CartoVox Delta V3 — full release notes

Delta V3 is the third Delta release, shared with invited testers on 29 September 2026. Your Delta access code keeps working, and the licence is unchanged (version 2.1), so there is nothing to accept again. Everything below is new or fixed since Delta V2. Several changes to the science make worlds come out differently: wetlands, high latitudes (where continents now sit, too), soils, stream order below lakes, and Deep Time's continents, which now rift apart. Desert sand changes only the regions you describe, and the river-health figure changes in the report but not in the rivers. A saved world does not change when you open it. It changes the next time it is rebuilt, and the first rebuild in Delta V3 simulates the whole world again, because the simulation a world keeps between rebuilds belongs to the version that made it. Deep Time and the science says what moves and by how much.

Delta

Delta V3 is the version you see. About, the release notes, the reference pages and Windows' list of installed apps say Delta V3, and the installers are named for it: Cartovox-Delta-V3-macOS-arm64.dmg, Cartovox-Delta-V3-Windows-Setup.exe, Cartovox-Delta-V3-Linux-x64.deb and Cartovox-Delta-V3-Linux-x64-glibc2.28-portable.tar.gz.
A new Discord invite. The CartoVox Discord has a new invite link, https://discord.gg/Y5aRPkk8g2. Join the Discord, the support button and every other Discord link in the app use it, as does cartovox.org.
A clean close is no longer counted as a crash. A usage-report heartbeat already on its way as the app closed normally could put back the marker the close had just removed, so the next start reported the session as a crash. Closing now waits for that heartbeat.

Across the app

The app says when it is working. Many actions used to give no sign of life while they ran: an export, an import, opening a world, a save, a journey, a scene render. Now the button that started the work turns into a spinner with what it is doing and a running count of seconds, the part of the screen it will fill dims, and a notice stays up if it takes longer than a few seconds. Any request to CartoVox's own server that takes more than about half a second raises a thin bar across the top of the window. The "Preparing your export…" notice no longer disappears after seven seconds while a large export is still being made, and exporting a book shows its progress and saves through the same download as every other export instead of silently leaving the page.
Undo survives a reload. Undo and redo in Render Studio and scenes, Draw your world, the Sculptor, the settlement editor, Deep Time's drawing and each manuscript chapter now keep their steps in this computer's browser profile, so Undo still works after a reload or after quitting and reopening CartoVox. Each map, drawing or chapter keeps up to forty steps. A history is only given back while its map, drawing or chapter is exactly as the history left it: if it was changed elsewhere since (a rebuild, another window, a server-side edit), the editor says the old steps were set aside rather than undoing edits nobody made there. Settings → Storage and display cache → Undo history between sessions shows how much is kept and has Clear undo history. Histories are let go once their world has left both the Library and the trash.
Long lists you can search. Dropdowns with hundreds of entries, such as Scene Studio's Mapped lore place and Codex article, used to open the system's own menu, which on macOS ran off the edge of the app window. They now open a list inside the window with a search box, and every long list in the app works the same way.

