CartoVox Delta V11 — full release notes

Delta V11 is the eleventh Delta release. Everything below is new or changed since Delta V10, which was shared with invited testers on 18 October 2026. The sea now shapes every new world's coasts: glaciers carve fjords, the sea's rise since the last ice age drowns river valleys into long inlets and estuaries, waves cut bays and capes, and the sea builds barrier islands, lagoons and reefs, all of which a new Coast Lab shows you. Land can lie below sea level, deserts have oases, and every nation can be given a strength, a naval reach and natural borders. A river guide brings your own rivers and lakes into an imported map, Create's reading of your description says what became of every clause, Sculpt stands docked beside the map, and Sky & planet shows the sky over any place. Worlds made with Delta V10 open as they are, and Library offers Update to this version for them; updating reshapes their coasts, so the rivers, towns and names along them can change.

Create

The sea wears the coasts. Coastal erosion is on for every new world (0.6 in Advanced; 0 keeps the coasts as the plates drew them). Where soft rock lies between hard headlands facing the open sea, the waves hollow it into bays and leave capes, cliffs and sea stacks standing; only low, soft islets wear away. Coasts come out longer and more indented, for under 1% of the land. A narrow neck joining two large landmasses is breached into a strait only where it is short, soft and reached by the swell from both sides, and only a few times in any world; a neck of hard rock never is.
Glaciers carve fjords. Where a great outlet glacier of the last cold age reached the sea, it cut its trough below sea level and the sea now fills it, so high-latitude mountain coasts are notched by fjords a few hundred metres deep, shallower at the mouth. At world scale only the largest fjord systems show; the smaller ones are drawn in the HD region and in refined child maps. The "Fjorded" coast choice, and "fjords" in a description, cut the troughs deeper (they do not give a world an ice age it lacks), and the new Advanced setting Glacial fjord depth sets how deep (600 m by default; 0 cuts none).
Drowned valleys and estuaries. The sea's rise since the last ice age drowns the valleys of big rivers without a delta into long inlets of the sea (rias), and river mouths with big tides open into funnel-shaped estuaries and firths. A stronger glacial history drowns them deeper; a world with no glacial history, or an Ice age planet already at its low sea, keeps its coast as built.
The sea builds coasts too. Where waves drive sand along a shallow coast with small tides, barrier islands rise offshore with lagoons behind them, cut by tidal inlets, and spits run on past the corners, as at Venice or the Outer Banks. In warm, clear, shallow seas away from muddy river mouths, reefs fringe the coasts, line the shelf edges and cover shallow banks, sand cays stand on the shallowest, and sunken volcanoes become atolls. The new Advanced setting Coastal deposition sets how much the sea builds: 1 by default, 2 for twice as much, 0 for none.
Land below sea level. Where two continents slide past each other and pull slightly apart, the ground between the fault's strands sinks, as at the Dead Sea and Death Valley: a handful of long, narrow basins at most, holding salt flats or salty lakes that rivers enter and never leave in a dry climate, and deep lakes filled to the brim in a wet one. A small pocket of sea floor that the coast has closed off has filled with sediment and salt to a floor near 450 m below sea level, as Earth's enclosed basins have, instead of staying kilometres deep. Ground you imported or protected is never changed.
Names hold steadier. A new world's own name is drawn from everything you chose for it, not the seed alone, and never repeats a world already in your Library (a second world from the same settings becomes "Nimadolen 2"); or type one in the Build step's optional Name this world field. Natural regions are named last, after every other place, and from their own ground rather than their size rank, so a change that merges or splits a region renames no town, realm, river, other region or the world itself. Tiny islands near a larger region of the same ground and climate join it instead of each becoming a region of its own, and every river whose valley the sea drowned has a name, so rias, firths and estuaries are called after their rivers. Worlds you already have keep their own name when updated; updating can rename their natural regions and some other places, and the update notice says so.
The world you build is the card you chose. A world built from a candidate card keeps the mountain belts and land bridges the card showed: the search and the Sketch, Quick and Full builds now lay out the planet's spreading ridges the same way. The detailed map in Build and in Preview this seed is drawn at the tier you chose, with its facts and checks taken from that map; switching tier or turning on Low memory redraws it, and it warns where moving the coast by a single cell would split or join large landmasses. Comparing candidates keeps what you inspected at each tier beside the search facts. On worlds with a set number of continents, an arm cut off to keep the count sinks with its shelf, so no pale ghost coastlines ring the open ocean.
