CartoVox Delta V5 — full release notes

Delta V5 is the fifth Delta release, shared with invited testers on 2 October 2026. Your Delta access code and the licence carry over as they are. Everything below is new or fixed since Delta V4. Three things look different the moment you open it: Create is four steps now — Describe, Candidates, Choose, Build — with Advanced settings as a section of Describe; the sentence under a control waits behind the small i beside its label (Settings › Explanations › Always show brings them all back); and the World map's toolbar floats, with zoom and Focus at the bottom right. A world made with Delta V4 rebuilds with slightly different ground near the poles (see Terrain), and the app says so before an edit rebuilds it.

Living History and what your world means

Press run, and centuries happen to your world. The Chronicle has a Run history panel: pick 100 to 600 years, a tempo (Calm, Steady or Turbulent) and the year to start from, and press run. It is a job like any other (progress as it goes, Stop at any point), and it takes a few seconds, because it does not re-simulate the planet: it advances the realms over the world as it was solved. Nothing about a world changes until you run it, and the terrain, climate and rivers are never touched.
Every event has its reasons. Wars, annexations, secessions, collapses, famines, plagues, migrations, roads built, towns founded, grown and abandoned all come from the world's own pressures: the harvest of a dry year on ground whose rain swings a third from year to year, a granary that ran out, a treasury counted in years of revenue, a frontier 1,400 km from the capital, an old rivalry, the road a conquest followed. Each event says so, with the numbers ("Ashur's usual grain surplus (12% above need) became a shortfall of 9% after the drought of 309 … Vellmark's treasury held 4.1 years of revenue; Ashur's was empty … The advance followed the Kesh–Ashur road, built in year 287").
Scrub the years and watch the borders move. Read by year, the Chronicle's year scale redraws the political map of that year over the relief: realms appear and vanish, borders move, roads are built, towns are founded and abandoned. A world with a run opens its Chronicle by year at the run's first year.
Why is this border here? Click a border on the year's map and the Chronicle walks back through the events that put it there, each with the pressure that tripped it, and ends at the ground the line runs along: the ridge, the great river, or the empty country between two peoples' farmland.
Pins: facts every run must keep. A realm never falls, a realm is never annexed by another, a border holds between two years, a realm ends in a given year, a new realm (with your name) is founded at a settlement in a given year, a settlement endures. A run treats them as hard constraints and says, pin by pin, whether it held on its own or only because your pin forced the outcome ("held by your pin").
The Chronicle is the consequence, and stays yours. A run's notable events are filed into the Chronicle a century to an era, marked "from the history run". Edit any of them like any Chronicle entry: an event you edited is kept word for word when you run again, an event you deleted stays deleted, and eras you wrote yourself are never touched. The Continuity Check reads the places a run ends and the names it changes, so a chapter set after a town was abandoned, or one that uses a town's new name before the conquest that gave it, is flagged.
Plausible by measurement. Every run carries a history health report in the style of the simulation's: no realm balloons in its first fifty years, none swallows the world, realms rise and fall, borders move and famines, plagues and wars come at Earth-like pre-modern rates. A realm's reach is measured against the world's own: a world whose simulation drew continent-wide realms keeps larger ones than a world of city-states.
The same world and pins give the same history. Runs are seeded from the world, so running again gives the same years; Try another history rolls them differently. Lengthening a run keeps the years it already had, and a stopped run carries on from its last checkpoint. When the world is rebuilt or your pins change, the panel says the run is out of date until you run it again.
What this world means. The World panel now opens with a few findings about the world in front of you rather than a list of map layers: how much of it is drought-exposed and which region is worst, which settlement has the shortest growing window, which border runs longest through mountains or desert, how many towns sit on wide floodplains, where the land recycles its own rain. Each is one sentence with a measured number and a named place, read from the saved world -- nothing is re-simulated, and it takes about a tenth of a second. Show on the map opens the decision map it came from, at the right layer, centred on that place; Why? opens the cell inspector there, with the climate explanation when the finding is about rain or warmth. The card shows the two to four findings that are most unusual for this world, so two worlds show different cards; a world whose saved data cannot support a finding simply leaves it out.
The Chronicle reads as a timeline first. Its column used to stack Run history, the line of history, the era form and the event form one under the other, so reading a year meant scrolling past the controls for making and changing it. The column now has one switch with three contexts. Read is where it opens: the year's (or the era's) events beside the map and its year scale, which history and era you are reading, and the border tracer's answer when you click a border, with no editing control in view. Edit follows what you select: click an event and its editor opens, with its kind, years, places and drawing, and Delete and Accept beside it; Edit this era opens the era's. The line of history (Branch from here, Make this canon, Delete branch) and the base map live there too, under a sentence that says what your edits change: canon, or only the branch you are on. Run history… is the one way into a run, and says before you press it what a run changes: it writes its years into the canon history, your own eras stay, events you edited stay as you wrote them, events you deleted stay deleted, and branches are not touched. Escape returns to Read, and focus goes back to the event or button you came from; the arrow keys move along the switch.
Every event says where it came from, in the same words. The list and the editor both read From your history run, Your event or From the lore (with "awaiting acceptance" on a lore proposal). An event you save is yours whatever it began as; the editor says when it was edited from a run, and that it will stay as you wrote it when history is run again. Deleting a run's event says it stays deleted.
Unsaved work stays where you can see it. Leaving Edit no longer throws a half-written event away: Edit carries a dot, Read says which event or era has unsaved changes with a Continue editing link, and scrubbing the year keeps the draft in the era it was begun in. Choosing another event, era or line of history while something is unsaved asks first. Drawing stops when you leave Edit, so a click on the map in Read asks the border's story instead of adding a point.
On a phone the map comes first. The Chronicle's map and year scale now sit above its panel, rather than under a column of controls.

