings. A mesh too large to make says the file was not saved, keeps the drawing open and offers Save Heightmap PNG.

• Maps from more national and continental grids import and land in the right place: the Swedish, New Zealand, Australian and European grids (SWEREF99 TM, NZTM2000, Australian Albers, the European conic and equal-area grids), the Swiss grids (LV95 and the older LV03), the old French Lambert zones (including Lambert II étendu), and equal-area maps centred on the North Pole, including NSIDC's EASE-Grid 2.0 maps of both poles. A GeoJSON or GeoTIFF that only names one of these by its code now imports, and a continent drawn round the pole comes back as a polar cap. The review still says when the map's datum differs from WGS 84: about a metre or two for the modern grids, up to a few hundred metres for the Swiss and old French ones.
• British National Grid and Belgian Lambert 72 maps import, including a GeoJSON or GeoTIFF that only names the code and a Belgian shapefile whose .prj spells out the projection. The review says their old datums are read without a shift, about 100 metres on the ground.
• Maps on older survey datums land where they belong. Imports on OSGB36, ED50, NAD27, Amersfoort, the Swiss, Belgian and French datums, Tokyo, Pulkovo 1942 and the older Australian and New Zealand datums are now moved onto WGS 84 with the published EPSG transformations (accurate to a few metres), instead of sitting 100–500 m off. The import review names the shift it applied.
• Rivers you draw on the blank canvas or bring in from a map file are now river lines like the ones the River line tool draws: they cut their valleys the same way and you can edit, rename or delete them in the Sculptor afterwards. Some imports whose drawn rivers ran to the sea failed to build; they build now.
• World maps in Plate Carrée, World Equidistant Cylindrical and Robinson now import and land in the right place: a GeoJSON, shapefile or GeoTIFF that names one of them (EPSG:32662, EPSG:4087, ESRI:54030 and their close relatives) or spells it out is read, not refused. A whole-world Robinson GeoTIFF comes back as the whole world, and the blank corners outside its oval are not read as ground.

Editing a built world

• Edit and create nations from one Nations panel. Every nation is listed, generated or your own, with its colour, capital, share of the land and where it came from; choosing one lights it up on the map. Renaming it or its capital, giving it a colour or describing it takes effect at once. Open it from Tools, Borders and places, Realms & settlements, the Sculptor's Realm tool or the command palette. These edits used to be spread over six places, and nothing listed the nations.
• Add a nation by clicking where its capital stands, and paint the ground it holds. Name it, pick its colour and optionally drag round its border; paint ground to any nation or back to the wilderness with a brush or a lasso, shown on the map as you draw. Remove a nation, or merge one into another. These wait in one list and are applied together by a rebuild of the peoples only, so terrain, climate and rivers stay exactly as they are. A capital placed close to an existing one takes that nation's founding place, and the panel warns before it does.
• A nation is the same colour on every map. The realm sheet and its key, the realm map, vector exports, arms, the campaign table, Living History and regional maps share one palette, and the colour you choose, or drew a realm in, is used everywhere. Realm sheets of worlds without a chosen colour are unchanged pixel for pixel; the in-app realm map and Living History now match the sheet.
• Fixed: renaming a realm from your roster lasts through rebuilds. Its roster entry takes the new name, so a rebuild no longer puts the old one back.
• Keep a lake's basin through rebuilds. Select a lake in the Sculptor and choose Keep its basin: its bed and shore keep their heights when you apply or reopen a revision. Its water still depends on rain and drainage, so it can shrink or dry out.
• Describe hills, lakes, inland seas and deltas in a drawn region. "Hills" adds modest relief, "a lake" or "a great inland sea" digs a basin, "a deep lake" digs deeper, and "delta" lowers the ground and asks for marsh where the climate allows. The coast stays put, and the reading explains each effect before you accept it.
• Polygon sculpting has Hardness. New filled polygons soften inward: Size sets the widest transition and Hardness narrows it. Ground outside the outline is untouched. Older polygons keep their hard edge.
• Shift holds a compass bearing. Shift snaps a straight sculpt line or polygon edge to the nearest 15° compass bearing on any projection, so an east–west line stays on its latitude and a north–south line on its meridian. Where the sheet cannot show the end point, the line is shortened along the same bearing.
• Kept streets shape a new town plan. Re-plan builds blocks, lots and buildings around the streets you locked, which keep their exact course and width, and new streets join them. A locked street that crosses water, or the classic planner, refuses the change and keeps the previous plan.
• Measurements travel with your world. Finished routes and shapes are saved in the world's folder and its project backups, with their names, colours and hidden state. Measurements kept in browser storage by Delta V8 move in when the world opens. Restoring an older version of the world leaves them as they are.
• Fixed: upgrading to a finer simulation says up front when it cannot go ahead. With a kept river valley, a Preserve brush area or a region described as kept, the upgrade simulated for a while and then failed. It now refuses at once and names the edits to switch off before upgrading.

• Draw rivers with the River line tool, beside the Road tool in the Sculptor. Click or drag a course, drag a point to move it, and save it as an edit every rebuild keeps. Before saving it tells you plainly when the line crosses from one river system into another, where water can't flow uphill. After the rebuild each line is listed as a river all along it (with the flow at its mouth), partly dry (the dry stretches marked on the map) or dry. Tick Keep its valley so later sculpting can't dam it.