Search deeper, your own way. Each search depth says how long it takes, from about 20 seconds up to about 5 minutes for 512 seeds. Search controls set the shortlist (6, 12 or 24), how far shape diversity explores and which seeds to try: repeat a fixed search, step from a start number, or rank a pasted list of up to 512 seeds you already like. These choices are remembered, each result keeps where its seed came from, and Recent searches sit on the search's own row.
Variation controls open over the candidate grid, so the world you picked stays in view. Choose which of 16 terrain traits may change, from coast detail, continental outline, mountains and shelves to rift depth, coastal plains, volcanic islands and sea-floor roughness, each with its own strength and direction (only increase, only decrease or either way), and show 6 to 48 results ranked by likeness or by fit to the brief. Variation amount basis can vary each setting by a share of its own value instead, and Variation sampling sets how many trials to run. The seed and plate count stay fixed, every card keeps its exact settings through choosing and building, and cards are checked against the settings they actually vary. Your last choices are remembered and travel with saved, exported and imported recipes. In Essentials, Search controls and Variation controls wait until you ask for them.
The description reads the numbers you write. Planet size, gravity, day and year, air pressure, star, orbit and moon, sea temperatures, rainfall, ice, land coverage ("70% ocean", "30% land"), salinity, plates ("nine major tectonic plates"), hotspots, mountain height and peoples, in familiar units (miles, feet, °F, inches of rain a year, mph, knots, psi and more), with thousands written as 1,000 or 1 000; and plain switches such as "tides off" or "rotation direction retrograde". A number counts only after its full name, so "an island of radius 1200 km" never changes the planet, and story numbers ("30% of the people", "nine plates on the table") are left alone. Every number it does not use is explained: the full name to write, out of range in your own unit, unclear like "1.000 km", or belonging in Must have. Which words does it know? can be filtered and lists the units each number accepts.
Counts and shapes are read in context. "Five main continents" followed by "two are large, one medium and two smaller" suggests five continents with large and small ones among them; counts or land shapes that disagree are pointed out. "Inland seas" in the plural is read, archipelagos beside a continent count become a check for many islands, "two continental pairs and an isolated continent" suggests continent zones, and "leave settlements and realms for us to place later" suggests the Civilisation choice that keeps only the places and realms you make. A refused shape ("no inland sea", "without an archipelago") sets nothing and points you to Avoid. A giant host planet, continents drifting apart or colliding, and the climate of one particular continent are reported as not supported yet.
More kinds of place, placed where you say. Caves, salt marshes, mangroves, bogs and fens, lakes, straits, ruins, holy sites, strongholds, impossible regions, barrier islands and lagoons, sea cliffs and stacks, alluvial plains, coloured and volcanic sands, salt flats and stony deserts can each be placed by direction, near or between your named areas and realm homelands ("forests 500 km north of Ember"), at coordinates ("hills at 25 N, 60 W"), on a bearing or part of the way along a route, with its own radius or area ("area 0.2% of planet"). A request about one place proposes no change to the whole world's climate or geology.
Choose which suggestions to take. Every suggestion reads as a plain sentence and value and has a checkbox, so Select this group, Select all suggestions and Apply selected take a few ideas from a long description; the list can be searched and filtered by status or group. "Not what I meant" dismisses one, and it stays dismissed with the brief, through a reload and in recipes, until you change the words it was read from. A suggestion that would replace a value you set yourself says so ("You set exactly 4 major continents in Limits; this would replace it.") and is applied only on its own, never by Apply all. Setup checks above the list explain settings that contradict each other and open Advanced at the setting; they never change a value themselves.
"What your description asked for" sits beside What the search checks: every clause of your description with what became of it (checked by the search, set, approximate, not applied yet, set by hand, in conflict, dismissed, not supported yet or not understood), folded to a one-line count, and What the search checks puts how each check is measured behind an (i).