Create and imports

Shape a world while it builds. A Full world takes minutes, but its relief exists a few seconds in and its climate and biomes not long after. The build window now has Shape while it builds…: a workbench over what exists so far. Raise, Lower, Plateau, Ridge and Island edits and story pins can be staged on the relief as the plates left it, drawn live as you make them. Inspect reads any cell's height, and its climate and biome once those exist; Measure gives distances along the surface; and What is known so far describes the planet from the stages already done. Nothing you do touches the running build. The staged edits wait, and when the world is saved Apply your staged edits hands them to the Sculptor as ordinary pending edits, with the usual review before Apply & re-simulate. A cancelled or failed build keeps them for the next one. Towns, realms, rivers, names and lore do not exist until the end of a build, so the workbench lists them with that reason instead of offering controls that would fail.
Realms you draw keep their borders. Realms drawn on the Create sheet lost their borders, names and capitals when the same realms were also named in the Nation brief: the drawing was dropped as a duplicate of the brief. On the test world none of two drawn realms held; now both do. Rebuilding an affected world puts them back. A realm named in the brief but not drawn still appears, and a border that cannot be honoured is reported. Plates follow my regions frames the atlas plates on your drawn realms and child maps instead of on the world's own regions.
"Thirty continents" means thirty. A thesis that asked for thirty continents in five zones used to get four to six. The reading now acts on an explicit number of continents and on zones, and the generator aims for the count: over eight seeds, "30 continents" averaged 27.5. Zones are set apart, cold zones go to the poles, and a zone the thesis calls unreachable sits behind open ocean with no sea lanes to it. Preview candidates are ranked by how close they come, and anything the world could not honour is reported.
Create speaks plainly. The Create sheet's captions were rewritten in a human voice, and every geography and planet-type choice explains itself when you rest the pointer on it.
Choose what an import is for. Importing a map now asks what you want from it before anything is built, offering only the choices the file can support:
- Rebuild a world from my map, as every import did before and still the default;
- Keep my land and heights as they are, when the file carries heights: climate, rivers, biomes and settlements are simulated on your ground without reshaping it. A high world held its median of 2,357 m, where a rebuild had pulled it down to 413 m. Rivers are never cut into ground you asked to keep;
- Keep my picture as the map, for pictures: the world opens on your own picture, with the simulation beneath it for lore, travel and tracking;
- Import the project's own places, for an Azgaar full export or a GeoJSON with named features: its states, towns, rivers and routes, and no settlements of CartoVox's own invention beside them.
Each is saved as ordinary settings, so rebuilds, reseeds and recipes keep it.
Hand-drawn maps on paper are read by their lines. A pencil or ink map photographed on plain or ruled paper was read as one colour, or as a heightmap. Its drawn coasts are now the coastline: land is what they enclose, told apart by the names and borders drawn inside it. On test photos like the ones testers sent, 97–99% of the land now comes out right, where 22–36% did.
A photo of a sheet is read as the sheet. The paper is found and squared up; the table, binder holes, ruled lines, glare and shadows are no longer read as land or sea.
Swap a region with one click. Inspect the reading has Swap regions: click any region the reader got wrong to turn it into land or sea, with undo, instead of tracing the whole coast by hand.
Combine several map files into one world. A map scanned in quarters, or a continent drawn across several sheets, now imports as one: choose Combine several map files…, or pick or drop several files at once, and they are laid on an arrangement canvas. Files that overlap place themselves from the detail they share, and each pair says whether it matched and how sure it is; on a test map cut in four, one quarter turned 7° and shrunk, every quarter landed within a tenth of a pixel. The rest you place as a grid, by the latitude and longitude each covers, or by hand: drag, turn and resize, with edges that snap and one-pixel nudges.
One picture, read like any other. The files are blended into one map up to 8,192 px across, which then gets the usual coastline check, questions and "what is this import for". Parts no file covers are generated with the world around your map, or read as sea if you say so. The import report names the file each part came from, the files are kept with the world and travel in its recipe, and Arrange sections opens the arrangement again to move a file and combine anew.
More of an Azgaar map comes through. Azgaar provinces become real provinces seated on the author's towns, and religions replace the generated faiths with their deity, form, culture and followers. Markers, cultures and the map's own name come through as well, and the importer checks the file against itself before using it. The lowest land level of an Azgaar map was read as sea, which shaved its coasts; the land now matches the file exactly (it matched 85% before).
Read the names on a map picture. An imported picture has Read the names on this map…: CartoVox finds the lettering and puts every name in a review queue, where you accept, correct, split or add names and rename realms. Accepted towns are placed at their dots, and other names are lettered where they stood. It all happens on your computer and nothing is sent anywhere: macOS's own text recognition on a Mac, Windows' own on Windows (now included in the Windows installer), or Tesseract if it is installed. English lettering is measured: on a test set the Mac found 109 of 112 names. You can also choose accented Latin, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese or Korean lettering where your computer's reader has that language; those, and Windows' reader, have not yet been tried on real maps, so tell us how they do.