Realms, towns and roads

Roads on a world you already have. A world built without roads had no way to get them back, and roads could not be drawn after a world was made. The World panel's Realms & settlements now has Roads (Generated roads / Only the roads I draw / No roads) and Sea lanes. Switching them rebuilds from the peoples onward, so the terrain, climate and rivers stay exactly as they were. A world built with roads off now reads as "Only the roads I draw", so a road you draw is built without switching anything first.
A Road tool in the Sculptor (Story › Road, key W). Click the road's points, and end it beside a town to join the town; name it and give it a rank (trunk, road or track). It shows on the map at once and waits in the pending edits until you apply. Every rebuild keeps it, even with generated roads off, and joins its ends to its towns wherever the rebuild placed them. Select a drawn road to remove it or draw it again.
Roads you draw are roads everywhere: on the map, in journeys, in the approach roads of a settlement planned from the world, in the GeoJSON export (marked as yours, with name and rank) and in the vector map.
Every road is a road. Roads you draw on Draw your world, and the roads in an imported GeoJSON or Azgaar map, used to be only a drawing on the map. They are now real roads, built where you drew them, joined to the towns at their ends, carrying travellers, and selectable, removable and redrawable in the Sculptor like any road you draw there. Imported roads keep their names and ranks. Worlds you already made from a drawing or an imported map get their roads as real roads on their next build or rebuild; only the peoples are rebuilt, the terrain stays as it is. When you import a map's own places, or keep only the places you made, the world starts with only your roads.
The Road tool joins towns you have just placed, before you apply them. A town you draw on the blank canvas without a realm around it keeps the name you gave it.
A road joins the town you drew it to, and no other. An end joins a town within 30 km, or one map cell on a coarse world (111 km at Sketch), and the Road tool shows exactly that before you apply; a rebuild used to take an end to a town up to about 660 km away.
Name and rank roads on Draw your world. The canvas Road tool asks for a name and a rank (trunk, road, track or sea lane), like the Sculptor's, and an end drawn on a city joins it.
Sea lanes from your map. An Azgaar map's sea routes and GeoJSON sea routes become your own sea lanes, which you can select, remove and redraw in the Sculptor, and the Sculptor's Road tool can draw one. Sea lanes has the same three choices as Roads: between ports, only mine, or none.
The World panel says whose roads they are, for example "3 you drew · 12 from your map", and a replicated GeoJSON or Azgaar world reads its file again in full, keeping its roads' origin and its provinces, cultures and realm details.
One row of actions for a place. A town's card on the map, the cell inspector on a town, and a settlement's dossier in the Compendium now share one row: Inspect, Journey from here, Journey to here, Write lore and Plan this settlement. Each opens what was already there: the cell inspector, Travel with that end filled in, the Write about this place drawer, and Settlement Studio. Before, the card had no way into the inspector or Travel, and the inspector had none into Travel, the lore or a plan. On the card, Write about it is now Write lore.
Travel shows the whole name. The From and To lists cut long names short behind their tier and kind; the full name of each end is now written under its list. The lists open a type-to-filter search once they hold more than a dozen places, not forty.
Pick a journey's ends on the map. Pick on map beside From or To draws every settlement on the journey map; click one to make it that end. Esc cancels. It works in the world's own projection.
Route assumptions fold away. Season, objective and party size sit under Route assumptions, with their values shown in its summary ("Typical year · Balanced · party of 4"). From, To, Mode and Calculate journey stay on top.

Exports

A plate across the date line shows both sides of it. A realm astride the line used to get a plate of the side that held most of it, and a continent astride it a plate the whole width of the world. Both are now framed on themselves and the sheet runs on over the line: the coast, rivers, roads, sea lanes, frontiers, towns and names carry straight across, the meridians read 170°E, 180°, 170°W, and the locator marks the frame at both edges of the little world map. A child map over the line gets its own window instead of one slid back inside the map. The atlas legend, the bound atlas's index, the players' fogged plates and the rebuild's kept-plate check all read these plates the same way. Every plate that does not cross the line is drawn exactly as before.
KML carries roads. The KML export (now Places and roads for globe tools) has your roads, the generated roads and the sea lanes as lines, each in its own folder with names and ranks, crossing the date line correctly in Google Earth.
The bound atlas has a gazetteer. The Atlas PDF now ends with an index of every place its plates letter: settlements (as capital, city or town), realms, continents, oceans and seas, lakes, rivers, ranges and places of power, in alphabetical order under letter headings, each with what it is and the pages of the plates that show it. A place is cited on the closest plates that hold it, and on the world plate only when no other plate does. It sets in two to four columns by paper size, takes its own line in the contents, and works with margins or bleed. The player atlas gets one too, listing only what the players' plates show them. An unlabelled atlas has none, since its plates name nothing.
The bound atlas has a cover. Its first page is now a designed cover in place of the bare title page: the world's name, set as large as the page allows, over the world plate, with your world's one-line idea beneath it and what the book holds at the foot, inside a double ruled frame on parchment. Every page number the contents and the gazetteer cite stays as it was.
Plates are numbered. Every plate in the bound atlas is Plate I, II, III… in the order it is bound. The numeral is in its caption (PLATE IV before the title), in a running head across the top of the page (the world's name on the left, Continents · Plate IV on the right, set on the same line as the gazetteer's own head), and in the contents beside its page. The gazetteer cites places by those same numerals, so a name in the index points at the plate whose head you thumb to. A plate gives up 7 mm at its top for the head rather than running under it.
A legend page after the contents, measured from the plates in the book rather than printed from a list. It keys only what those plates draw at their scale: towns, ports, forts and the stamped mountains, forests, dunes and ice only where the closer plates show them, tracks never on the world plate, ley lines only on regional plates, each place of power's ground and stamp, the ground colours with the share of the land shown each one covers, and the sea's depth ramp. A mark not on every plate says which plates it is on. The swatches are the plates' own stamps, drawn by the same brushes at your world's seed, on the plates' paper.
The legend states each plate's scale and projection. Each plate's scale is the ground it shows over the width it prints at on the paper you chose (1 : 9,600,000 · 1 cm to 96 km along the meridians), the basis its own scale bar uses; the projection is the one the world plate was drawn in and the plate carrée every closer sheet is cut from, with its graticule interval. A world plate in a butterfly or double-disk projection says its scale varies rather than printing one number.
The player atlas has a player's legend. It is measured from the same filtered fields the players' plates are drawn from: a place of power the party has not found has no row, a road or sea lane is keyed only when the campaign shows roads or sea lanes, and a fogged copy keys the veil.
Ask for the book in Create. Atlas edition (bound PDF), beside Atlas lettering, binds the plates into an A4, A3 or Letter book as soon as the last plate is drawn, into the world's exports folder, with a no-label twin when you draw both letterings. A build stopped early binds it when the deferred plates are finished. The Output line names the book and the Cost line says what it adds: binding is seconds, not minutes (twelve Draft plates bound in 4.1 s, six full publication plates in 7–8 s), and the book is about the size of its plates.
The Atlas leads with its sheets. The column opens on the plates, with a selector by scale (All, World, Continents, Regions, Cities, each with its count) and, once a world has more than a dozen sheets, a name search. The reading desks come last, as an optional set.
Labeled or no labels, in one place. One switch beside the plate's title changes its lettering, the choice carries from sheet to sheet, and the thumbnails follow it. It is greyed, not hidden, on a sheet drawn in one lettering only. (Each sheet used to carry its own pair of buttons.)
Map styles by name and by picture. Styles are named the way the map viewer names them (Swiss analytical relief, Antique nautical, Black & white print…) instead of their file keys (imhof, nautical, ink), shown as real previews of your world, and counted from what the world actually has: the Atlas said "seven styles" while worlds had eight. The Map gallery names them the same way.
Every reading desk says plainly what it is for under its name: Royal Surveyor, physical geography; Bluewater Navigator, maritime routes; Field Naturalist, climate and ecology; Court Chronicler, realms and history; Monastery Copyist, printable bases; Forbidden Archivist, dark and supernatural. None opens by itself.
The badge beside a plate's title reads World, Continent, Region, City plan, Map style or Reading desk, not the record's key.
Themes in the vector map. The Vector map (SVG, PDF) now offers bedrock geology, soils, Köppen climate, resource provinces, floodplains, deltas with their names and channels, ocean currents, prevailing winds (for the year or one season) and deposits with their minerals named. Each is its own layer in Illustrator, Affinity or Inkscape, with its key under the map, and all are off until you tick them, so the usual file is unchanged. A view that has a vector layer offers SVG beside its picture export, which opens the setup with that layer ticked.
Heightmaps and greyscale pictures. Export › 3D and printing › Heightmap saves the world's elevation, sea floor and land, as a 16-bit or 8-bit greyscale PNG, with the metres per grey step written into the file. Greyscale beside the picture projections saves any map as plain grey.