Limits take exact requirements: "20 to 40 islands", "land coverage 25–40%", "highest peak 6 ± 1 km", in mixed units if you like ("16000 ft to 6 km"). A single number such as "highest peak 8000 m" means about that (within a tenth either way); "exactly 8000 m" keeps an exact bound. A check can be moved between Must have, Prefer and Avoid, a preference can count up to ten times as much as normal, and Edit check changes a range or its wording. The Land step adds Shape checks for continent sizes, land by hemisphere, land or open sea at each pole, and few, some or many islands, and the description's own words for them ("the south pole is land", "continents of a similar size") suggest the same checks.
Draw your key features. Story › Place your key features draws up to 32 circles and rectangles straight on the map: name and describe each, duplicate, move, resize or switch it off, and choose which comes first where they overlap. Pick on map places an area, with its exact latitude, longitude and size (across the date line too) under Exact position. Each area can shape the ground (how strongly, up to 5,000 m high or deep, how hard its edges are, which way a channel runs), follow the description or set each effect on its own (ground, climate, tree cover, wetlands, river flow, surface, fantasy colouring, deltas), sit at a distance and bearing from your named areas or realm homelands, and be sized by radius, diameter, width and height in km or miles, a scale, or a surface area in km², square miles, hectares or a share of the planet. Calculate shows the result before Apply changes anything.
Share a recipe as a code. Advanced › Recipes turns a Create sheet into a short sharing code and loads one back, with the usual review before the sheet is replaced; it says when the code was made with a different generator. Imported and drawn maps, Deep Time starts and large recipes still travel as files.
In the plate director, tick several plates in the list or Shift-, Ctrl- or Cmd-click them on the map and set crust, bearing or speed for all of them in one undoable change.
Deep Time › Continue history (+100 Myr) carries a history on from where it ended, as a new history beside the original. Find a stage in this history looks through the saved eras for a supercontinent, its breakup or scattered continents and shows the latest match.
"Metal-rich mountains" puts extra iron, copper, gold, silver and tin in fold belts and beside colliding or sinking plates, where real ore belts lie, rather than on any high ground.
A desert you place in the World Brief carries patches of steppe and upland grassland on its higher ground and wetter side, while still reading clearly as desert (about nine tenths of it).
The Advanced setting that warms or cools the whole planet is called "Global temperature (greenhouse)", and its help says so in plain words.
A build that has to wait says "Waiting to build", what it waits behind ("Queued behind: the candidate search · 482 of 512 seeds checked") and for how long, and Show it opens that work; shaping the terrain opens once the build reaches it, and its build time starts only when it does.
Opening a saved realm roster and using it again keeps everything the roster editor does not show (colour, traced border, cities), and a roster of more than 24 realms keeps them all.
Create's actions follow one button hierarchy, with the step's main action filled and the rest quiet; scrolling panels such as "Your world so far" fade at the edge that has more beyond it; and the Build step's strip of other matches shows whole cards beside a map sized to fit.
The Build step for an imported or drawn map now says in one place what the world is built from: your map and how it was read (for example a coastline mask), whether the relief comes from your heights or is generated inside your coastline, each guide layer with its count (such as "Tectonic plate map, 9 plate regions, 2 given a motion"), what the land shape chosen in the brief still sets (relief, climate and life, but not the land or any search), the planet and the values you changed, that a new world is made without touching saved ones, and what is left for later. Its time line now reads "Your imported map" instead of naming the brief's land shape, such as Shattered Archipelago, as though it were built.
On Import/Draw, Your world so far shows your own map on the planet instead of the land-shape example, and the search checks that only apply to generated worlds are no longer shown there.
Choosing Generate while an imported or drawn map is still attached no longer just changes the label: CartoVox says your map is kept as your Import/Draw draft (every world would still be built from it) and offers to keep it, staying on Import/Draw, or to start a clean generated world, which returns every Create input to its default as Reset all does and leaves saved worlds and recipes alone.
Two candidate worlds that are nearly alike can each be picked from the spread; one no longer hides the other.