• Move a river's course. Draw a River line from a point on a river to a point further down it, or out to the sea for a new mouth, and tick Replace the old course. The stretch that will go dry is drawn dashed before you save. After the rebuild the river runs along your line and the old bed is dry; the tool says how much went dry, what still runs there (a tributary or an overflowing lake keeps the old course a river below where it joins) and which lakes on it stopped overflowing. Untick it, or delete the line, and the old course comes back.
• A selected object looks and behaves the same in the Sculptor and in Scene Studio. The Sculptor's selected feature and the scene inspector now share one panel: the kind of panel, the object's name and a line about it at the top with the close at the right, titled groups below, and Remove or Delete at the end of the row, apart from Duplicate. Scene object fields are grouped under "Name and placement" and "Ink and fill". Escape inside either panel lets go (the Sculptor drops the selection without leaving the Select tool; the scene puts its inspector away) and returns you to where you were, and picking among the features at a spot with the keyboard no longer loses your place.
• Sculpting rebuilds only the part of the world your edit reaches. For a hill, a valley, a lake hollow or a built-over city that reaches a small part of the world, CartoVox works out which river systems the edit drains into and how far its rain and rain shadow carry, works out the climate and water again there, and leaves every height, river, lake, temperature and rainfall elsewhere exactly as it was. The review says so ("Rebuilds the area around your edit: about 3% of the world"), with "Rebuild the whole world instead" beside Apply. Edits that move a coast, change ice or a placed climate, or reach more than 15% of the land still rebuild everything, and so does a river line on a world that erodes, since only a whole rebuild lets it cut its valley.
• The River line tool can now add a branch to a river or take one away. Choose Add a branch and draw it down to the river it joins; choose Remove a branch and click a tributary: its channel goes, but its water still runs down the same valley into the river, so nothing downstream changes.
• A river you hold with a river line now cuts its own valley as the world erodes, so a drawn river runs in a valley instead of a flat channel, and can wear through a low ridge in its way.
• If you sculpt the ground after moving a river's course, the next rebuild finds where the old course runs now and dries that, instead of the cells it ran through before; the tool draws and says so.
• The Terrain Sculptor's notes now name the button the way it reads, Review & re-simulate, instead of the old Apply & re-simulate.
• After you sculpt a hill or a valley, sink a lake hollow or describe a built-over city, and the rebuild works out only the area around the edit, the towns, roads and realms away from the edit now stay exactly where they were. Only the towns in that area, and just around it, are placed again; only the roads that pass through it are laid again; and only a realm one of whose towns moved has its borders drawn again. The towns keep their names.
• City plans are drawn again only for the towns whose surroundings actually changed, and the data maps your edit did not touch (the plates, tides and ice, and for some edits the climate maps too) are kept as they were, so a rebuild after a small edit finishes sooner: a small ridge on a Quick world takes about 27 seconds instead of 35.
• Rivers far from an edit now come out exactly as they were after a rebuild of the area around it. Worlds are saved with their rivers worked out from the same figures the world file keeps, so the first whole-world rebuild after this update can send a stream down the neighbouring channel where two were nearly equal.
• Child maps that reach a pole now let rivers cross it as the world does: water running over the pole leaves the child map at its polar edge and comes back in, with everything it drains, on the far side, instead of pooling or running off sideways. The ground right round the pole no longer counts for more than it is, so polar rivers keep their size. Refined child maps are refined again; only those that reach a pole change.
• A city you describe on a river's delta now stands on the delta. Describing a stone city around a town at a river mouth used to wash the delta it stood on back into sea, so the town's own ground became water and the city was never recorded; the delta now grows as before and the city is built on it.
• Quick look no longer turns the middle of a large continent into desert. Its rain now matches the full simulation, and a look takes about a second longer than before.
• After a rebuild of the area around an edit, the lore and the Compendium of everything away from the edit now read exactly as before: a realm whose towns and borders did not change keeps its ruler, its neighbours, its rivals and its border notes word for word, and roads and sea lanes keep their numbers, so their entries in the lore and the Compendium stay the same. Only what the edit actually reached is written again, and anything that mentions it by name (a neighbour that was renamed, say) follows it.
• Places of power and sea lanes away from an edit now stay exactly where they were after a rebuild of the area around it. A place of power is sited again only when it stood in that area, and then inside it if it can be.
• Every people keeps its language after a rebuild of the area around an edit, even when one of its cities is placed again somewhere else nearby, so the names of towns far from the edit no longer change with it.
• The aquifers away from an edit keep their thickness to the last figure after a rebuild of the area around it.
• After a rebuild of the area around an edit, the natural regions away from it keep their ground, their numbers and their names, and so do their pages in the Compendium. Only the regions the edit reaches are divided again, into as many as they were, and a region next to them changes only its list of neighbours.
• Mountain ridges, the places where farming first began and the bodies of groundwater away from an edit now keep their lines, places and numbers after a rebuild of the area around it.
• What a market far from an edit is known for, and the order it lists its goods in, no longer shift after a rebuild of the area around the edit. How rare a good is still counts every town and market in the world, but one or two towns placed again near the edit no longer reorder the specialties of towns on the far side of the world; a bigger change in how many places make a good still shows.
• When an edit turns a river into a neighbouring valley, a rebuild of the area around the edit now follows the river's old and new course too. The towns, roads and ground beside the river's new path are placed and read again, however far it runs. If that makes the area too large, the whole world is rebuilt as usual.
• The small divisions seated at a manor rather than a town (a hundred, a barony, a township) now keep their names when the world is rebuilt or divided again, for as long as their seat stands. Before, renaming a town near an edit could rename a manor on the far side of the world.
• When an Apply rebuilds only the area around your edit, the finish now says so ("the area around your edit was rebuilt; the rest of the world is as it was") instead of claiming every layer was rebuilt. If a local rebuild was not possible and the whole world was rebuilt, it still says that.
• A river's drawn bends no longer change because a river somewhere else was added or lost; each river's wiggle now depends only on where it runs.
• Editing a river line that replaced a river's old course keeps that choice; after a rebuild the "Replace the old course" option used to vanish and the old course came back.
• Pressing Enter to finish a river line always saves it, even when the machine is slow to check it.

Render Studio

• Combine shapes. Select two polygons and use Union, Intersection or Subtract second from first; the lower one in the object list comes first and gives the style. Subtracting an inner shape leaves a real hole that shows the artwork below. Curves become straight edges. A result that would leave nothing is refused and both shapes stay, and Undo restores the originals.
• Edit shapes with holes and islands. Choose an Active ring (the outer edge, a hole or an island) to drag or type its anchors, insert or remove anchors, or smooth it with curve handles; an edit that would make rings cross or touch is refused. Copy a ring into a caption path, or use the shape as a clipping mask that keeps its holes. Make the rings straight again before Split, Remove, a Boolean or a clipping copy.
• Edit curve handles by number, and link them. Curve and point editing show each handle's coordinates, and linking an anchor turns its opposite handle with the one you move. Undo, autosave and reload keep the choice.
• Style a single landmark, region or division. Choose a saved wonder, pass or story pin and set its colour, symbol, size or visibility. The new Authored regions and divisions layer draws your described regions and political borders; pick one region, province or county to give it a fill, its own boundary colour and width, or hide it. Use layer style returns either to the shared look.
• Fixed: copied and saved artwork styles keep their Line ends and Corners, through reload, undo and style export and import.
• Exported structures keep their full-size artwork. Export structure writes the originals of imported artwork into the file, so it loads into another map, or imports into a structure library, still sharp. A file without originals, such as an older export, loads with its working copies.