Maps and Render Studio

The Natural look recolours illustrated maps. Map looks used to leave illustrated sheets in their own inks. Now the chosen look recolours illustrated land, water, ice, mountains, forests, mist, ink and rivers through its colours by height, and that includes Natural, the default. An illustrated map or atlas drawn in the Natural look therefore looks different the next time it is drawn; choose the Illustrated look to keep its old colours. Each of the nine illustrated recipes draws exactly as before under its own look.
Painted stamps. Render Studio's Stamp style offers Painted beside Drawn (ink outlines): mountains, forests, dunes, reeds, towns and more drawn as small paintings lit from the west, with soft edges and brush marks, in the map's own colours and sharp up to 16K. Seventeen subjects come in six variants each. Drawn is unchanged.
Paint in Render Studio. A new Painting layer holds brush strokes: pressure, an eraser, texture, a colour picker, a stamp scatter that lays the same stamps every time, and Range and Forest brushes that paint in the map look's own mountains and trees. Artwork from your library can be scattered too. Strokes are kept as paths, so the editor and the rendered sheet draw them identically, and they reach the SVG export. A sheet with a thousand strokes takes about four seconds longer at 4K.
Render Studio editing. Artwork can be sheared. The Layer tree drags objects to restack, regroup or move between layers, and keeps empty groups. Clip masks are reusable: one shape can clip many objects, in the editor, the rendered sheet and the SVG. Dragged points snap to the lines of a reference image. A caption can sit to the left or right of artwork as well as above, below or centred on it.
Linked structures. A structure placed from your library stays linked to it: change it and choose to update this map or every map (one Undo takes it back everywhere), while each copy keeps its own position, pose, tint and recolours. Detach makes a copy independent, and a copy whose structure is gone keeps drawing.
Big sheets stay quick. A map can hold 5,000 objects and 1,000 pieces of artwork (up from 1,000 and 96), with every click, drag and undo answering in under 50 ms at that size: selecting by click went from 739 ms to 28, undo from about two seconds to 41 ms, saving from five seconds to one, and a 4K render from 90 seconds to 14, with the same picture. Box select and long lists that scroll without delay come with it.
Artwork keeps its full size. Imported artwork up to 4,096 pixels across is kept at full size beside the map, where it used to be cut to 512; the editor still works on a light copy. Originals travel through the structure and artwork libraries, art packs, recipes and library archives, and the SVG export embeds each one at the size it is drawn.
More from reference images. A sheet takes up to six reference images, each with its own show, lock, order and opacity. An image can say which projection it is drawn in (Plate Carrée, Mercator, Robinson, Mollweide, Sinusoidal or Equal Earth) and is laid onto the sheet through it; a map that crosses the date line keeps its two halves together; and Warp: bend it through every point fits a hand-drawn map through 4 to 40 control points, checking each point against the warp the others make.
Refine a region. A child map can be refined two, four or eight times finer than the world (Refine this region): the ground is eroded again at the finer scale, the world's rivers flow in from outside, the climate is brought down to the finer grid without changing each world cell's totals, lakes are kept and towns resettle within their cells. Realm borders follow the refined crests and rivers, roads are re-routed and meet the world's roads at the edge, city plans are drawn on the refined sites, and the refined ground can be sculpted, with strokes kept across rebuilds. A 1,000 km region refines in about a second at Full 8×, and the world itself is untouched. A refinement is kept with the child map and goes out of date when the world is rebuilt, and can be refined again. Regions poleward of about 75° are not refined yet.
Borders and places over any map. The View menu's Borders and places lays realm borders, provinces and each deeper level of divisions, capitals and settlements over whichever sheet is showing — biomes, relief or any other — in any projection and turn.
Sharper saved sheets. Charts, cartographic styles and the globe views used to be shown only at the size they were saved. They can now be drawn at two to four times that size from the saved world; the sheets that cannot say why.
Several measurements on the map at once. Finish a route or close a shape and it stays on the map in its own colour, with its total on a label, and the next click starts another. The Measure panel lists them to select, hide, rename or delete, and they come back with the world.
Measure works on a phone again. The measure panel no longer stretches over the whole map on narrow screens.
Hotspots. A hotspot can be an area as well as a point, on the world map and on regional maps, and can open a viewpoint, a Codex page or a kept file as well as a scene. A world holds up to 200. Hotspots also work in the offline interactive map.