Writing and the Compendium

Your continuity log is kept. The Series Bible told you to record every canon decision on it, but the Bible is a generated page, and a rename redraws generated pages from scratch, so the log was lost on the next rename. The premise and the log now live on their own page, codex/Continuity_Log.md beside _generated/. CartoVox writes it once and never rewrites it, and the Bible and the book template point there.
A save that is only partly done says so. A rename or canon edit saves your canon first, then redraws what is built from it. If the handbooks, the city plans or the name registry could not be redrawn, the save used to look complete. Now a notice names what is behind; saving again tries those pages again.
Checks read your prose, not only your scene cards. Write › Insights › Continuity now reports a world name written one slip off ("Westhavn" where the world says Westhaven), when that spelling appears only once in the whole book. A name you write the same way twice is taken as meant, and a name the world does not have at all is never reported. It also checks a journey time the text states ("a week's ride", "three days' march") against the distance between the places that sentence names, or between the scenes' places at a scene's opening, and reports a time far too short for the distance. A broken [[link]] now names the page it was probably meant for, and each finding's scene label opens that scene.
Checks never contradict your canon. Write › Insights › Continuity now reads your Continuity Log (codex/Continuity_Log.md) and your lore edits before it reports anything. A line that names what a finding is about and says what your book says settles it: "Highport is a city in the books", "Eastwatch lies forty miles from Highport by the old road". There is no syntax to learn, and a line that only names the place ("Highport and Eastwatch are at war") settles nothing, so the log never hides a finding by accident. Settled findings are listed at the end with the line that settled them, never as contradictions. New worlds' logs explain this in their first lines; your existing log is not touched.
Accept a finding, for good. Each finding has Accept: this is how the book means it. It stays out of Checks from then on, kept with the book (continuity_accepted.json beside its chapters), and listed under "findings you accepted" with Restore. Rewriting the sentence brings it back to be read again; rewording the check does not.
Every finding says the same things. What kind it is, the scene (its label opens it), the sentence it quotes with the words in bold, what the world says, and what you can do. Readings that can be right — snow on a summer's day, a town called a city, a journey whose places came from the scene cards — are marked low confidence and folded behind a count until you ask for them.
Show the route. A journey that is too short for the map opens Travel with the route already solved between the two settlements, on horseback or on foot as the prose says — any town, not only the ninety busiest the pickers list.
Add travel days, with Undo. When two scene cards put too few days between two places, Add N travel days moves the later scene so the journey fits (turning the year when it has one), and Undo puts it back. Nothing else in the book moves, and the prose is never edited.
Five new checks, each quiet unless it is sure of the world's side:
- Distances the prose states — "forty miles", "200 km", "three leagues" — between two places a sentence names, too short for the straight line or far too long for any road.
- Wrong realm: "Eastwatch, a port of the Kingdom of the Vale" where the world puts Eastwatch in another realm (a vassal belongs to its overlord too).
- Wrong kind: "the village of Highport" for a capital, "the capital, Vale's End" for a town no realm is ruled from, "Lake Long Water" for a river.
- Farming season: harvest, sowing, lambing and haymaking against the season at the scene's place on its day — not in the tropics, and not "the next harvest" or "a harvest of years".
- Unstated year change: a scene in another year than the one before it, across chapters, whose card, opening and chapter title say nothing of the time between. A year turning over by a few weeks is just the calendar.
Only names the world has are read, as the world writes them, so a place of your own is never reported.
Old names join Checks. A name the world has since renamed, still in a chapter, is a finding there too (the Compendium's "Old names in your books" still changes them all at once).
Vault sync keeps an accented page in its own file on Linux and Windows. A page or folder whose name was written on a Mac (Élan, Ébauches) was recognised when the vault came back, but the sync wrote your edits to a second file with the same-looking name beside it, and Undo then refused because it could not find what it had written. The sync now writes to the file that is there, whichever way its name is spelled.
The brass button is the one thing to do next. With no world open, the empty desk offers Open the Library; with no book, New book; with a book and no chapter open, Resume the chapter you were last writing (or Add chapter, if the book has none yet). While a chapter is open nothing around the page is brass: New book stopped pulling the eye away from the chapter you are in the middle of, and Save is a quiet button, since an idle pause saves on its own.
The book has one place in the column. The selector and, beside it, a Manage menu that starts, imports (a manuscript or a Scrivener project), renames and trashes books — the same buttons, with the same names and shortcuts, moved. Five chips no longer sit above the chapters, so the chapter list starts just under the selector. With no book yet, New book, Import book and Import Scrivener stand open under the selector rather than behind the menu: a first book is not something to go looking for.
One toolbar, three labelled groups. Chapter tools beside the chapter's name (rename, duplicate, move, earlier copies, then the tools you use while writing it — a note, a sprint, the reading lenses — and Move to trash, last and set apart); Format (the marks you use constantly, and a Format menu for headings, lists, rules, links, text placement and maps); Book tools (read, outline, insights, export). Every control keeps its name and its keyboard shortcut.
Larger, easier toolbar text. The toolbar's buttons and the focus and zoom controls under the page were 11–12 px on 22–28 px; in Comfortable density they are body-size text on 30–32 px controls. Compact density keeps the tighter set.
Save state in one place. "Saved", "Unsaved changes" and "Saving…" are shown on the status line under the page, after the word counts, where nothing moves when the words change.
The Compendium's sections are grouped. The 22 sections sat in one flat list with the export buttons running on underneath. They are now under five headings in a fixed order — Overview & questions, World reference, Your writing, Names & canon, and, last, Import & export, which holds Import lore and every transfer in and out (the Obsidian vault, Scrivener and Ellipsus transfers, realm handbooks, WORLDBOOK.md). Every section keeps its place and its address; the one search still reads across all of them.
One set of words for where a fact came from. The Compendium and the Manuscript's world reference now say Measured, Suggested and Your canon everywhere: the dossier badges (which said "derived", "suggested" and "canon"), the mark on each Compendium entry ("Generated", "Written by you"), Describe everything ("generated", "yours"), History ("Measured foundation", "Author canon") and the lore editor's Suggested lore switch. A dossier opens on the key to its marks: what the simulation measured, or worked out from what it measured, is the unmarked default, so a capital's dossier lost 33 "derived" badges and the few marks left are the ones that matter.