• Curved compound shapes no longer have to be made straight first. Split cuts a curved edge in two without changing its shape, Remove joins the two neighbouring anchors with one curve fitted to the edges it replaces, and combining shapes or saving a clipping mask from a curved compound now work: the curves are traced as fine straight edges (within a quarter of a pixel on a 1000-pixel sheet), and the status line says so.
• Render Studio draws rivers down the channels shown on the map, with no strokes wandering off them.
• Ice sheets now stand at their full height in Render Studio and the tilted camera. The land is shaded, tinted white and contoured at the top of the ice, as the main relief map already shows it, while coasts stay where the ground meets the sea. Mountain stamps no longer sit on the smooth dome of an ice sheet; only ranges that rise through the ice keep them.
• On painted Illustrated sheets, coastal dune belts now carry a row of painted dunes just inland of the shore, turned to the onshore wind.
• On Illustrated sheets (inked and painted) and every other Render Studio sheet, the inked coastline now sits on the edge of the painted land instead of half a cell to the north-west of it. Rivers, contours and realm borders moved with it, so rivers now reach the sea they drain into, and the tilted camera and the exported geography.svg show the same.
• Towns, painted places and their names now stand at the middle of their map cell, so ports sit on the shore rather than in the sea.
• A regional sheet now draws its towns where they are; it used to place them as if the sheet showed the whole world.

Maps and exports

• Every record and statistic of a world in one World facts panel. Open it from the dock's Tools, the Planet card, the Compendium or the command palette. Land, Water, Climate, Peoples and Economy each lead with their records, then tables: the tallest and most prominent summits with their key cols, ranges and landmasses; rivers with length and flow, the largest basins and lakes; biome and Köppen climate shares; the hottest, coldest, wettest, driest and windiest places. Every row goes to the map in one click.
• Peoples and trade in numbers. World facts lists each realm and province with its area, share of the land, estimated residents and density, every settlement by role, cultures and faiths, and each market's goods, what every realm sells and must buy, and every trade route. What the model does not compute (settlement sizes, demand, wealth, how faiths spread) is said in one line instead of invented. Every table sorts by any column and downloads as CSV in your units; the whole set downloads as JSON.
• Show on map lands where you can see it. A place sent to the map from a tool drawer is centred in the part of the map the open panels leave clear, not under the panel that sent it.
• Fixed: a stray arrow sat behind the map library's Download icon. The fold arrow every collapsible section draws was drawn under that button's own icon; buttons that carry an icon no longer get one.
• Fixed: picture exports carried a grid you never turned on. The whole-map exports had a faint 30° grid that the map on screen did not show. No map drawing includes it now, so the Grid over the map is the only grid, and new worlds leave it off the map files saved in their folder. The picture exports gain Stretched and mark the projection on screen, and the Mercator choice is now Web Mercator (square), since it is not the 3:2 sheet the map shows. Library cards of older worlds keep the old grid until a rebuild.
• Hide the rivers with one click. A Rivers button sits beside Grid in Map appearance (key U). Turned off, the relief, biomes, every data map, the close-up view, the globe and every picture export are drawn without river lines, and the world remembers the choice. Lakes, the sea and coasts stay, a data map's own Rivers box can still show them, and the rivers stay in the world for travel, lore and data exports. Rivers drawn on the blank canvas hide too, since they became real rivers. Nothing is rebuilt.
• Fixed: a child map's hex map shows that map. A refined child map's illustrated hex map read the world's coarse cells, so it could show no rivers, blocks of one terrain, square lakes and misplaced towns. It now draws the child map's own largest rivers, its forest, meadow, swamp, hills and coast, its lakes in their shapes, and its towns where that map puts them.
• Fixed: every continent and island keeps its rivers on a whole-world hex map. The world's largest rivers used to take the whole share of river hexes; each landmass now has its own share.
• Hexcrawl sheets and VTT hex notes match the picture. They flag a river exactly where the hex map draws one, and a child map's sheet and notes describe that map. Expect far fewer river hexes than in Delta V8 on a whole-world sheet (407 instead of 3,948 on one 1440 × 720 world), because streams the picture leaves out are no longer flagged.
• Pins on the hex map. Your landmarks, hotspots, child-map pins, active volcanoes and hot springs are marked where they stand, each named above its pin; turn off Pins or Pin names in the hex map setup to leave them out. The grid information lists each pin's hex, and the hex maps and notes in Universal VTT, Foundry and Atlas VTT bundles include them.
• A players' copy. Tick Players' copy in the hex map setup to leave out hotspots, unrevealed story pins and places of power, and child-map pins you keep GM only, with their names and hex notes; each pin in a child map's list has a Players box. Regional VTT references without a grid offer a players' copy too, and its realm and city pages leave out unrevealed places of power.
• Switch any map to its Key view. A Key toggle beside each map's name puts the legend inside the picture, and downloads follow it: a transparent area round an Equal Earth or Robinson sheet stays transparent, and SVG maps stay intact. Switch back to Normal to read places or edit terrain.
• Biome classes are grouped by colour, blues, greens, ochres and so on, from dark to light, in the class list and in new biome keys. Biome IDs and map colours keep their meaning.
• Fixed: class filters respond to the first click, and quick changes to several classes keep every choice.
• Compare two species. In Species & varieties, choose Compare with to see the suitability difference or the shared suitability of two species; hover, the key and downloads name the pair. Land and sea species cannot be compared.
• Sailing directions. One chart in Water & atmosphere draws the four seasonal winds with the currents, saved sea lanes and named straits; open or download it at up to 4× density. It reads saved records, so no rebuild is needed. A world without open sea says the chart is unavailable.
• KML includes mineral and fuel prospects. The Places, roads and deposits download lists worked sites and undiscovered prospects, marked as geological potential, not measured reserves.
• Fixed: Maritime accessibility starts from a port the sea can reach. The port picker checks the approach to each quay rather than straight-line distance to the coast, and the map markers agree.
• Ruins on painted maps. With Landmark symbols on and the Painted style, ruin sites show the ruin artwork, and towns, cities and castles keep theirs. Landmarks near the date line keep their positions. Re-render a static export to see the change.
• Fixed: rivers on regional maps follow the larger branch where a river splits, matching the river the region inherits, near the poles and the date line too.

• The Watersheds map draws the divides between the watersheds it shows, so you can see where one river system's ground ends and the next begins.