Species, deposits and trade

Wines, ales, meads and a great deal more. Markets now trade 85 goods in nine groups: wine, ale, mead, cider, rice wine, rum and other spirits, tea, coffee and cacao; wool, cotton, linen, silk, rope, woven and dyed cloth; lumber; saffron, cinnamon, pepper and other spices; pearls, coral, murex purple and whale oil; tin, silver, gold, bronze and ten kinds of gem.
What a town makes comes from its ground. A settlement grows what the species maps say thrives around it, works the deposits beside it and fishes what lives off its harbour. Grapes become wine where they ripen and barley becomes ale where they do not; cane becomes sugar and rum; a market weaves its towns' wool and flax, dyes the cloth when a dye reaches it, and casts bronze where copper and tin meet.
Towns are known for something, by name. "Vaniath red", "Nkaifelak forest mead", "the saffron of Ixbrokk", a few in the realm's own tongue, each with a line from the ground it grows on. The dossier says what a place is known for, and so do the Codex and the exports.
The market editor groups its goods. The picker lists them under Drinks, Textiles, Spices, Gems and the rest, and each market shows its towns' specialties. A saved world gets the new goods the next time it is rebuilt or its lore is saved.
Pinpoint tin, silver, amethyst and 22 other minerals. The new Deposits layer (View → Map aids, key O) pins named mines and gem fields where the world's own rock puts them: tin in collision granite, silver in volcanic arcs, diamonds in the oldest cratons, salt in dry basins.
Every deposit explains itself. Click a pin for its grade, size, the geology that made it, the nearest town and whether anyone works it; worked sites are named in the tongue of the realm they lie in.
Filter and search the deposits. Tick minerals by group, show worked or undiscovered sites, or type "tin" to list the tin mines, richest first. The cell inspector lists the deposits beside any cell.
Saved worlds get deposits without a rebuild. They are placed from the saved map the first time you ask, and travel with the GeoJSON and GeoPackage exports.
The Species map shows its picker and its key again. In the World view the key was folded into one thin line that hid the species list and every word about the colours. It is a card again, on every map with controls (sea level and ports too).
Find a species by name or by use, and filter by group. Type saffron, wine, dye or wool; the groups (crops, livestock, bees and silkworms, wild animals, wild plants, sea and shore) are chips with counts. Enter shows the first match.
A key beside the map says what each colour means. Cannot live, marginal, thrives and ideal; what plain relief and plain sea mean; and the chosen species' needs in your units, its uses and its share.
Spices, fibres, drinks and the sea: 69 species, up from 42. Saffron, cinnamon, pepper, clove, nutmeg, vanilla, cardamom, hops, barley, flax, hemp, indigo, honeybees, silkworms, alpacas, and pearl oysters, murex, coral, cod and whales in the sea.
River-loving crops no longer cover Sketch worlds. Reach to a river is measured in kilometres, so rice and date palms follow the rivers instead of a grid of stripes across half the land.

Scenes

An isometric view. A scene can be seen in isometric beside its plan, live as you draw: walls, doors, floors and stairs stand up as lit blocks, furnished from a built-in art kit and lit by the scene's sun, with lamps, darkness, captions and fog of war. Click to select, drag to move, and each map keeps its own view settings. It exports as a PNG up to 8K or A3. A thousand objects draw at 4K in about a quarter of a second.
Furnished interiors, floor by floor. Step inside a building now works on any building, including ones you drew, and furnishes the rooms from the Rooms and furnishings kit. A building of several storeys gets a floor for each, joined by stairs, and every interior has a pin that leads back out.
Scenes that follow their parent. A child scene takes its parent's world, sun and darkness until you change them, and a Viewpoints panel keeps saved views for hotspots to open.
Scenes linked to another world travel in backups. A nested scene linked to a different world is now kept in world backups and linked again on import.

Sculpt and rebuilds

The review of a big sculpt no longer times out. A tester's batch of 110 long strokes took 73.5 seconds to review, past the 30 the app waited, and failed with "The review timed out". Each stroke is now measured only where it passes, which gives the same review in 2.3 seconds and speeds up the rebuild and forest painting too. The review also waits up to three minutes, counts its seconds on the button and keeps a Still reviewing notice up, and if it does time out it suggests smaller batches. Its failure message used to be headed "Nothing here yet".
Settlements and landmarks stay on the map while you sculpt. The Landmarks overlay used to disappear as soon as the Sculptor opened. Now towns, landmarks and borders stay, and in Select the pointer names the town under it, a click selects it, and dragging a settlement's marker stages a move, checked by the same rule as the Move button. A moved or removed town leaves a ghost where it stands today until the edit is applied.
Overlays line up in every projection. Show where settlements fit, the previews of staged features and the highlight of a selected feature only lined up on the Stretched map; on Robinson, Mollweide and the rest they were stretched over the sheet. They now follow the projection and the map's turn.
What you wrote about a place follows it through a rebuild. Lakes, ranges, rivers, deserts and seas now keep their numbers through a rebuild, as towns already did, so what you keyed to them follows the place: chosen names, renames, canon, campaign reveals, regional projects, scene links, and realms' allies, rivals and disputes. On a sculpted test world the rebuild used to put 20 of 29 lake names and 42 of 60 river renames on the wrong place; now none. [[Links]] in chapters, Codex pages and lore edits follow a renamed or renumbered place (168 wrong links on the test world, now none), and marks on a moved town follow it in regional projects, the Chronicle, campaigns and hotspots. What belonged to a place that is gone goes to Released in a rebuild in the Naming studio for you to review, instead of landing on whatever now has its number. A rebuild with no edits gives back the same world.