Terrain

Inland basins near the poles keep their shape. The broad sags that become a continent's lowlands, gulfs and inland seas were laid out in degrees of longitude, so one placed far north or south bent into an arc along its line of latitude, came out about a third less elongated than it should, and one that reached the pole was cut off along a straight north–south line. They are now laid out in real distances on the ground, so a basin at 80° is the same shape as one at the equator, and one that crosses the pole carries on over it. Every world's basins move a little; a world with a basin within about 20° of a pole can change noticeably there, so worlds made with Delta V4 rebuild with different ground (the app says so before an edit is applied).
Long Sculptor brushes near a pole are the shape the outline shows. A stretched raise, lower, island, plateau or basin brush applied near a pole bent along its line of latitude, though the outline drawn under the pointer showed the true shape. The brush now lands on the outline, both in the live preview and in the rebuild.

Getting started

Your first hour with CartoVox. A new page beside the manual walks a new tester through nine steps in the example world, each ending on something to look at: ask a desert why it is dry, see the same coast in two styles, open a decision map, generate a Sketch world from one sentence, rename a town and watch the name follow, sculpt a valley and see how little else moved, plan a journey, start a book linked to a place, and take the plate and the SVG out as files. Every step was done in Delta V5 before it was written down.
The README says what CartoVox is before what it has. It now opens with one sentence and four points (it simulates a planet, draws a printed atlas, writes the book beside the world, and is yours) before the feature list.

One version story. The README and the installing guide both say which Delta release was last shared and which is being built, and a check now reads both against the release notes, so they cannot drift apart again.

"You have not tried 11 of these." The guided tour of useful tasks was reached only from Help, and most testers never found the decision maps, the Lands gazetteer or Explain climate. The World workspace now carries one quiet line beside the World/Maps pill that counts the tour's tools you have never used; open it for the list, and each one takes you to where the tool lives, exactly as the tour does. A tool comes off the list when you use it yourself, not when the list shows it to you. The line can be dismissed for good with its ×, goes away by itself once everything has been tried, and comes back with a reset of App settings. What you have tried is remembered on this computer only.
The welcome opens on a question. Its first page used to say that CartoVox makes a world rather than a picture of one. Now it shows it: a finished map of the example world, and wherever you click on its land the welcome answers why that place is wet or dry, in the cell inspector's own words: its rainfall against the average for its latitude, the strongest measured cause, and what the air lost and climbed on its way there. "A dry place" and "a wet place" pick a clear example for you. The answers are prepared in advance, so there is nothing to wait for and nothing to build first. The last page no longer calls the example world Eldrebrenn; the seed has been called Ljosmearh for some time.