• Child maps near the poles keep the world's rivers. Their refined ground no longer has a north-south grain that pulled rivers off course, and a road that crosses the date line is routed as one road. On any child map, a river flowing out of a lake now carries the lake's water. Each refined child map asks to be refined again once; away from the poles, and where no lake drains into the map, it comes out exactly as before.
• Painted towns, castles and ports. With painted stamps, every settlement on the map is now drawn as a small painting in the same light and brushwork as the painted mountains and trees: hamlets among their fields, villages round a chapel, towns with a church spire, ports with a quay, lighthouse and ship, open cities with a cathedral or dome, walled cities, hill castles and capitals with a palace above their walls. Bigger places are drawn bigger, each place keeps its own drawing on every sheet, trees make way for the buildings, and names sit beside the pictures instead of under them. The new places are also in Render Studio's stamp list for painting by hand, and in the painted artwork pack.
• Towns on steep ground show how their terraces were made: each terrace is cut into the hill on its uphill side and built up with the spoil below, drawn in shadow and pale under the plots, and the town's summary says how much earth was moved. Towns on level ground are unchanged.
• The 3D views run on a current three.js. The planet globe, landscape, planet and voxel views look as they did, with a library about a tenth smaller, and a device without WebGL 2 is told so plainly instead of the view failing.
• Fixed: a world's flood-basalt provinces are recorded where they appear on the map. Their saved longitude used to miss by however far the map had been turned to keep land off its edge.
• A downloaded map's key takes about an eighth of the sheet instead of over a quarter: its type scales with the sheet, classes run in columns, a colour scale fits on one row, and square or tall sheets get a side panel.
• Map aids are a grid of nine icons in Map appearance, with each aid's name shown when you point at it or reach it with the keyboard.
• Editing lives in Tools. Political hierarchy moved from Map appearance to Tools › Peoples beside Nations, so Map appearance only changes how the map looks. The Export menu fits without scrolling on a laptop.
• The Export menu's projection marked "on screen" saves the map exactly as you see it: its turn, its look and filters, the grid while it is on, and the borders, places and pins while they show. With Mercator on screen a "Mercator (as shown)" choice saves the 3:2 sheet beside the square Web Mercator. The other projections export as before.
• Heightmaps, vector (SVG and PDF) maps, terrain meshes, printable terrain and the printable globe now show the top of an ice sheet rather than the ground under it. A new "Under the ice" heightmap gives the ground beneath the ice, and the heightmap's own notes say which one it is.
• Rivers on the World map now run down the middle of their valleys and meet the coast, instead of sitting half a cell to the south-east.
• Mineral and gem deposits are now placed site by site: changing the ground in one place no longer moves deposits, their grades or their names elsewhere on the map, and the towns far away keep what they are known for. The first rebuild after this update places and names the world's deposits once afresh.
• The Köppen, calendar, snow, monsoon, storm, biodiversity, species and realm maps now redraw when what they read changes, instead of showing an older drawing after a rebuild; deposits and the Bronze and Iron Age maps follow a delta's arms after its rivers are routed again.
• The free offline reader opens PNG maps again; since WebP plates arrived, a reader packet's map and the PNGs in older backups would not open.

Writing, lore and history

• Collect books in one omnibus. Choose Omnibus in the book export menu, pick books in order and give the collection a title. Word, Markdown, standalone HTML and EPUB keep each book's chapters, and the first book sets the typography. A figure whose picture was deleted is left out, as in a single-book export.
• Download Insights as a spreadsheet. Export .xlsx saves your writing and downloads the current Chapter, Book or Series report. If a chapter's file is missing, Insights measures the rest and names that chapter.
• Books point out places a rebuild removed. After you accept a rebuild, Checks quotes prose that still names a town, river, lake, sea, mountain range, desert, natural region or place of power the rebuild did not carry over, and asks what you meant. Accept it or settle it in the Continuity Log; your prose is never changed. Only rebuilds accepted in Delta V9 are compared, so a comparison draft made by Delta V8 asks to be built again.
• Design a realm's government. In Describe › Peoples, expand a realm's Government to choose its origin, values, pillars and authority, with an optional founding story; a live preview names the government and its ruler's title. Rebuilds, dossiers, the Compendium and handbooks keep it, even with generated lore off.
• More naming styles. Tongues and Create offer Malay-inspired, Thai-inspired, Filipino / Tagalog-inspired, Playful invented and Eldritch invented styles, to blend into your tongues, allow for a world or lock for a realm. Worlds that do not choose them keep their names. Long family names now show in full in Languages & tongues.
• Market prices in your own currency. In Lore editor › Markets, name a currency, its value against the price index and a quantity for each good. Markets, dossiers, the Compendium and the vault then show suggested prices such as "2,555,000 copper pennies". Goods without a quantity or a trade route stay unpriced.
• Give any town a specialty. In Lore editor › Markets, write a named town's specialty and description, or restore its suggestion. It appears in dossiers and the vault and follows the town through rebuilds.
• Lean years can open a war. In Living History, the worst famine or lean year of the last four years can raise a neighbour's chance of attacking, and the war's explanation names that year. The Food model says so.
• Fixed: abandoned towns cite the right war. A town's abandonment now names the war fought in its own province, not a defeat elsewhere in its realm. Start a fresh Living History run to see it.

• A lore editor left open elsewhere no longer saves over newer lore. This covers the Lore editor, the Nations panel and the describe sheet in another window. An edit to something else is saved alongside the other window's change; an edit to the same entry is not saved, and the editor says so and offers to load the latest lore, keeping what you typed.

• Fixed: the arrow on Chronicle's "Event views" no longer sits on top of its words.
• Living History feeds people from more than fields. Coastal and lake towns fish, grasslands keep herds, and forests and wetlands give wild food, so a fishing or herding country weathers a failed harvest better: famines, lean years and hunger deaths fall sharply, and the Chronicle says when herds or nets carried a realm through. Peaceful, trading realms take technology steps over the centuries that raise their yields, and the history panel splits each year's food by source. Run a world's history again to see it.
• Each realm's ruler now has a name of its own that does not depend on the realms listed before it, and a realm's nearest river is looked for among all the world's named rivers, not only the twenty longest. The first rebuild after this update gives rulers new names (an author's own ruler names stay as written), and many realms now name a nearer, smaller river in their notes.
• Languages spoken from a secondary town now name that town in the lore and the Compendium, instead of a code such as "s4".

Campaigns and the tabletop

• Bring regiments and fleets onto the campaign map. In Tokens, expand Saved regiments & fleets and place a private copy at its station or anywhere on the map. Undo last recorded move steps back one day of its trail and keeps explored fog. The world's military records are not changed, and player exports leave out the private details.
• The tabletop speaks your language. GM and player windows follow the interface language you chose: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Polish.