Deep Time and the science

Paint your own plates. Deep Time's Paint plates gives each plate a colour to brush or fill, and Show generated plates lays the run's own plates underneath to paint over. Each painted plate must be one piece (the editor names the one that is not), and ground you leave unpainted joins the nearest plate. The plates keep the shapes you painted as they move: 99% of the ground still matched the painting after 40 steps, where seeding plates by points managed 40–76%. A run you do not paint is unchanged.
Welded continents keep moving, and supercontinents break up. A continent welded to another now turns with the pull of everything welded to it, where it used to barely turn (about four times faster over twelve seeds); crust squeezed out at a collision is kept as thickened crust instead of deleted; two continents weld only along a front at least 500 km long that holds; and a group holding three quarters of the crust for 100 million years rifts along its youngest sutures. Over twelve seeds, the share of the run spent as one rigid block fell from 47% to 23%, and the largest landmass in the kept era from 43% of the land to 39%. A saved Deep Time history is not run again; new runs and re-runs get this.
Warmer summers near the poles. Land ice used to follow the yearly mean temperature, so land near the poles turned to ice cap where Earth has tundra, and continents were squeezed towards the equator when they were placed. Land ice now follows the warmest season, and continents are eased away from the poles only near the latitude limit. On twelve seeds, lowland summers at 65–75° went from 5.0 to 8.1 °C, tundra from 0.8% of the land to 2.3%, boreal forest from 2.8% to 5.0%, and the land beyond 45° from 18.6% to 24.1%. Because the continents are placed differently, a world grown from a seed has different coastlines when it is rebuilt.
Bogs, marshes, swamps and salt marshes. Wetlands come in four kinds (biome model 3): Bog and fen, where a cool, wet climate builds peat; Marsh, on flooded plains and lake shores; Swamp forest, where they flood under hot summers; and Salt marsh, on tidal coasts. Soils, travel, goods, names and the words a region brief understands follow them, and Advanced settings has Wetland cover. Wetlands now cover 4.6–8.3% of the land, against Earth's 6–8%; the old single class covered 7.7–14.4% and traced every river as a ribbon. A saved world is reclassified when it is next re-simulated.
Wet ground where the water gathers. The soil model read dryness the wrong way round on flat ground, so waterlogged soils ended up on dry country: 98% of poorly drained ground was steppe. Waterlogging now needs water gathering in, and peat needs a wet driest season. Poorly drained steppe is gone, and on the test world peat covers 1.5% of the land instead of 0.8%, none of it on dry ground.
Rivers that build deltas show them. The simulation has always decided which mouths build a delta: a big river that reaches the sea with almost no gradient left, over a shelf shallow enough to build on. Until now only the illustrated atlas drew one. The World map and the relief, biome, soil and resource sheets now draw its distributaries fanning from the river across the delta to the coast, over a wash of wet ground. A river that builds no delta still ends in an estuary.
Deltas have names. A river's gazetteer dossier says when it ends in a delta, how large its plain is and which sea it fans into; the cell inspector says "On the … delta" on that plain; and the world's summary lists every delta, so the calibration report counts them at last.
Stream order carries through lakes. A river leaving a lake used to start again as the smallest stream. A lake now counts as a confluence, so its outlet carries the order of the rivers flowing in. No river's order went down, and on Full worlds more rivers reach the largest orders, so rivers below lakes can be drawn wider and lettered as the great rivers they are. Settlements, routes and names did not change on the test worlds, and worlds without lakes are unchanged.
Deserts made of different sand. Describe a region as a white gypsum, pale quartz, golden, red or black volcanic sand desert, a salt flat or a stony desert, and the ground takes that colour on the maps and that brightness in the sun. The cell inspector, the gazetteer and the travel planner give the ground's temperature by day and night on open dry ground. White gypsum stays cool: about 7 °C cooler than ordinary desert ground over a day and 16 °C cooler at midday, as measured at White Sands. Black sand is the hottest, reaching about 71 °C under a Lut summer. At night the sands differ by under 2 °C, because a clear dry sky cools every desert alike; black sand has the widest swing between day and night, and the region's reply says so. Worlds that describe no sand are unchanged.
River branching is measured properly. The health report judged how rivers branch with a fit that read a well-formed network as too sparse. It now uses a measure that is exact on test networks, and CartoVox's rivers read within Earth's range at Quick and Full. The rivers themselves are unchanged; only the report's figure moves.