Create

Setup guide, Reset all and Search again look like buttons. They were bare words a reader could not tell were clickable; each now has a tone and an icon, never the brass of the step's main action.
Star, orbit and moon sits under the planet types. It is not a kind of planet, so it is no longer a twelfth tile among them: it is a row of its own under the planet card, its settings on one line, opening in place.
Planet and geography say which setting they disagree on. When a planet type and a land shape want different values, the note names the setting as Advanced settings does ("Target land fraction"), not its internal name.
On a tall screen each candidate says what sets it apart. Where there is room under the twelve (1440 by 900 and taller), every card adds the one story hook the fewest of the others share, such as "two comparable continental powers" or "a broad tropical belt", so the cards differ in words as well as maps.
Create shows one next step at a time. With your brief written, the brass button is Find 12 strong matches, not Preview this seed: the search is the main road, and one seed is its own short path.
The results offer the search and nothing else until there are results. Variations, the shortlist filters and Compare arrive with the results they act on.
I have a seed. Under the search, for when you already know the seed you want: it puts you in the seed field and the step line becomes Enter your seed › Preview it › Build. Preview this seed draws a quick rough map and saves nothing; the build button then turns brass. Search for candidates instead takes you back.
The build step says what you are about to make. When the next step is a build, the brief's dock shows what it makes (the world, and which illustrated plates and lettering if the atlas is on), how long it takes and how much space, how much is free, and the World Library folder it is saved to. Earlier steps keep the one-line cost summary.
The Library's start cards open Create on the route you chose. Import a map used to open Advanced settings with "How do you want to begin?" still asking behind it, and Generate a world could land on whatever route Create was last on. Now each card is the answer: if you have said what your world is for, Create opens on that route with its first step in view; on a first visit it asks only what the world is for, and says which way in it is setting up.
What is this world for? is a list. Five purposes on a four-column grid left the fifth alone on a row of its own; they are five even rows of picture, name and line now.
Your world in a few sentences. The brief's first field was called World thesis. It is named in plain words now, and the reading under it says Good description rather than Good thesis.
Shape of the land shows each shape. The nine land shapes carry a small picture of what they make, the simulation's own structural preview of that preset, three to a row.
Create walks you through four steps, one at a time. The top of Create is now just the way you are starting (Generate or Import/Draw) and a step bar: 1 Describe, 2 Candidates, 3 Choose, 4 Build. Each step has the whole sheet to itself, and the bar lets you go back to any step you have done: your brief, your shortlist and your chosen seed are all still there. A step you cannot reach yet stays greyed out and says why when you hover it. Reload, and Create opens on the step you were on. Import/Draw has its own three steps: Import or draw, Confirm coastline, Build.
The brief has room to breathe. Describe is your brief at full width, with what CartoVox read from it in a column beside it: the world shape, the ideas it picked up, and what the search will check, as a checklist. The search sits at the foot of the brief with its depth beside it, and "I have a seed" and "Start from Deep Time" are the two other ways in. Deep Time itself is unchanged.
The seed waits until there is a world to go with it. The World shape, Seed, options gear and Reset all row and the Inputs, Output and Cost lines have left the top of Create. World shape is part of the brief now, the seed appears on Choose, and the generation options, what a build makes, how long it takes and where it is saved are all on Build, above the one button that builds. Reset all and the setup guide sit at the head of the brief. Nothing was removed: every control is still there, on the step it belongs to.
Twelve candidates, and choosing one is a click. Find 12 strong matches fills the Candidates step with twelve worlds in full rows, each with its map, a short name (World A to World L), three numbers and how well it fits your brief. Click a card to choose it (arrow keys and Enter work too); Continue with World C → takes it to Choose. Building happens on the Build step, so the cards no longer carry build buttons. Favourites, rejections, notes, filters, sort and taste influence are all still there, beside the grid.
Compare opens over the candidates. Compare two to six side by side, the same facts in rows, with the rows where they differ standing out. It opens from Compare (N) beside the grid and returns to it; the separate Compare tab is gone.
Show 24 variations of the chosen world. The 24 fill the same grid, with a way back to the twelve. Your choice, the variations and which set you were looking at all survive a reload.
Choose shows the world you picked, large, with its seed. The seed appears here for the first time (with Copy), with every check of your brief and Preview on the map. A seed you bring with "I have a seed" gets the same view once you preview it.
Searches are quicker. Every seed tried is drawn as it is scored, instead of solving the shortlisted ones a second time: twelve results cost no more than six did, and 24 variations take about half as long. Quick now tries 24 seeds (about 20 s), Thorough 36 (about 25 s), Deep 72 (about 50 s). At the same depth a search finds exactly the worlds it found before.
The brief fits on one screen. Describe used to be one long column you scrolled through. It is now seven sections: Story, Planet, Land, Peoples, Tongues, Tectonics and Limits. Their names run down the left, each with a word saying what it holds ("30 words", "2 limits", "default"). The section you pick fills the middle of the screen, laid out for what it holds. On a laptop or desktop the page itself never scrolls. Every setting the brief had is still there, in its section.
Your world so far, always in view. A panel beside the brief shows the land shape and the planet as pictures, what CartoVox read in your description, and how many limits, realms and tongues you have set. Click either picture to go to its section. Search depth sits at the foot of the panel as three choices with their times (Quick 20 s, Thorough 25 s, Deep 50 s). Find 12 strong matches is the bar's one gold button, underneath.
Every planet type has its own picture. The eleven planet types are now a grid of small globes. Each one is drawn by CartoVox from a world built with that planet type, so Ice age shows its ice sheets and Lush and warm shows its rainforest. Star, orbit & moon is the twelfth tile. The nine land shapes keep their maps, three by three.
Build is one screen. Step 4 shows what you can make as four pictures of your own kind of world — Sketch, Quick, Full, or a publication atlas — each with its real time and memory, measured the same way the run itself is. Pick the atlas and its plates appear as thumbnails to tick, with finish, lettering and the bound book beside them. The seed you chose is locked at the side with your brief in a line, and Generate waits in the bar at the foot. Every option you had is still there; the atlas switch and the tier choice are simply this one choice now.
Your build stays on the Build screen. Close the progress window and the run carries on in the side panel — stage, clock, Show details — and opens in World when it finishes, as before.
Import or draw, then confirm, then build. Bringing in a map or drawing one now walks three steps: the two doors, the coastline review (your map large, its reading and choices beside it, Use this coastline in the bar), then Build. Confirming the coastline is what opens Build; going back keeps the map and every answer you gave it, and Remove map returns you to the doors.
Every Create step shares one frame. The same margins, the same main area and side panel, and the same bar at the foot — Back, a line saying where you are, and the one gold button — so things sit in the same place from step to step, and nothing scrolls off the screen on a laptop.
All twelve candidates on one screen, and the one you pick explained beside them. At laptop and desktop sizes the twelve now fit without scrolling. Rest the pointer on a card and a larger map of it opens next to it. Pick a card and the side panel shows that world in full: a bigger map, its six figures, which checks it passed and its story hooks. Before you pick one, the panel shows the range of each figure across the set. A small chart above it places all twelve by the two figures that differ most between them, and clicking a dot picks that world. Search depth, Taste, Show and Sort sit in the step's header. Compare (two to six), the 24 variations, favourites, notes and rejections work as before.
Choose shows a sharp map, a globe and the other candidates. Opening Choose now draws a proper preview by itself. The card's soft image shows until the sharp map arrives, about three seconds later, in the same space so nothing jumps; a larger version follows when your screen can show it. A small globe of that map turns beside it. Under the map is a row of the other matches (or the other variations), so you can switch to one without going back. On the "I have a seed" path, the seed you type is previewed once you stop typing. The seed and Copy, the figures, the checks and Preview on the map are unchanged.
Advanced settings open in Describe, beside what they do. Advanced is now the brief's last section, under Limits, instead of a separate screen. Its groups are listed down the side with how many settings you changed in each; search still reads across all of them, and Undo, Redo, Reset group and the recipe actions are where you would look. While it is open, "Your world so far" becomes a live preview: a quick map of one seed redrawn a moment after you stop changing things, a Preset / Yours switch to compare against the preset, every changed setting with a one-click way back, and what a build with these settings would cost. Nothing was removed from the sheet; every setting, hint, definition and cost badge is still there.
Every way into Advanced settings lands in the same place. The command palette, the setup guide's Expert view, a health check's suggested repair, the orbit designer's link and a generated recipe's Adjust all open Describe › Advanced, at the setting or group they were about.

Simpler, steadier panels

Tools shown: Essentials or Everything, wherever you look for it. Making CartoVox simpler used to mean knowing that Essentials lived in App settings, that the Beginner, Writer, Cartographer and Simulation presets lived in Layout, and that Create's "What is this world for?" was a third thing again. They are now named apart everywhere: Tools shown (Essentials or Everything), Panel arrangement (the presets and the panels you hide) and Build output (what a build produces, asked by Create). Tools shown is the first thing in the Layout drawer as well as in App settings, and it is the same setting: change it in one and the other follows.
The welcome asks once. The last page of the welcome offers Tools shown beside Build the example world and Start my own world. It is a choice, not a step: leave it and nothing changes, close the welcome and nothing changes, and a later version's welcome does not ask again.
Nothing Essentials holds back is ever simply gone, and nothing promotes you out of it. The Tools menu ends in More tools · 6, the View menu in More view controls, the Compendium's sections in More sections · 6 and the map library in More maps · N. Each shows what it is holding right there, for this session, and Essentials stays Essentials. The map library's old "show everything" quietly switched the whole app to Everything; it does not any more. Only you change Tools shown.
"Show everything" in Layout is now "Show all panels", so it is not mistaken for Everything.
Every panel and dialog closes the same way. App settings, Layout, the welcome, the manual, the deliverable dialogs, the native dialogs and the map's floating tools all have a title row with the title on the left and the same × last on the right, named for what it closes ("Close Climate Lab", "Close layout", never a bare "Close"). Escape closes each of them and puts focus back on whatever opened it; when that was a tool in the dock's Tools menu, focus goes back to the Tools button. A panel that reports what it did says so in one place, at its foot. The drawer and the dialog keep their shapes: a drawer for contextual tools, a dialog for a decision with an end.
The 3D terrain explorer, the keyboard shortcuts sheet, Map and caption and Bring your vault back gained the same × in their title rows.
An explanation folds when you have used its control, not after five launches. Under Explanations: Auto, the sentence under a control stands until you have clicked or changed that control (or opened the tool it sits in), and folds behind its "i" from the next time CartoVox opens, so nothing moves under the pointer while you work. Opening the app a fifth time no longer takes the explanation away from the Erosion Lab you have never opened. Always show and Always fold still win outright.
Costs, what is saved, and what cannot be undone always stand. "A quick rough map · nothing is saved", "Previews only · nothing is saved", the illustrated atlas's twenty minutes, the trash's 30 days, "Nothing is saved" under Sculpt's quick look and the other lines like them never fold, under any Explanations choice.
Layout's list of zones no longer reads a panel's heading. A Chronicle with eras was offered as "No historical eras yet", the manuscript's menus as "More" and "Lenses", and the Sculptor as "Sculpt terrain Hide controls". Every zone now has a fixed name ("Chronicle heading", "Manuscript: More menu", "Sculpt terrain workbench"), and a heading's zone no longer changes identity when its words do, so what you hid stays hidden.