• Fixed: Open tabletop keeps its full size in the campaign panel while the profile form scrolls above it; it had been squeezed flat.
• A story pin has its own Players box. Select the pin and tick Players, and players' copies of the hex map, the player handout and player mode show it even before your campaign reveals it. Unticked, which is how every pin starts, your campaign's reveals decide as before. It saves at once and needs no rebuild.
• Plan sessions and arcs on a Campaign board. Open it from the campaign header: lanes (Ideas, Next session, In play, Done, or your own) hold cards for sessions, scenes, quests, people and threats, each with notes, a campaign day shown in the world's calendar, and links to places, story pins, realms, forces, journeys, Chronicle events and manuscript scenes that open where they live. Drag cards or move them with Alt and the arrow keys. Cards stay hidden from players until you tick "Players see this card"; player mode and the handout show only those, and Download board writes the whole plan as Markdown.
• Players can join a table from their own devices on your local network. At the GM desk, Invite players starts sharing one table: players open the link (or scan its QR code) in a browser and see exactly what the player window shows, with fog painted into the picture. They can roll dice that show at your desk, ping the map and, if you allow it, move the token you give them. Nothing is shared until you press Start inviting, and Revoke or leaving the desk ends it. It works on your local network only.
• Campaign board links and quests follow their places across a rebuild. A linked town, river, pin or realm that moved keeps its link; one the rebuild did not find stays on the card marked as not found, never pointing at whatever holds that number now, and is listed with the rebuild's released records.
• Resolve a clash with the battle simulator in the campaign workspace. Pick two to four sides from your saved regiments and fleets (or quick forces), a place and a campaign day: it reads the ground there (hills, forest, marsh, a river to cross, a town's walls or a fort) and the day's weather, or the sea for fleets. The result says who held the field, tells the battle in a few sentences, lists losses force by force and shows every modifier with its reason ("Defenders on a ford: ×1.5"). The same setup always gives the same battle; "Fight again" tries another. Keep it in the campaign's battle log, apply its losses to your forces (undoable), and share only its summary with players.
• Saved regiments and fleets carry a quality read from their history. A levy starts raw and a guard elite; with a current Living History run, a realm's recent won war, its technology and a recent famine move its forces up or down, and the battle simulator and a token's details say why ("Veterans (fought in the Varn war, 1220–1224)"). You can still choose another quality for any battle.

The living world

• Fixed: small inland waters had ocean tides of several metres. Water the world ocean cannot reach, smaller than an inland sea (90,000 km²), is now a lake: the lake model fills it fresh, salts it or leaves it dry from its own water, and it has no tide. Ponds painted on imported or drawn maps count too. Enclosed inland seas tide on their own, a few centimetres to under a metre, and lake hollows below sea level keep their depth and are drawn as land. Rebuilding may turn small enclosed seas into lakes or dry hollows and change nearby coasts; a narrow strait to the ocean still carries the ocean's tide.
• Tilt a planet past 90°, as far over as Uranus or Venus. Axial tilt now runs from 0° to 180°. Past 90° the planet lies turned over and spins against its orbit: a 97° world has the seasons of an 83° tilt, with every wind belt, gyre and rain shadow mirrored. Daylight, the noon sun and the midnight sun in dossiers and scenes follow. A description can ask for it ("tilted 97°", "like Uranus", "lying on its side"), and Seasons in the brief keep a turned-over planet turned over. Worlds tilted 90° or less build exactly as before.
• Grasslands have more depth. New builds tell tall-grass and short-grass prairie, montane grassland and flooded grassland apart from mixed temperate grass, cold steppe and savanna, in maps, the cell reader, dossiers, the Compendium and hex exports. Prairies are open grass on atlas plates, and a mild-winter tall-grass prairie shows as pampas on the vegetation map. Fire and grazing are not simulated.
• Rain on built-up ground drains downstream. On ground you described as a city, walls or other built-up land, rain and snowmelt now run through drains and culverts into the rivers below instead of vanishing. A hollow mostly under the town stays dry, but a lake whose shore the town reaches keeps its water.
• Wheat and barley grow beside reliable water. Their habitat maps and goods suggestions now count irrigation within 35 km of a large river that runs all year, or of a fresh lake, as the Agricultural calendar already did. These are places the crops could grow, not yields.