Imported and drawn worlds

Your coasts stay as drawn. An imported map, a world you drew, kept areas and built ground keep their coastline exactly, whether you asked for their ground rebuilt or kept as supplied: no fjords, drowned valleys, wave-cut bays or barrier islands are added to them. Only the generated ground around a map that covers part of the world is shaped by the sea.
Bring your own rivers and lakes. The new Rivers and lakes guide layer reads a picture of your rivers beside your coastline map (a transparent PNG, or lines on white, of the same area). CartoVox finds the river colour itself (or you pick it), reads lakes as areas in a second colour or drawn wide, and drainage-basin outlines in a third. The import page shows what it read over your coastline, joins rivers that stop just short of another river, a lake or the coast, and rings in red any river that reaches neither. Your rivers become the world's rivers where you drew them, each drawn lake becomes a lake at its drawn size overflowing down its outlet, and you choose Only my rivers or Mine plus generated tributaries.
Rivers on imported and drawn maps flow the way you drew them, each in a valley of its own down to the coast it reaches, instead of running backwards toward a hollow or stopping where the ground rose across them. Tributaries running diagonally on a coastline map are read whole, and on a world built from a coastline mask the rivers join into river systems that reach the sea instead of breaking into short strokes.
Plate maps need not be perfect. Boundary lines leave out stray dots and lettering, bridge small gaps, let a line overshoot a junction, stop a line at the map's left or right edge, and join plates smaller than 1% to their neighbour; grey antialiased edges and JPEGs are fine, and the guide's notes say what was forgiven. Lines that still have open ends are ringed in red on a picture of your lines, counted and located, with a suggestion to read the map as Painted lines, which now finds black lines on a light picture by itself.
On worlds built from a coastline and a plate map with long straight plate edges, the oceans no longer show broad, square-cut panels of raised sea floor: a mountain belt behind a trench stands only on continental crust, and where the plate behind it is ocean a chain of volcanic islands rises instead.
Export › Rebuild map saves a whole world to build again: its ground and sea floor to the metre, coastline, plates, Sculpt edits and placed deposits, and also its rivers, seasonal water, settlements and their names, realm borders, roads, lore, canon and saved map views, in a file of up to 1 GB. Choose it in Create › Import and new rivers, settlements and lore are simulated on the saved ground, or tick "Keep rivers, settlements, names and lore" to redraw the maps and handbooks from the saved world. A world kept that way refuses Sculpt edits and settings changes, saying what to do, and is still offered version updates, which simulate its features afresh while the copy the update keeps holds the originals.
A CartoVox heightmap PNG imports at its own metre scale, 8-bit or 16-bit, and keeps its heights by default. A PNG holds only its grey steps, so use Rebuild map for exact ground, coastline and authored features.
Create › Import › Try Earth elevations brings a built-in, one-degree sample of Earth's land and sea floor (NOAA ETOPO 2022) into the usual coastline and height review. It is coarse, so small islands and peaks can be missed, and the climate comes from your planet settings, not Earth's weather.
Sculpt › Terrain adjustments › Apply a plate map gives a built world a hand-drawn plate map, one first made from a heightmap included: review the lines on its saved coast, then apply and rebuild. Heights and coastline stay, plate motion is simulated, and a restore point is kept first.
Import/Draw shows its step bar only once your map is open for review, in the same style as Generate's: a small number and a plain name per step, with steps you cannot open yet fainter and the optional ones marked so.
An imported coastline no longer assumes its narrow water is rivers. CartoVox now says how sure it is that the lines on your map are rivers you drew, draws them over your map, shades in amber the water keeping them would turn to land, and says how the land share and the number of separate landmasses would change, before you choose. A plain land and water mask with nothing that reads as a drawn river line keeps its straits, fjords and inlets as water unless you say otherwise; rivers drawn in a colour of their own are still kept by default.
"Keep all water as water" is now the first choice under The rivers on this map, marked Recommended whenever the reading is unsure. Choosing "Keep the rivers I drew" fills in only the lines that read as drawn rivers, no longer every narrow inlet and channel beside them, and narrow channels that do not read as drawn lines are counted and left as water.
A tectonic plate map added as a guide layer now fills the Tectonic Director: each of its regions becomes a plate in its own colour, seeded where its ground puts it, and a new "Give the plates motions" button on the plate map's card opens it. Give a region a drift bearing and speed, or join two regions with a margin, and the Director marks every shared edge as converging, pulling apart or sliding past before you build; the build moves those regions that way. Regions you give no motion keep a simulated one, so a plate map left alone builds exactly as before. Free plate seeds and ancient shields are set aside, and said so, while a plate map is in use.
The import report no longer warns that a plain two-colour coastline's "sea floor runs continuously up onto its land": that sea-level warning now appears only for maps whose coast really is cut at a brightness, such as heightmaps.
A world's build record now says what its terrain was built from: for example "Built on outline.png, a coastline mask: coastline from the file, relief generated by CartoVox", or "elevations from the file" for a heightmap, instead of calling every import an imported heightfield. Each guide layer is listed by its file name, what was read from it (such as 9 plate regions) and the start of its content hash.
Names you give a plate map's regions in the Tectonic Director now reach the built world: the Tectonic plates layer's key and the plate reading under the cursor say "Western" where they said "Plate 8". A name alone moves nothing; the region keeps its simulated motion.