Write and Codex

Import a Scrivener project. Scrivener keeps a project as a .scriv folder, which the book import could not read. The binder's Draft now becomes the book: parts become their chapters, documents left out of the compile are skipped, and chapter synopses and notes and scene titles and synopses come with them, from Scrivener 3 and Scrivener 2 projects. Pick the project folder with the new Import Scrivener button, or import a zipped .scriv through Import book (which is what macOS sends when you pick a project package). It has been tested on projects built to Scrivener's layouts rather than on many real ones, so if yours does not come through, tell us on Discord.
Write in both panes. The chapter opened beside is now a second editor rather than a page to read. Each pane saves its own chapter; the pane you are typing in is the one Find, Insights, the World panel and the word counts follow, and it is marked. A passage dragged from one pane to the other moves, and each pane's lens marks its own chapter's words. A chapter is never open in both panes, the split comes back when you reopen the world, and it stacks the panes on a narrow window.
Edit any generated entry. Every generated Codex entry has Edit, and says whether it is Generated, Partly yours or Written by you. Realms, cultures and faiths have histories you can write. Lore can apply to the whole world, to chosen regions, peoples and places, or to one point, and has a category (a phenomenon, a faith, magic or law, an era and others), both changeable later. A new Your lore page lists everything you wrote, and world-wide lore shows on the Overview.
Regions within regions. A realm's provinces can now be divided again, up to four levels deep, in the realm's own words: a duchy into counties, counties into baronies, baronies into domains, or a wilayat into sanjaks. Choose the depth in the lore editor's Provinces of the chosen realm, for every realm or for one realm alone. Each division has a dossier, a vault page and a name you can change that survives rebuilds, and any realm or division has Open a child map of …. Crowded levels thin their labels on the map. A world that never asks keeps its provinces only.
Bring an edited Obsidian vault back. Bring your edited vault back reads a vault you exported and edited: your edits to your own pages are applied, edits to generated pages become lore edits, conflicts are shown for review, moved and deleted pages are offered, and an Author_Notes folder comes back. It all undoes in one step, and alias links resolve in the Codex.
Lore import reads spreadsheets and keeps attachments. Import lore reads Excel, OpenDocument and tab-separated sheets, every sheet in a workbook, with real dates. Imported records can have their type, aliases and fields changed, duplicates merged and unmerged (or every exact match at once), and PDFs, documents, sheets and audio attached, during import or after. The relations graph can focus on one record and zoom.

Play (campaigns)

A player atlas. Download player atlas redraws every atlas plate under the campaign's player rules and fog, so it shows only what the players know. It runs in the background, plate by plate, with progress, a Stop button and your memory allowance, and is bound into one book.
Token sheets. Download token sheet prints A4 or Letter PDF tokens for the party and visible units, the characters the party has met, realm banners and the settlements they know. Every character is there only if you ask for it.
Reveal characters. The campaign page marks each character as revealed, met at the table or not met yet, and Reveal to players and Hide from players put a character on or off the players' token sheet and out of their vault.

Settlements

Towns on hills. Towns on steep ground now sit on it: streets follow the contours and switch back up the slope, with steps where they are too steep for carts; plots are terraced behind retaining walls; approach roads wind up the hill; and the Crag town's approach ramps up to its top ring. Level towns are unchanged.
Water through the town. Fountains and wells are fed downhill by conduits from springs, cisterns, a reservoir or a water wheel. River and coast banks are surveyed from the terrain, braided rivers have bars with bridges hopping between them, and a lake shore follows its basin.
No streets through buildings. Generated streets ran through buildings: 1,684 times across 62 test towns, now never. Streets are also re-routed around buildings you place, and the navigability report counts any crossing left.