• Rivers pass under built-up ground in culverts, and a town's drains have a capacity: a town's page says when its drains overflow and in which seasons, and a river's page says where it runs under the streets. A tenth of the rain on built ground is lost to evaporation and leaking pipes before it reaches the drains.
• A river's catchment now adds up along the river. Drainage area is measured along the channels the rivers follow and through lakes, so it never shrinks downstream and no basin claims more ground than it has. Soils, resources and where towns settle read it, so rebuilt worlds may move some towns and rename many places; child maps match their parent's catchments more closely.
• Big rivers build their deltas out into the sea. A river carrying enough sediment onto a shallow shelf now grows a fan of new low land at its mouth, sized by its load (a Mississippi or Nile builds a wide one, a steep river off a deep margin none), and splits across it into a few distributaries that share its water. Deltas become marsh, mangrove and swamp forest, and towns may settle on them. Describe "a great delta" in a region and its main river builds one if the shelf allows, and the region's reading says whether it did.
• Oases, springs and flooding rivers water fields. Dry ground near a spring or oasis is farmed as irrigated land (date palms grow there), and a river that floods each wet season supports flood farming along its banks. The Agricultural calendar has an Irrigation layer, the cell inspector and a town's page name the source ("Seasonal flood farming on the Y"), and towns favour water they can draw on all year.
• Cold, dry open country reads as cold steppe, as Köppen draws it: ground too dry for forest with a winter month below −3 °C, or with no month reaching 18 °C (Patagonia's cool summers), is cold steppe instead of short-grass prairie. The cell inspector and the biome's page say why.
• Small towns settle at desert oases. On a dry world a dozen or more towns now stand at springs and oases in the desert; capitals and regional centres stay where they were.
• More of the rain inland comes from land, as on Earth. Water vapour now rains out within about nine days of evaporating instead of sixteen, so moisture from forests and wetlands falls again over land rather than drifting out to sea: deep in a continent about two-fifths of the rain was evaporated from land on its way. Land as a whole is a little drier, and dry belts and rain forests sit a little more as they do on Earth.
• Mountain ranges no longer rise as broad plateaus above 5 km. An Earth-like world now has about as much very high land as Earth (a few tenths of a percent rather than nearly 2%), while its tallest summits still stand well above the ranges around them.
• The health report compares an Earth-like world with Earth: how much of the surface is land, how high that land stands, where rain peaks and dips by latitude, and how much land is dry, each beside Earth's own figure. It is information only and never lowers the score.
• Rivers braid where they should. A river with a strong flood season, a steep enough bed and a heavy load of sediment, such as a glacier-fed outwash river or a monsoon river leaving the mountains, splits into several channels between gravel bars. The inspector and the gazetteer say so, towns on these rivers get their bars, and illustrated maps and hex maps draw them as threads across a bed of gravel.
• A river's flow now only grows downstream. Discharge and lakes are worked out along the channels the rivers are drawn on, so a river no longer seems to lose water halfway down; it loses water only through a lake's evaporation and seepage, and splits only across a delta. Many rivers carry a little more than before, the biggest rivers keep their places, and lakes on a watershed may change.
• Worlds with permanent day and night read their ground properly. The cell inspector shows the day side, twilight band or night side, how high the star stands, the one steady ground temperature (no daily swing, only clear against cloud), and whether frost and dew ever form; frozen night-side ground is a cold trap where ice gathers. Dossiers describe the fixed star instead of a noon sun, and journeys give one ground temperature for each day ashore.
• Deep Time runs for worlds with permanent day and night. Its climate history warms the point under the star instead of the equator, and ice sheets gather on the night side.
• Gold and tin placers, waterfalls and town drain reports follow the rivers as drawn. Placers sit on drawn rivers and run down a delta's arms, waterfalls stand where a drawn river drops, and a town's drain report names only rivers that really run through it.
• Rain by latitude follows Earth's pattern. Sinking air now dries the subtropics, and the subtropical highs stay near 30° through the year instead of following the tropical rain belt, so the driest belt lies at 20–30° where Earth's great deserts sit and about a quarter of subtropical land is desert. The sea evaporates into the air just above it, so the trade winds feed the equatorial rain belt and it rains about as hard as Earth's, not harder. Storms in the westerlies wet the mid-latitudes and carry moisture poleward, so high-latitude land is a little wetter. Hot deserts and dry steppe are much more common than in Delta V8 and gather in the subtropics, Mediterranean climates appear on west coasts, and boreal forest spreads. Worlds on other planets, such as a steeply tilted one, change most.
• Cold water wells up where the wind pushes the sea apart. Cold tongues along the equator and cold seas off subtropical west coasts now cool the air above them, so the equatorial rain belt is less extreme, equatorial land gets Earth-like rain, coastal deserts on western shores stay dry, and the Fisheries map is richest where the cold water rises.
• Every world has biogeographic realms. Land is grouped into realms by how long it has been cut off by sea, mountains, desert or ice, with island realms for far archipelagos; long-isolated realms have mostly their own wildlife. Wild beasts and plants that cannot cross the sea keep to the realms their kind could reach, farming spreads within its home realm first, and the cell inspector and dossiers say which realm a place belongs to. On Deep Time worlds a realm's isolation comes from its continents' history.
• Deserts have sand seas with real dunes. Where the wind can pile sand from dry river beds, salt flats, dry coasts and sandstone, a sand sea forms, its dunes shaped by how steady the winds are: crescent, transverse, linear, star or (half-grown with plants) parabolic, their crests set by the seasonal winds. A new "Sand seas & dunes" map shows them, the cell inspector names them ("a field of linear dunes running NNE–SSW"), painted maps line their dunes up along the crests, and a large one may give its desert region a name such as "The Aelion Erg".
• Continents have broad uplands one to two kilometres up, like southern Africa or the Colorado Plateau, instead of climbing straight from coastal plains into mountain ranges. An Earth-like world's land now stands about as high as Earth's: nearly a third above 1 km and about a tenth above 2 km. The uplands rise inland and leave the coastline where it was.
• Winds blow at Earth's speeds. The trade winds blow at about 7 m/s instead of 12, the westerlies are stronger and blow hardest in winter, and wind over land is gentler than over the sea. Sailing directions, sea state in the battle simulator, storms in the weather year and dune drift follow the new winds; rain belts and dry country stay where they were.
• A river that leaves a lake just inland of the coast can build its delta, and is named on it. When a delta you described still is not built, the region's reading gives the one reason that applied, such as the sea at the mouth being too deep.
• Lakes trap their rivers' sediment, as Lake Geneva does the Rhône's, so a delta below a large lake builds smaller or not at all, and rivers without a lake on their way build theirs as before.
• Lakes balance their water in ordinary worlds too. Where two lakes stand at one level and share a low crest, their water often never settled, even on everyday worlds, and a lake's page could show water draining from its storage that nothing had put there. These lakes now settle, and each lake's page balances what flows in against what flows out.
• Ice sheets now stand up off the ground. A large ice sheet rises as a dome, a few hundred metres thick at its edge and up to four kilometres at its heart, while mountains taller than the ice stand through it bare. The air over the ice is measured at its surface, so the heart of a big sheet is now 6 to 9 °C colder than the ground beneath it was, like the summits of Greenland and Antarctica. The relief map draws the sheet white and shades its dome, and the cell reader shows the ice surface, the ice thickness and the ground under the ice. Small mountain ice keeps the height of its mountains.
• Deltas now take the shape their coast gives them. Where the river brings down more than the sea can move, the delta reaches out into the sea and splits into channels, as before. Where strong waves carry its sand away along the shore, it spreads into a broad, smooth point with one or two mouths. Where big tides scour the mouth, it stays open as a funnel between sandbars and the river leaves by one channel. The cell reader and a river's dossier say which kind of delta it is. On the worlds tested, most deltas are the river's kind and about one in six belongs to the tide. No wave-shaped delta formed: built deltas need big rivers, and they mostly sit in sheltered seas.
• Sand seas read their dunes from how the winds wander through the year: star dunes rise where winds from several quarters meet, long linear dunes where two winds cross at a wide angle, crescent dunes where one wind rules. Every dune field now has a sand depth and a dune height (clicking a cell says how high its dunes stand, and desert and region pages give a typical height), and windy, sandy shores carry belts of coastal dunes, wet coasts included, drawn along the shore on the "Sand seas & dunes" map.
• Rivers whose floods come all in one season now braid more readily, and rivers that run steadily all year braid less. Each river also has a bed of sand or gravel: sand where its catchment is low ground or its floods are too gentle to move gravel. A braided river on sand shifts between sand bars, in the inspector, the gazetteer and the town plans beside it.
• Where a town stands on built-up ground you described and its drains overflow, its town plan now shows the flood routes: storm water running along the streets, not across the plots, down to the river, the shore or the culvert, and a river carried under the town is drawn as a culvert. The town's Drains entry in the gazetteer says where the water goes.
• The soil carries water from one season to the next. After the climate is solved, each place's soil fills with rain and melting snow and dries through the warm months, year after year until the cycle repeats. The biomes now read that water rather than the year's rain alone: a winter- wet, summer-dry climate grows open Mediterranean woodland, a monsoon climate with the same rain grows closed forest, and no bog forms where the summer dries the ground. The cell inspector's Runoff & storage section shows the soil water each season, how much of the possible evaporation the ground could give, and the year's water shortfall and surplus; the Climate Lab's seasonal scrubber has a Soil water layer; and the scientific export carries the year's totals.
• A town at the outlet of a lake now carries the lake's river under its streets in a culvert. Its page, the river's page and the town plan name the river, where before they said only that rain ran off its streets although the whole lake drained through them.
• Frozen seas no longer act as a source of rain: sea ice now stops the sea evaporating, so polar seas stop feeding a fake drizzle. Storms carry on past the subpolar low, and cold lands give back more of their summer rain. Together these bring more rain to high latitudes, and the far north and south are less like deserts. Ice-age worlds get drier near the poles, as glacial worlds were.
• The mid-latitude rain belt is a little flatter and spreads further poleward. The ocean's rain belt now runs about a month behind the sun, so the wet season reaches further from the equator. Rebuilt worlds will show changed rain and biomes.
• Rivers carry an Earth-like share of the rain. Rivers used to carry away about three fifths of the rain that fell on land, and deserts gave nearly all of their rain to rivers. Now the rivers are fed by the same soil water the plants live on. Soaked or frozen ground sheds water quickly, steep and rocky ground sheds a heavy month's rain, and the rest feeds the soil, the plants and slowly the springs. About a third of the land's rain now reaches the sea, as on Earth. Deserts give up only a few percent, and cold country loses about half its rain to rivers. Big rivers now carry about the flow of an Earth river with a similar catchment and rain.
• Rivers rise when the soil overflows. A river's high-water season is now the season its land's soil overflows, and in cold country that is the spring flood, when snow melts on ground that is still frozen. More rivers run low or dry for part of the year, as many do on Earth. Fewer closed basins fill into lakes, so some lakes, salt pans, marshes and swamps are smaller or gone, and towns that followed the water have moved with it.
• Forest and woodland read the same soil water as the rivers. Because the soil now loses its soaked and frozen water to the rivers, woodland, Mediterranean scrub and bogs were re-balanced, so the same climates grow the same cover as before. In the cell inspector, a cell's "surplus" is now all the water the land passes on to rivers and springs.
• Tropical seas and coasts now get the rain that easterly waves and tropical storms bring outside the main tropical rain belt, and winter cold fronts reach a little further toward the subtropics. Land is now drier than the sea by about Earth's margin, deserts hold their ground, and the climate stage is about a tenth faster.
• A stream that joins a bigger river is now as wide as its own water makes it. Before, every stream was sized by the river it flows into, so a small tributary could be drawn hundreds of metres wide, with a broad floodplain, a braided bed or gravel it never carried. Floodplain wetlands shrink a little to match, and on a rebuild a few towns, realms and biomes beside those streams may shift.