Maps

Vegetation types. A new map under Life & settlement splits the biomes into the plant cover an atlas shows: needleleaf, larch, mixed, broadleaf deciduous and evergreen forest, tropical dry forest and sclerophyll; and tall-grass prairie, humid pampas, short-grass and shrub steppe, tree and grass savanna and thorn scrub. Each is read from the cell's own winters, summers, rain and height. The 26 biomes the world is built from are unchanged.
Biodiversity. How many of the wild animals and plants (and the wild ancestors of crops) each place could hold, and a second reading for island life found nowhere else: small islands far from any continent glow.
Languages and faiths. Two maps under Life & settlement paint each realm in its tongue family, with the family's flavour in the key and mixed speech where a realm's far frontier meets another family. The faith map shows the faiths your lore records over the realms that hold them; a generated world asks whether its leading realms keep a faith rather than inventing one, so those realms read "unwritten" until you write it. Both are also layers in Map appearance › Borders and places, over any map.
UV exposure. A climate map of the midday UV index through the year, from how high the sun climbs, the star's brightness, altitude, cloud and snow, with a second reading under the forest canopy.
Every one works on the worlds you already have, read from what they saved, with no rebuild.
Oil and gas fields. The Deposits layer now places oil and natural gas fields with the rest: in sedimentary basins, at the foot of young mountains, against buried salt, and offshore on the shallow shelf beside a basin, a rift or a great river's delta. Each has a name in its realm's tongue once worked ("Whenuarangi Pitch Wells", "Anoras Eternal Fires", "Ryuhara Oil Fields" in 61 m of water), a filter of its own in the Deposits panel and a place in the map-features GeoJSON. A worked oil field sells pitch and lamp oil in its town's market.
Every mineral and gem you already had stays exactly where it was, with the same name, grade and size.
Layer tints, the flat atlas look. Map look › Layer tints colours land in stepped height bands and the sea in stepped depth bands, flat, with no hill shading or shelf glow, as a classic atlas does; "Layer tints, fine" uses twice as many bands. The bands match the vector map's own, and the scale under the map steps with them.
Earthquakes and tsunamis. A new Seismic hazard map shades the ground by how hard it shakes, from the kind and speed of each plate seam: collisions and subduction high, transform faults close behind, rifts and ridges lower. Representative earthquake zones sit along every seam, and behind a subduction seam they deepen inland, shallow to intermediate to deep, the way a sinking slab does. Tsunami exposure marks the low coasts that open sea links to those seams. Both work on every saved world, without a rebuild.
Snow, monsoons and storms. Snow depth and Snow season show peak snow (in the classes testers asked for, from under 3 cm to over 200 cm) and the months the ground lies under it, replayed from the world's own snow rule. Tropical cyclones counts cyclone tracks from many seeded years of the weather year, Monsoons shows where the wet season and the wind both turn round, with arrows for the rain-bearing wind, and Storms & fog switches between thunderstorms, tornado-prone plains, dust storms, blizzards and fog. Each map has a key, says on hover what made a place what it is, and adds a Hazards & weather reading to the cell inspector and the gazetteer. Nothing about the world changes.
Volcanoes, named and on their own map. A new Volcanoes view marks every stratovolcano, caldera, shield volcano, fissure field, cinder cone field, geyser field, seamount, guyot and atoll your world's plates and plumes built. Each has a name in the tongue of the land it stands in, and its tone tells you whether it is active, dormant or extinct. Worlds built from now on also draw the hotspot tracks: the trail of ever-older islands a plume left as the plate slid over it. The volcanoes are in the gazetteer, in the cell inspector's "Landforms nearby", on the Landmarks overlay of any map, and in the GeoJSON and GeoPackage exports. Your saved worlds get them without a rebuild; only the hotspot tracks need one.
Karst and caves. The Karst & caves view shows where wet limestone dissolves into sinkholes and where it hollows into caves. The great cave systems, sinkhole fields and lava tubes are placed and named, and each has its own dossier.
Fjords, sounds, lagoons, barrier islands, cays and atolls, found and named. The Coastal landforms view finds them in your coastline and names them the way your bays and gulfs are named. They are in the gazetteer and on the Landmarks overlay too. Only inlets at least one map cell wide can be seen, so a world without glacier-cut coasts may have no fjords at all.
Coasts worn by the sea. A new Advanced setting, Coastal erosion, sits beside Coastal raggedness. Turn it up and soft capes facing long open water under the prevailing wind are cut back to shallow shoals. Exposed hard rock stands as cliffs, and sheltered shores barely change. At 0, the default, every world's coasts are exactly as before.