Editing a built world

The Coast Lab (World › Tools, beside the Erosion Lab) shows what the sea did to a world's coasts: a depth view with shelf contours, the shore before the waves and ice dashed beside the shore after, what was cut away and raised, and the bays, capes, cliffs, wave-cut platforms, fjords and lagoons in their own colours. Click any coast for a cross-section of its ground before and after, with the sea and its tides, and lower the sea by up to 120 m to see the shelf an ice age would bare. Try settings wears the coasts again at another strength or cuts the fjords deeper, counted beside the world as built and marked approximate; nothing changes until Apply to this world, which asks first, says roughly how long the rebuild takes and keeps the world as it was as a restore point.
The Climate Lab applies its changes. After you compare a change, Apply to this world asks first, saying what is rebuilt and roughly how long it takes, then rebuilds the whole world with the new setting: places keep their names where they still exist, your edits are kept, and the world as it was stays in its history as a restore point. The list of changes starts with "Global temperature change (± °C)" (5 for a planet about 5 °C warmer, -5 for a colder one); every other setting shows this world's own value and starts from it, so you type the value you want. Comparisons show maps of temperature and yearly rain now, with the change and the difference, on one shared scale.
Give a nation strength, a naval reach and natural borders. Every nation in the Nations panel, and each realm on Create's roster, has three sliders: strength decides how much ground it takes from its neighbours (at 2 its rule reaches twice as far), naval reach how far across the sea it claims islands and coasts (at 0, nothing overseas), and natural borders how firmly high mountains, great rivers and deserts stop it. The ground it would claim is previewed on the map as you move them, with its share of the land; the preview is approximate, since the rebuild places the towns and other nations again. A changed nation waits in the panel until you apply the rebuild, Undo puts its old settings back, and its capital, name, number and settings follow it through later rebuilds.
Small islands just off a nation's coast belong to that nation when the sea between is narrow (about 150 km), further with a long naval reach and none with no reach; borders you traced yourself still hold exactly what you drew. Adding a nation in the Nations panel, or tracing one with the Realm tool, gives the world one more nation instead of replacing the weakest.
Sculpt is docked beside the map. It stands in a column the map fits beside, so nothing covers the ground you are shaping; Hide controls folds it to a slim rail of tool icons and Sculpt remembers how you left it. The side palette names every tool under its icon, the inspector has Shape, Preview and Edits tabs with Help beside them, switching tools keeps your brush settings, and opening or closing Sculpt leaves the map's view where it was. The planet card steps aside while the column is open, panels you dragged keep clear of it, and on narrow windows Sculpt keeps its sheet below the map. Terrain adjustments links to Tune erosion and Tune coasts, and both labs come back to your pending strokes. A hollow you dig below sea level where the ocean cannot reach shows as land a moment after the brush rests, and a cut you open from the sea shows as sea.
World overview › Rebuild settings chooses what future rebuilds start from: the original recipe, Keep terrain only (the saved ground with your applied Sculpt work) or Keep world features (the whole saved world, so rebuilds redraw it rather than simulate it again). A restore point is kept first, and while world features are kept, new settings, Sculpt work and plate changes ask you to switch back first; names and lore can still be edited. Keeping the terrain is saved as one change, so stopping CartoVox part way cannot leave settings and edits that disagree.
Upgrading a world to a finer grid can Keep current ground and coastline: a separate world with the same heights and coast, your terrain edits baked in and kept areas carried across. The finer grid adds no new small terrain; rivers, climate, settlements and lore are worked out again.
A quick rebuild of the area around an edit leaves roads, realm borders and realm names outside that area as they were, even when it moves the town a far realm is ruled from. An edit whose rivers run into a drowned valley or estuary rebuilds the whole world, so the drowned coast is worked out again with it.
Sculpt › Describe a region understands minerals when the words ask for them ("amethyst deposit", "silver veins", "hills rich in gold"; "a kingdom of salt traders" is not a salt mine). They are placed in the region, show under Deposits marked "Author placed", GeoJSON exports included, and keep their names through later rebuilds.
The "Review and re-simulate" dialog says in one sentence what the rebuild does and roughly how long it takes, lists the edits, the area and the height change, and folds the measurements under "Technical details".
A rebuild that finishes in the background refreshes the open world without pulling you out of Travel, Write or wherever you had moved to.
A name you save while the atlas lettering is still being redrawn is now redrawn too, instead of leaving the sheets showing the older name.
With the same world open in two windows, only the window where you renamed something redraws the atlas; the other no longer repeats the work or warns that the labels need refreshing.
Changing only what a name means no longer marks the drawn maps as out of date.
When the atlas labels finish redrawing after a name change, the Lore editor keeps a world name or raw lore edit you were still typing, and keeps the place you picked to rename instead of switching back to the first in the list.
Lore entries, meanings in Rename everything and boxes in Describe everything keep your cursor where it was when the atlas labels finish redrawing.
Saving two lore edits quickly one after the other no longer makes the second "saved & reapplied" message vanish at once.
If you save raw lore JSON after the lore has changed since you started editing it, for example after a rename, the Lore editor stops and asks: reload the latest lore, or save yours over it with a second click.

Render Studio

Preview composition and Create render bundle stay in view below the options instead of scrolling away, and on small screens editing uses the map-reading strip, which comes back when you close the panel.
In scene maps, Escape or the inspector's close button puts away just the inspector; the scene's other settings stay open, and the Inspector button brings it back.