Speed and memory

• A faster climate step. On the reference Mac a Full world took about 6½ minutes instead of 12½, and a Quick world about 80 seconds instead of 100, with every saved number the same. Installers carry it whenever the machine that built them could compile it, Windows included, and each build's log says whether it was used.
• Create quotes re-measured times and names the machine. Until your own builds teach it, Create quotes figures from an Apple M5 Pro MacBook Pro on 14 October 2026: Sketch about 37 seconds, Quick about 80 seconds, Full about 6½ minutes, and a Full world with every publication plate about 12 minutes (Delta V8 said 20–25). A copy without the faster climate step quotes its own, slower figures. The example world quotes about 2 minutes and 275 MB.
• Build estimates learn your land shape. Your own timings count only for builds with the same geography, planet, Advanced settings and variation; until one finishes, the menu says Not measured. Memory estimates include the faster climate step, about 200 MB for each season a Full world solves at once.
• Fixed: a Low memory world stays Low memory. Its rebuilds, updates, restores and drafts solve one climate season at a time, as its first build did; a finer copy made from it uses spare memory like any other world. Create no longer quotes a Low memory figure not measured for this version, and says so plainly.
• Sketch and Quick atlas plates are drawn at a size that suits their grid, using much less memory. Full worlds are unchanged.
• Opening a world for the first time is quicker: dividing it into counties and building its Compendium do less repeated work. App Settings loads the first time you open it, and the interface fonts are smaller.

• Opening a world and finishing a new one take much less memory on a Mac. Large world files were read in a way macOS held on to afterwards. A Low memory world now builds and opens in about 3.2 GB on the reference Mac, inside its 4 GB promise again, and Create shows that figure.
• Building a world is quicker. Every "how far is this from the coast, the nearest plate boundary or water" measurement is now worked out exactly in one sweep instead of an approximate search: a Quick world builds about 15 seconds faster and a Full world about a minute faster. A few places that were measured slightly too far from the coast now get the right distance, so rebuilt worlds differ in small local details.
• Atlas plates and styled maps measure distance from the coast about five times faster, and exactly: about a quarter of a minute saved per full atlas on a large world. Names stay where they were.
• A Full world's atlas no longer holds memory it has finished with. macOS had been keeping memory the plates had already freed, so the same plates now need about half as much, drawn exactly as before; the atlas spends the room on sharper plates (see below).
• Atlas plates come out sharper when memory is short. The atlas had been expecting each plate to need about twice the memory it really takes, so it gave up fine detail too early: an 8 GB Mac now keeps every plate at full size, a 16 GB Mac draws most with smoother edges, and a Mac with about 20 GB free draws them at the full publication finish, which takes longer and peaks at about 11 GB on a 48 GB Mac.
• Opening a world's maps holds less memory on a Mac: up to half a gigabyte lower at the peak, and about half as much held afterwards.
• Rivers and lakes are worked out about ten times faster. On a Full world the water stages fell from about four minutes to under half a minute, and the checks before a world is saved from 41 to 9 seconds, with every world coming out exactly as before.
• The climate is worked out two to two and a half times faster. Each season's moisture now stops once the air has settled instead of after a fixed count, the final climate starts from the first pass's air, and more of the work runs compiled. Quick worlds, which never fully settled before, come out a little wetter and closer to a Full world's climate.
• The rest of a build is faster too, with every world coming out exactly as before: checking a Full world before it is saved takes 9 seconds instead of 46, Living History runs about a third faster, a large city's plan is drawn in two thirds of the time, and saved files are written faster.
• A whole atlas no longer holds more memory with every plate it draws. Each plate kept the mountain, tree and town stamps it had sized for itself, so by the last plate of a Full atlas about 2 GB was taken up by stamps no later plate would use. Each plate now lets them go when it is finished. The late plates peak up to 3 GB lower, and every plate comes out exactly as before.
• Create's memory figure for a new world was measured again with the faster climate solver and with the seasons solved side by side. A Full world no longer quotes less than a one-season build really uses (it said 4.6 GB for 4.8 GB), nor about 1.4 GB more than four seasons at once take; it now quotes about 5.6 GB solving one season at a time and about 7 GB solving four, each 15% above the measurement.
• Build times round half-minutes up, so a Full world quotes "3 min–5 min" around its typical 3 minutes instead of "2 min–4 min", and Create's own build notes and the update estimate round the same way.
• Applying a small sculpt now keeps every illustrated atlas plate the edit cannot reach, instead of redrawing all of them. On the example world a valley in Garheim keeps 7 of its 12 plates (the world sheet and the plates around the valley are drawn again), and the Apply took about 53 seconds instead of 80 in our measurement.