Look and feel

The Library's other doors look like doors. Beside Continue, Scenes and encounter maps, Map gallery and Import project backup are toned rows with an icon and an arrow instead of plain text.
"Shape the terrain now" in the build window. The button that opens the Sculptor while a world builds read "Shape while it builds…", and the trailing dots looked like text that had been cut off.
The build progress folds to one line. The strip along the bottom while a world builds has a fold arrow: folded, it keeps what is running, how far and how long, and the bar. The page always keeps exactly the strip's height free, so the World map's key, toolbar and zoom are never cut off under it.
Zoom and Focus are at the bottom right of the map. The key and the coordinates keep the bottom left; the toolbar floats between them and steps aside if dragged onto either.
One type scale. The interface used 98 different text sizes, twelve of them within 4 pixels of each other, so neighbouring labels often differed by half a pixel. Every size now comes from twelve steps. Small labels below 10px, such as the Advanced settings captions, the Create preview note and the region stat labels, are now 10px. Most other text is unchanged or one half-pixel larger.
Even spacing. Padding and gaps had sixty-odd values, including 3, 5, 7 and 9px. They now sit on a grid: even pixels up to 24, then fours. Compact density in Settings now tightens the whole interface, not just the panels that happened to use it.
Faint labels are readable. The faintest text colour sat below the contrast that readable text needs (3:1 on the dark sheet, 2.2:1 in Parchment Light). It was used for the Library start cards' numbers and arrows, the tour's step numbers, card captions and the sheet folio. These now use the next ink up, which clears AA on every surface in both themes.
The Manuscript shows the page before you write on it. With no world, no book or no chapter open, the Manuscript used to show one line of text on an empty desk. It now shows a sample page in your book's own typeface, with its running head and chapter opening, next to the one step that gets you writing: Open the Library, New book or Add chapter.
An unsearched brief shows what a search brings. Before your first search, Create's results panel shows six empty slots, each with room for a map and its fit to your brief. They are placeholders, not sample worlds.
Parchment Light is warm all the way through. About 150 interface colours were written for the dark theme only: tinted notes and warnings, highlighted rows, verdict and health badges, focus rings in Render Studio, dialog backdrops, and the shadows under menus, dialogs, pickers and the brief. Daylight drew them as night-time colours on paper. They now follow the theme, and shadows on paper are a shallow warm brown instead of black. The dark theme looks the same. Map overlays, brush colours, legends and artwork keep their own colours, as before.
The Create brief is easier to read. Setup and Advanced settings now sit on one quiet line, and Preview and Create have the button row to themselves, so the next step is the one bright button. A step you fold now shows what it holds (your thesis and story frame, planet and shape, realms, must-haves and avoids, pinned tectonics), so you can fold the steps you have finished and the brief fits on one screen. The "Two or three sentences" box that repeated the thesis field's own hint is gone, and four long explanations are shorter.
A preview's buttons are no longer under the planet. On a laptop-sized window, the Planet card reached down over the strip under a previewed world and half covered Back to shortlist and Create world. The strip now stops beside the Planet card.
Atlas plates fill the stage. Fit used to stop at a plate's own size, so a small plate (from a quick or half-resolution world) sat in the middle of a dark stage. Fit now fills the stage, enlarging a plate up to 3×, the same limit as the zoom buttons. It also refits when you hide the plates column.
Window widths behave the same everywhere. Panels used to rearrange at about thirty different window widths. At exactly 900px and 1100px wide, two layouts applied at once. There are now ten widths, each with one layout on either side. Narrow-window adjustments now start at the same width across the app, a little earlier than some did before, so nothing wraps in the gaps between them.
Settlement Studio follows your theme. It and its recipe guide stayed dark whatever theme you chose. They now open in Parchment Light when you have picked it, and their panels, fields and notes use the theme's own colours. The zoom and pan controls over the settlement map stay dark, like every other instrument that sits on a map.
The printed page stays paper. The Read view's running head, captions and rules are part of the page, not the interface, so they keep the page's ink in both themes. This is now a stated rule rather than an accident.
Parchment Light is now photographed by the browser tests (the Library, Create, Settings, the map, the Atlas, the Manuscript and Scene Studio), so it can no longer drift unnoticed while only the dark theme is checked.
The Library opens on the world you were working in. With saved worlds, the first thing on the page is Continue: that world's map, large, its name, when it was last saved and one Resume. It is the world you last had open, or else the one most recently saved. The last world's map still drifts faintly behind it, and the CartoVox mark sits beside its name at a smaller size. The full welcome, with the large mark and the four ways in, is kept for an empty library.
Start something new is a compact row below your worlds. Generate, Import a map, Draw and Deep Time are all still there, one line each, after the shelf rather than in front of it.
Every world card is the same size, and says who the world is first: its name, whether it is saved and when. The seed, continent count and land area are the card's small print. Each card's Open is quiet now, so Resume is the one brass button on the page.
Trash folds away but still says what it holds ("2 recoverable · 1.4 GB", or "Nothing to recover"). It opens by itself on the project you just moved there, and whenever it has a warning about its size. Its rows say what kind of project each was ("Saved world", "Interrupted generation") instead of a status key.
Header actions wrap instead of running off the screen. On a phone the Library's three actions measured 468 px across a 390 px screen and pushed Import project backup out of sight. They now wrap beneath the title in the same order, with their labels showing, at 320 px, 390 px and with text at 125%.
The same rule everywhere else. The section tabs (Map, Atlas, Travel, Campaign, Scenes; Chronicle, Compendium, Manuscript) wrap onto a second line on the narrowest screens and the bar grows to hold them; Create's "Show shortlist filters", the Planet card's buttons, the Manuscript's More menu and zoom Reset, and the map dock's Fullscreen all stay on screen at 320 px and at 125% text.
Advanced settings explains itself to authors. The note at its head said the values "override the Python defaults" and are "not written back to config.py". It now says what they do: they shape the next world you generate, and only that one.
Settings sections read in sentence case: "Identity and grid", "Presentation of the sphere", "Tectonics — plates", instead of "Identity And Grid" and "Presentation OF The Sphere".
Text fields, searches and lists use 16px text on phone-width screens, so a phone browser no longer zooms the whole page in when one takes focus. Desktop sizes are unchanged.
Scenes and Settlement Studio look like the rest of the app. Now that they open inside the window, they use its titles (Newsreader, at the shell's sizes; Settlement Studio's title was Archivo at 28px), its fields and its two button sizes: page actions at the same height as the rest of the app, in-panel controls one step smaller, and Compact density reaches both pages. The 44px buttons are kept for phone widths, where every control and field grows to a 44px touch target and text entry to 16px. Sections, settings groups and folds are a line of text with a chevron rather than a box each; the scene editor's tool rail, inspector and task panels are set apart by tone instead of outlines.
One brass button per screen in Scenes. The scene library's brass action is Create scene; Back to the world is a quiet link-button now, and New settlement from your world is a plain button beside the imports. In an open scene the brass action is Preview composition, the drawing of the finished scene; the fog, hotspot, parent, link, child scene, isometric export and Render Studio buttons that were brass are ordinary buttons there.