Maps and exports

Land below sea level has a colour of its own on every map, the Create previews and the live Sculpt map: a deeper green than the lowest lowland, as atlases draw Death Valley or the Dead Sea shore, with no coastline round it. The relief key lists it when the world has any, its lakes and salt flats are drawn as lakes and salt flats, and the HD region keeps such a hollow as land at its own depth.
The Coastal landforms map shows what the sea did. Its fjords are the ones the glaciers cut, each stretch of fjorded coast named once ("The Uldonkai Fjords") with a count of its fjords. New landmarks mark drowned river valleys and estuaries, bold headlands and sea cliffs, isthmuses, island arcs, spits, barrier reefs and reef coasts, and lagoons, barriers, cays and atolls are the ones the sea built; a lagoon is named once, behind its barrier, or on Quick worlds the barrier coast carries the name. A drowned valley or estuary is traced to the river that cut it and named after it in that river's language ("The Firth of Varn", "The Ryugawa Estuary"), with words of the tongue's own such as "Ness", "Ras", "Maw" and "Horn". Coastal names follow the place, so adding or losing a fjord renames nothing else; existing sounds, lagoons and cays get new names once with this update and then keep them.
Child maps and the HD region draw the coast the world can only hint at. On a glaciated coast a 4x to 16x child map cuts narrow, deep fjords up its valleys over a shallower sill at the mouth; drowned coasts get drowned river arms and tidal funnels, and wave-worn coasts headlands, bays, cliffs and a shallow platform. Barrier islands stand offshore with lagoons behind them and inlets every 50–100 km, spits run past the corners, reefs fringe warm coasts, line the shelf edge and cover shallow banks, and atolls ring their lagoons; spits, cays and the smallest barriers appear from 8x, drawn a little larger than life. Reefs have their own colour on the relief and illustrated sheets. Every lagoon reaches the open sea, each world cell's average height comes back exactly from the finer cells, no pool of sea is shut inside the land, and every world sea cell stays mostly sea. The HD region also loses its pools of sea inland, its noise islands at sea and the grid of squares in its seas, its air over the sea is as warm as the sea's surface, and its rivers no longer cut far below the sea. Press Refine again to see this on a child map refined before this update.
Map panels move and fold. Drag the cell inspector, the HD region card or any map tool panel by its header (mouse, pen or touch), or use its grip button with the arrow keys; Home or a double-click puts it back. Each has a fold button, and where panels sit and which are folded is remembered until you reset preferences. The HD region card opens at the top right, clear of the cell inspector and the minimap, and both start below the Compare labels. A folded planet card is a small "Planet" button on the map's top row.
Map keys fold right down to a small arrow, scales and filters included, and stay folded between maps and restarts. Hiding the toolbar hides the key and the readout along the bottom too. Map appearance fits above the toolbar on laptop screens, scrolling inside itself, and on larger screens its Map aids show their names under their icons.
Map appearance › Map aids › Text and symbols sizes place names and map symbols separately and can keep them the same size on screen as you zoom, remembered for each world and carried by saved map views.
Changing to another map layer keeps your zoom and position when the projection is the same (Keep position between matching projections, on by default). Continuous layers have a Colour gradient choice (Viridis, Cividis, Magma, Blue or Blue to red), remembered per layer and used by its key, downloads and saved views.
The Tectonic plates map is drawn from the saved plates, with a Land fill slider, coloured boundaries and motion arrows; hover a plate for its area, the age of its ocean floor and how fast the ground moves there.
The reading in the lower-left corner covers more maps, UV exposure and vegetation types among them, with units, and says when there is no value rather than showing zero.
World › Natural colour draws the saved ground, plants, rivers, lakes, snow and ice as the land would look, in any season the world has saved; maps that change with the seasons share one season choice per world. The map catalogue adds Waterways (grey land with blue rivers and lakes) and Settlement distribution (towns without names). Every map shades its relief, and draws its river courses when enlarged, for your planet's own size rather than Earth's.
Atlas › Generate selected sheets can draw a plate for every realm, up to 256, or for a rectangle typed in or marked with two clicks using Tools › Atlas rectangle (it may cross the date line). Cancelling and resuming keeps exactly the plates you chose, and rebuilding the world keeps the realm and rectangle plates you added. The open regional lens has Move regional lens: choose it, then click the new centre.
Export › 3D and printing › Terrain kit downloads the world's ground for 3D software and printing: elevations in metres, a 16-bit heightmap, the coastline, river and lake masks, natural colour and climate pictures and the water features, with a README giving the scale and sea level. Heights are the rock under the ice. Rebuild map is still the way to carry everything you made.
Languages and Faiths are offered only on a world that has languages or faiths to map; the layer list says why. The Realm territories and States maps show a rebuilt world's new nations and provinces straight away, instead of after a restart.
In a narrow window, outlining a hotspot area works: the hotspot card moves below the map while you click its points, instead of covering the map.

Writing, lore and history

Dry ground below sea level is a named landmark, "the ... Depression" or "the ... Sink", in the local language, with its lowest point, how much ground lies below the sea and whether it holds a salt flat or a lake; the cell inspector says how far below sea level a cell is.
The World panel's dossier for each new coastal landmark says what it is: an estuary's river and tide, a drowned valley's basin and depth, a fjord coast's fjords and length, cliff heights and sea stacks, the narrowest width of an isthmus and the landmasses it joins, an island arc's islands and volcanoes, a lagoon's barrier and inlets, a reef coast's living reef. Searching the World panel or the gazetteer for a kind of place ("fjord", "reef", "capital", or everyday words such as firth, cape, land bridge, sandbar or coral reef) lists those places first, after an exact name.
Insert link in the Manuscript's World panel works for landmarks that have a dossier but no page of their own, fjords included, and opening Write before the World tab has loaded no longer leaves links unavailable.
Locking a name, editing its meaning or renaming in a batch no longer saves over a change made meanwhile in another window, a lore edit or a rebuild; your draft is kept to review and apply again.
A realm is renamed only through the rename tool. Some older worlds stored a realm's new name another way that is no longer read, so such a world may show the realm's generated name after its next save or rebuild; rename it again to keep yours.
Removing one of a mapped note's pins just after opening the note from the map is no longer silently ignored; its buttons wait until the note has opened.