Saving, updating and the Library

• Fixed: opening a world as the app starts showed two "Still opening" notices. The app reopens your last world by itself; clicking Resume meanwhile started a second open of the same world, with its own notice, and filled every panel twice. Resume now joins the open already under way: its button says Opening, one notice is shown, and the world view opens when it lands.
• Find a world's folder by its name. New worlds are saved in folders named after them, such as ashen-reach-1a2b3c4d, instead of world_ and a string of letters and numbers. Rename a world and its folder follows, with everything that points at it: scenes, tabletop campaigns, drafts, other worlds' records and your unsaved work in the app; old links still reach it. If something is using the world, the folder keeps its name and the app says why. Library cards have Show folder, and exports are named after the world. Older worlds keep their folders until renamed.
• Fixed: renaming a world no longer renames towns in route descriptions whose names contain the world's old name. This also stopped some older worlds from updating.
• Fixed: two name-related save failures. An older realm-name override now updates neighbouring realms and map names together, and a city rename keeps the name you gave a drawn road while its endpoints follow the city.
• A failed build, rebuild or update says in its log which final check failed and why, and an update keeps your previous world to go back to.
• Fixed: a world in a folder CartoVox cannot write to opens. In a read-only or shared library, a world not yet divided into provinces could fail to open. Its provinces and counties are now worked out on opening and saved once the folder can be written.
• Fixed: moving your save folder keeps your Notes inbox folder choice, which used to become an empty folder. You can keep working during the copy, and anything you save meanwhile goes to the new folder.
• Fixed: the gazetteer, dossiers and the Landmarks overlay wait for a slow save, such as a rename, instead of failing after five seconds.

• World folders are smaller. Atlas plates and city plans are kept as lossless WebP, about a quarter smaller than before with exactly the same pixels, so a Full world with every plate takes about a seventh less room. Downloads, Foundry modules and books still get PNG where PNG is expected.
• Saved versions take far less room. Each version of a world now keeps a file's content once and shares it with every other version that has the same file, so a lore edit's version adds a few kilobytes instead of about 18 MB, and older versions move into the new store safely the next time a version is saved. Every older version still restores exactly.
• Fixed: a copy of a world could no longer restore its older versions. Keep previous version and rebuild drafts rewrote files inside the copied versions, so restoring them was refused as changed.
• After "Use this version" on a kept previous version, the open window keeps showing the world without missing pictures.

Settings and the app

• CartoVox saves before it closes. Closing the app first saves pending drawing, tracing, writing, map and tabletop edits and waits for a drawing export to finish. If a save fails or cannot be confirmed, a warning says so: Cancel keeps CartoVox open so you can save, and OK closes without those edits.
• Preview themes on a miniature interface. Appearance shows each built-in, system or custom theme's colours around the same map, and a custom theme updates as you edit it.
• Large numbers are easier to read. Measurements, populations and counts group their digits (12 345 m), never split across lines, and line up in columns.
• The welcome guide's pictures show the current Create steps.

• Fixed: readings that round to zero show as "0", not "-0" (for example "-0 °C" in the cell inspector).
• Linux now needs a current distribution: Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 35, RHEL, Rocky or AlmaLinux 9, or newer, or a current Arch. Older systems (Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 11, the RHEL 8 family) are no longer supported; the runtime check says so plainly, and the portable archive's name now ends in glibc2.34. CartoVox now runs on Python 3.14.
• The battle simulator's account of each battle, its modifiers and their reasons, the place and weather it reads, the Simulation health panel's checks and their explanations, the campaign board's first lanes and the map editor's short messages now follow your interface language in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. Exports and saved files stay in English, and a lane you rename keeps your words.
• More of the app now follows your interface language in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish: the battle simulator's error messages and each saved force's quality reading ("Read as Veterans (fought in the Varn war, 1220–1224)"), the Simulation health panel's dry-river and delta checks, the Terrain Sculptor's Quick look panel, its live terrain summary, the selected-feature guidance and buttons, the pending-edits line, the review messages, and the River line tool's hints, divide warnings and results. The Sculptor's sentences now name "Review & re-simulate" and "Quick look" exactly as those buttons read in your language. English text, exports and saved files are unchanged.
• Much more of CartoVox now follows your interface language in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish: the welcome tour, the Library (Continue, world cards, Trash), Create's first choices and build buttons, the world map's dock, tools and panels, the Terrain Sculptor (every tool's name, instructions and tooltips, the pending-edits list such as "3 · Raise · 12 km stroke", the keys and gestures), Render Studio, the Write workspace, the campaign table (clock, sessions, tokens, quests, fog, territory) and the campaign profile, tooltips across the app, the reasons a greyed-out button gives, and the error messages the app's server sends when something cannot be done. A river branch you take away is shown as "Branch of …" in your language. English text, exports and saved files are unchanged.
• A tool panel's title on the map now wraps onto a second line when it is too long for the panel, instead of ending in "…".
• The first-hour guide walks through Beinnorn, today's example world, and shows a sculpt Apply rebuilding only the area around the edit, with "Rebuild the whole world instead" beside it.

Known limits

• A copy of CartoVox without the faster climate step, such as a Windows build made without a C compiler, builds at Delta V8's speed. Create then quotes the slower times, and the build log says the faster step was not used.
• The tabletop's German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish have not yet been reviewed by native speakers.
• A local rebuild leaves the edited ground as you sculpted it (rivers are not given time to wear it down). A realm's share of the world's land can change in its last figure when the edit fills or drains a lake, and dune fields can shift up to about 1,500 km from the edit, as far as the winds and the sand they carry reach. "Rebuild the whole world instead" works everything out again.
• Rainforest rivers run a little low. The wettest tropical rivers carry slightly less than Earth's Amazon would for the same rain, because the model's tropical evaporation runs a little high.
• The review before Apply cannot see a river the edit will turn. The share of the world it quotes can be a little smaller than the area the rebuild finally solves again; the rebuild's log gives the final share.