Exports

Print a globe. Printable terrain or globe (STL) has a Globe shape beside Flat: a watertight ball with your chosen diameter and relief exaggeration, the sea smooth or carved to the sea floor, a hollow shell (about half the plastic) or solid, a flat at the south pole or a socket for a stand's rod, a drain hole for resin printers, and the whole globe or two halves joined at the equator. Flat prints are unchanged.
The offline map carries full dossiers. The offline interactive map now carries places' full dossiers, capitals first when a large world has more than the file can hold, and its pins can be clicked at any zoom.
An illustrated hex map. Hexcrawl sheet or illustrated hex map… can now paint its hexes as a picture: every hex a textured tile of its terrain (grassland, forest, jungle, hills, mountains, snow, desert, badlands, swamp, marsh or farmland) with a few Drawn or Painted stamps in it, a calm textured sea with a soft edge along the coast, the world's own rivers running hex to hex and widening downstream, lakes and settlements, and optional names, realm borders, hex numbers and a compass rose. Choose the whole world, what the map shows or a child map, at 2K to 16K; a preview paints as you choose. It follows your map look. Each hex is a whole number of pixels across, and the setup and the PNG say how many, so a VTT's hex grid can be set to match. The CSV and SVG are unchanged.

Fixes

Controls that should be hidden stay hidden. Label detail in Create's generation options now hides when the atlas is off or has no labels; the art, structure and style libraries show Trash, or Restore and Delete, only when they apply; the reference-image tools wait until they are needed; and an empty gap in the Codex's vault sync panel is gone.
The world switcher no longer offers worlds it cannot open. A world still generating, or a run that failed or was interrupted, is listed greyed out with its state, where a click used to close the menu and do nothing. If a world cannot be opened from anywhere, a message says why.
The world switcher lists every world. It stopped at twelve; now the list scrolls, Open Library and Create a world stay in view below it, and the arrow keys move through it.
An imported map no longer grows a ruled strip into the sea. When "complete the world" placed your map on a generated planet, land that met the edge of your sheet ran on into the ocean as a flat-ended rectangle, generated seamounts beside it came up as round islands, and deep sea at the edge left a hard-edged pit. The edge now blends into the world around it: coasts carry on a little and taper, and the blend never raises islands of its own. Worlds without an import are unchanged.
Grimdark and Imhof rivers. The first time a world was shown in the Grimdark or Imhof style, its rivers were drawn as blocks. They are lines from the start now.
The Gazetteer shows the dossier you clicked. Clicking an entry in the Codex's Gazetteer opened its dossier out of sight; it now scrolls it into view.
Clicks land on the right place on charts. On charts drawn with a title, axes and a colour bar, such as tectonics, tides and currents, the installed app could fail to find where the map sits in the picture and spread the world across the margins, so the cell inspector and markers were off. It finds the map inside the chart again, including in worlds made with Delta V1 and V2, which had remembered the failed measurement.
Windows reads map names. Reading the names on a map picture with Windows' own reader needed one more Windows package, which the installer now includes; a missing reader now says so instead of failing mid-read. Tesseract installed for one user (under your own AppData) is found too, and a picture too large to read is refused with a reason instead of an error.
Staged edits stay with their world. Edits staged while one world built, and never applied, were offered on the next new world. They are now offered only for the world they were staged over; a cancelled or failed build still hands them to the next build.
Undo history is not lost when you switch chapters quickly. Coming back to a chapter within about half a second of leaving it could set its history aside as out of date; Clear undo history can no longer be undone by a save that was still on its way.
Vault sync keeps accented names. A vault zipped by the Finder or the zip command named Élan.md as ├ëlan.md when applied. Names are read as the Mac and Windows write them, and a review made for one world can no longer be applied while another is open.
Scrivener projects with emoji, or zipped on Windows. Emoji in a Scrivener chapter stopped the import, and a project zipped with Windows' Compress-Archive read as empty. Both import now, and a failed import leaves nothing half-written behind.
A realm across the date line gets a proper plate. Its author plate showed a thin sliver the width of the world; it now frames the side that holds most of the realm and says so.
Mirrored reference points are explained. Control points laid mirror-wise used to fail with an error, or in the browser silently make nothing; both now say the map may be mirrored and suggest warping it.
The split view keeps the pane you clicked. Clicking into the other pane while a save was finishing could leave the first pane marked active.
Accented names in scenes on Windows. A viewpoint, hotspot, fog layer or scene project named with an accent or a curly apostrophe (Álfheim's gate) failed to load on Windows or came back garbled. Every file CartoVox writes is now read as the UTF-8 it was written in, and a test keeps it that way.
Step inside more buildings. Buildings much deeper than they are wide were refused; a failed attempt left an empty "Inside …" scene behind; the Floors choice was ignored; buildings you drew were refused when the settlement picture was missing; and a very large hall could use several gigabytes. All of these work now, and ordinary houses are furnished exactly as before.
Child scenes keep following their parent's sun. A new map in a child scene could stop taking the parent's sun and darkness as if you had set your own. Only a change you make now counts as your own.
Ground temperatures on slow-turning worlds. On worlds with very long days (the Slow Rotator preset and beyond) the desert ground temperature in the cell inspector, gazetteer and journey weather came out at hundreds of degrees below zero, or blank. It is now finite and sensible at any day length; Earth-like days give exactly the figures they did.
Refining regions. A refinement that failed while drawing left an empty sheet that was served from then on; regions about half a world wide put some cells on the wrong side; a region too big to refine at twice the detail could use nearly 2 GB before failing; and a pin saved while a region was refining could be lost. All four are fixed.
Large hex maps. Hexes wider than about 1,000 pixels were mostly black, and painted stamps at very large sizes could run out of memory; both are fixed, and a hex map too large for the memory free says so.
The player atlas says why it drew nothing. When no plate fitted in memory it said only "not drawn"; it now says so and suggests Draft size.