Campaigns and the tabletop

Campaign › Invite players shares a live, read-only map over your local network: copy the link or let players scan its QR code, and they press Open the map. Reveals, places, routes, tokens, board cards and battle summaries players may see update by themselves, fog is cut out of the picture itself, and players cannot edit anything; they see "The game master stopped sharing this map" when you stop. Your computer may ask to allow incoming connections: allow it for private networks only. Invite players and Player exports are separate menus. A full table of twelve can join at once, and neither someone guessing at links nor a device holding connections open can lock players out.
With Tools shown set to Everything, Campaign handouts and scene tables can also invite players through your own HTTPS web server, which needs a domain with a certificate and port forwarding; the setup steps are folded into the menu. CartoVox sets up no relay or public address for you, and the Studio itself stays out of reach.
Atlas VTT collections can include the world's maps, places and lore for the GM (on by default): numbered maps, atlas plates and city plans, settlements and landmarks at their coordinates with their notes, every realm however small, prose, chronicle, cultures, religions, markets, regiments, diplomacy and trade, and roads and sea lanes as drawings. The GM collection holds the original CartoVox project, so Import project backup can restore it; players' copies leave it and the GM material out.
VTT note pins default to Sparse, at most 128 spread over a map, with All and None to choose from. Hex sheets can have up to 100,000 hexes, and an Atlas VTT collection can be up to 512 MB.
Undoing a token's move right after renaming it now says the move was undone, instead of only "Saved."

The living world

Deserts have oases. Water left under a desert by the wetter ages of the world's ice-age past comes to the surface in its lowest ground: depression floors, dry basins below sea level, the feet of escarpments and now and then a fault. Only sandstone and limestone basins hold enough to feed wells, so a large desert on such rock has a handful to a few dozen oases and one on old shield rock or high ranges few or none; a world with its ice-age history turned off has none, and dry ground by the sea is not an oasis, as water that shallow at the shore is salty. Elsewhere the water under a desert lies deep, often hundreds of metres down.
Desert towns gather at the oases: fields within reach of one are watered all year, towns stop beside them, and a town at an oasis has a spring in its town plan. The irrigation map and the Agricultural calendar show them, and the oases named on the landmarks map and in the gazetteer are the same ones.
The cell inspector opens on a short summary of the place (name, height, climate class, biome, water and the nearest settlement), with its full readings in Why here?, Terrain, Climate, Water, Life and Story sections that stay open from cell to cell. On ground no settlement farms, it says the ground "could be irrigated" rather than describing irrigated fields.
Weather Year › Sky & planet shows a place's sky: day and night, polar day and night, auroras, the paths of solar eclipses, moon phases, a night sky and impact zones, with Play running the local clock. The date reads in the world's own calendar, the clock as local solar time, and clicking the picture moves the observer. Sky setup adds up to four more moons, six companion planets, 64 named impact zones and twelve constellation names, saved with the world; they change only the sky, not the tides, climate or ground.
Weather Year adds readings of the saved year: pressure belts and winds, windward and leeward slopes, onshore and offshore winds, the hot season, strong winds, ice cooling the air, waters that favour algal blooms and a clean waterways view, with clouds that follow the rain and sea ice that drifts with the wind. They describe the saved seasons; they are not forecasts.
The occasional submarine mountain plateau far offshore is now a trench with an island arc behind it, and where a trench changes kind along a plate edge the sea floor no longer gets one twice as deep and wide.
Each world keeps a record of where the waves cut a coast back and where they raised a cliff, in its saved data and the scientific data export.
The world health report's reading of river length against basin area no longer credits a small river with a neighbour's basin where the two share a mouth.

Speed and memory

Panning and zooming the World map is smooth: a drag that ran at 7 to 12 frames a second keeps up with the screen on Quick and Full worlds, and the map asks for no readings or sharper tiles while it moves. Trackpad scrolling and pinching zoom in proportion to the gesture, a mouse wheel zooms one step per notch about the pointer, and on macOS a zoom no longer stutters as it starts.
The time left is close to the truth. It is worked out from each stage of the build and how fast this machine has done it, so a rebuild that said about 40 minutes and took 10 now says close to what it takes, and the figure keeps moving through long quiet stages. Until the first stage finishes it is a range ("about 2–5 min left"). The rebuild review gives the same estimate before you start, and rebuilds are timed on this machine so later estimates use its own speed.
The build window's memory line shows the whole app as the system's monitor counts it, with the build's and the window's shares ("CartoVox using 24 GB (build 11 GB, window 13 GB)").
A build no longer keeps the data read for open worlds beside it (about 200 MB per Full world opened), and on Windows it hands back reserved memory when the machine runs short.
New worlds build in about the time they took in Delta V10 although the sea now shapes every coast (on the reference Mac: Sketch 30 s, Quick 53 s, Full about 3 minutes), mostly because coats of arms are drawn side by side when memory allows; rebuilds and name edits finish 5–10% sooner, and city plans need less memory.
The app does less while the map sits idle, the Library opens with less to load, reinstalling keeps the build stages a world has saved so a quick rebuild can still start partway, and edits that place no deposits leave the mineral deposits alone.