Engineering

Every package a release installs is now pinned, on every platform. desktop/build/constraints-py312.txt names the direct inputs, and the new desktop/build/lock-py312.txt pins everything they pull in (pyobjc on macOS, pythonnet and pywinrt on Windows, Qt on Linux, and the rest), resolved for all three platforms at once by scripts/lock_release_dependencies.sh. The build refuses to freeze when the installed environment differs from the lock, so two build machines can no longer package different libraries from one tag.
Newer libraries: CPython 3.12.14 on every platform (macOS was on 3.12.13), numpy 2.5.3, Matplotlib 3.11.2, pypdf 6.19.0, PyInstaller 6.22.3 and, on Linux, PySide6 and Qt 6.9.3. Qt stays on 6.9 because 6.10 and later need glibc 2.34, which would drop older Linux systems; OpenCV stays on 4.14, which is newer than 5.0.0 and all the app needs. Saved worlds build byte for byte the same; Matplotlib moves the text in chart titles and labels by up to a pixel. The Linux bundle is frozen on the 26 September 2026 manylinux image (August before), so the system libraries it carries have the security fixes to that date.
The manuscript editor's libraries move to their latest patch releases: ProseMirror view 1.42.6, model 1.25.12, markdown 1.13.8 and markdown-it 14.3.2 (cursor and Android input fixes, and a memory cap on hostile smart-quote input). The editor bundle rebuilds byte for byte from its lock, and npm audit finds nothing in it.
The release gate runs on the release interpreter and the locked libraries, and says when it does not. Run on the developer's Python, it had passed while the installers' Pillow crashed painted volcano stamps and their Matplotlib broke the dashboard's reading of charts; both are fixed.

web/shared-helpers.js (AtlasHelpers) holds the helpers that were copied into dozens of modules (the work tracker in six spellings, the confirm-then-act wrapper in twelve), so a fix lands once.
The stylesheets were reorganised into cascade layers with shared spacing tokens, and redesign.css was retired into the stylesheets it overrode. Screens were compared pixel for pixel before and after.
calibration_world read counts["error"] and counts["warning"] while the health file writes errors and warnings, so every recorded calibration held zero errors and warnings. The next calibration run will show warning-count drift that belongs to this fix.
Worlds that use none of the new features build byte for byte as before on the standard proof world (seed 991 at Sketch), apart from the science changes named above, each of which has an evidence packet under docs/scientific-evidence/.