Saving, updating and the Library

The World collection. The Library shows an illustrated card for each world, with its measured traits, favourites, search and filters for available, archived and rarer editions. Click a card's art for a larger view; Share uses your device's share sheet or downloads a PNG. A world gets its card when it finishes building or importing (an older world, the first time you change it); cards stay on this device, follow a renamed world and are included in Download backup.
Discover a world opens Create ready to build from a fresh random seed, and the finished world draws its card's edition: Common, Uncommon (20%), Rare (1%), Legendary (0.1%) or Mythic (0.01%), each with its own frame. Editions are only for show, every feature is available at every edition, and copying, updating or restoring a world never draws again.
Archive to save space saves a verified project backup beside the world's card and moves the world to the Trash, showing first how much space it frees. Restore world brings it back under its own name and folder without building it again.
Each world in the Library shows how long its last build took on your computer, what kind of build it was and at which tier; its details and the World tab's "How this world was built" list the earlier builds. Worlds last built before this version show no time until they are next rebuilt.
Rename a world straight from its Library card, the Continue panel or the World overview; its maps, dossier, lore and folder follow the new name.
Start something new shows its four routes as compact named buttons, and the Library's sections share one heading style. The time, memory and disk estimate sits in Build, beside its button.
The description a world was made from is labelled Design brief in the World overview and the Library, paired with what became of each clause and what the build measured for every checked request.
The World overview names the tier a world was built at, a world still being built says its continents and land are not solved yet instead of "0 continents", and island counts say what they count ("1 island over 40,000 km² · 13 over 8,000 km²").
Saving a project backup no longer saves an error message as the backup when it fails. Backups include saved projections, display sheets, reference pages and Render Studio exports, and a restore can hold up to 100,000 files and 40 GB. A world restored from a compact backup no longer looks like an interrupted build.
A terrain-only rebuild of a world whose plates have broken into pieces no longer refuses its saved plate map as a bad drawing.
The "Update to this version" confirmation is easier to read. Each release's name appears once as a heading over its own changes, the changes are written in plain words (and in your interface language), and a world several releases behind shows its first eight changes followed by "…and N more changes (see Settings › Release notes)", so the dialog fits on a laptop screen without scrolling.
"Update all" in the Library lists every change the oldest of your worlds lacks. Before, it showed only the first change of each release.
If a rebuild fails part way through saving, or CartoVox closes while it saves, your world is put back exactly as it was: the maps, the inspector, exports and the Library card keep the last good version, and the message says nothing was lost, so you can simply try again.

Settings and the app

World › Tools keeps each tool under its own heading (Inspect, Geography, Peoples, Simulation) in two columns that scroll, so larger text no longer pushes tools out of sight.
Hover help no longer disappears as you move between controls, and a control you reach with the Tab key keeps its explanation on screen.
Unavailable buttons and fields show a plain, muted outline instead of a dashed one; dashed outlines are kept for drop zones and empty places.
In Advanced, Sky & planet keeps the moon settings in use with tides off, and the Nations preview keeps realm reach, wilderness share and the realm grid in use with realms or roads off; each setting's help says so.
More of the app follows your interface language: the World dock and Map aids when the language is set before start-up or changed later, and Create's area notes, counts, setup checks and the reasons it refuses an area's size or position or a pasted list of seeds.
Panels across the app were tidied for every screen size, phones included.
On Windows, removing a folder (old rebuild drafts, emptied Trash entries, finished imports) no longer stops half way when a file in it is read-only or briefly in use.
The map scale's "at the equator" line changes language as soon as you switch the interface language, instead of when the map next moves.

Known limits

The Coast Lab draws one colour per simulation cell, so a fjord or cay narrower than a cell does not show there; the panel says how large a cell is. A Full-grid cell is about 27 km across, so only the largest barrier, lagoon, spit and atoll systems are built as ground on the world map; smaller ones, and every one on Quick and Sketch, are drawn only in child maps and the HD region.
An oasis is one cell of the world's grid, a few thousand square kilometres on a Quick world. Whether its water is fresh or brackish is not modelled away from the shore.
A narrow strait or land bridge can still come out differently between a candidate card and the finished world; the detailed preview's warning says where that is likely, not what will happen.
The description is read in English whatever the interface language.
The new interface text is translated into every interface language but has not yet been read by native speakers.
On Windows the memory line has not yet been checked against Task Manager on a real machine; it counts each part the way Task Manager does.