Settlement Studio shows its path. Under the title, a quiet line reads Place, Review inherited conditions, Generate plan, Edit, Save as scene, and marks where you are. The brass button follows it: Generate settlement until there is a plan, Save as new scene while you edit it, Open saved scene once it is saved. The recipe, file, report, compatibility and import folds sit after the path under their own heading, and where the water and roads came from (the saved world or a street-level design assumption) is still said in words on the fold.
The World map's controls say what they are for. The two buttons over the map are now World overview (the world's identity, checks and what it means) and Map layers (which generated map is shown). The dock's View menu is Map appearance, and Edit map is Sculpt terrain, the name the Sculptor already had. In the Tools menu, Render is Edit artwork. At 1200px and narrower the dock shortens these to Appearance and Sculpt, so the scale key keeps its colour bar.
Tools are grouped by task. The Tools menu reads Inspect, Geography, Simulation and Artwork, instead of three groups named by consequence. Its tiles are shorter and drawn without frames, so the open menu covers less of the map.
Every tool says what it changes. A line under each tool's header says whether it changes the saved world (Sculpt terrain, with how many changes are pending), changes the current drawing (Render Studio, with whether the drawing is saved), or is a temporary view that changes nothing (the inspector, the labs, Weather, Tectonics, the Advisor, Landmarks, Deposits, the regional lens and Measure).
Pin a tool to compare. One tool panel is open at a time, as before. Pin on a panel's header keeps it open: the next tool opens beside it instead of replacing it. Closing the pinned panel lets go. Pinning is for windows wider than 900px.
The planet folds away on laptops. At 1280px wide and narrower, the Planet card starts folded to its header, so the map has the room. The arrow on the header opens it, and CartoVox remembers how you left it. Wider windows show it open, as before.
Sculpt terrain is in one place. It was a button on the map's dock and a second tile in the Tools menu. Now it is only on the map's toolbar, and the Tools menu holds the views and Edit artwork.
The Tools menu reads in two columns. Inspect runs down the first column. Geography, Simulation and Artwork are stacked in the second, so no group is split across a half-filled row.
Focus and Fullscreen are one button. Focus, at the World map's bottom right, puts the panels, map key and planet away and takes the map fullscreen. Exit focus, Esc or the browser's own exit brings back both, with the panels as you left them. Focus is no longer remembered between sessions, because a browser only allows fullscreen after a click. Other maps keep their own Fullscreen button.
Map appearance is one tidy column. The look's long description is gone. Map look, Shallows, Projection and Detail use selects of the same width, lined up under each other. Planet joins the map aids, which are now a two-column grid whose icons line up with everything else. Borders and places folds away at the bottom of the menu and says how many are shown, so its boxes are there when you want them.
Explanations are on hover. The sentence under a control now waits behind the small i beside its label from the first visit, instead of standing until you had used the control. Costs, what is saved and what cannot be undone still stand. Settings › Explanations › Always show brings the sentences back.
Write says less and trusts you more. The Manuscript panels, the Compendium's sections and the Chronicle no longer open with paragraphs explaining bold, find and replace, trash, page setup or what a section is for. What stays standing is what you need to decide: counts, why a button is unavailable, and what a step will change in your saved work, each in a line. Your books, lore and history are untouched.
CartoVox's own ideas explain themselves on hover. Initialize from Lore, the continuity checks, the lexicon's roots, Rename everything and the import review each carry one short sentence behind the small "i" or on the button, instead of a block of text above it.
Create says less and trusts you more. The route cards, the world brief, the candidate search, Deep Time, Compare and the setup guide lost the sentences that explained what their own buttons do: the empty search now says only that results are kept, the search line says only what it costs ("about 45 s"), and each candidate card no longer repeats the same two notes about your brief. What stays standing is what drives a decision: the time and disk a build costs, why something cannot run, and what you are about to save.
What is unique to CartoVox moved to hover. The Tectonic Director's limits, the Deep Time drawing tools, taste influence, the planet and land shapes and the purpose choices each keep one short sentence behind their "i" mark or tooltip instead of a paragraph on the sheet. Nothing about how worlds are generated changed.
The app says less. App settings, the Library, the welcome, the tool tour, Layout, the command palette, the manual and the empty workspaces lost the sentences that explained what every option was. What a setting costs, what it keeps and what cannot be undone still stand in one short line, and the few things only CartoVox does are explained when you hover them. The sheet number in each workspace's corner ("SHEET 2 · BRIEF") is gone too.
Continue shows your world, not empty space. Beside the map you are resuming, the Library now gives the world's own thesis and its figures (seed, land, continents and islands, highest peak, when it was made), with Scenes, Map gallery and Import project backup beside them, so Resume is the one brass thing that asks. The faded map behind it is gone, and a world card's delete button is red. An empty Library is unchanged.
The Export menu fits on one line per format. Every row is now a short name beside its format badge ("Vector map", "Hexcrawl or hex map", "Map tiles"), with no subtitle underneath and no list of programs; the badge already says SVG, PDF, PNG or ZIP. The menu no longer wraps or scrolls at 1280×720. The vector bundle still tells you what is inside it on hover. Every format is where it was.
Exports, Travel, Campaign, Scenes and Settlement Studio say less. The setup dialogs open on their choices instead of a paragraph, journeys show their numbers without captions that repeat the heading, and the Campaign, Scenes and Settlement Studio pages lose their opening explanations. What is left is a cost, a consequence or a reason something is disabled. The few ideas you cannot guess (what a trade unit is, why a river is or is not drawn in a settlement, how a token clears fog) are on hover.
Import and Draw are a picture and one button each. The two ways to begin from your own geography lost their paragraphs: an existing map leads with a crop of a CartoVox illustrated plate and a single "Choose a map file", the blank canvas with the same world sketched in ink and "Open the blank canvas". The accepted formats are on the button's hover; combining several files and resuming a tracing are quiet links underneath. The import review, its questions and the blank canvas say less too: each answer is its label, with what it sets on hover.
Advanced settings explain only what you could not guess. A setting whose name already says it (radius, tilt, the graticule) no longer carries an explanation at all; the rest have one short line on hover, at most fifteen words. The full definition, what a change reaches and the setting's ID are still one click away under its cost badge, and search still reads all of it. No setting, default or value changed.
The map's tools stop explaining themselves. The Tools menu, the Sculptor, Render Studio, the labs and the 3D terrain view lose the paragraphs that described what their own buttons do. What stands is state: what is pending, what is saved, what a choice costs. Anything particular to CartoVox stays one hover away, in a sentence. Hide controls in the Sculptor now leaves a single header row, and Show controls brings the rest back.
Map layers is tidier. The view's name heads the drawer, then one row with the count, Original and a Download menu; how the map was made is one quiet line that opens; the categories sit in an even two-column grid, and a count shows only when some views are missing. Every view, download and provenance file is where it was.
The World map's toolbar floats, and you can move it or put it away. Map appearance, Sculpt terrain, Export and Tools are one bar, centred at the bottom of the map. Drag its small grip to put it anywhere on the map (arrow keys nudge it; double-click the grip to send it home), or hide it with the switch beside Focus. Its menus open towards the room, down from a bar near the top. Where it sits and whether it shows are remembered; resetting your preferences puts it back. On a phone it stays docked along the bottom, as before.
The resolution reads at the top right. The drawing and simulation resolution is a quiet line in the empty band at the top right, above the planet; its "?" explains it on hover. The bottom-left corner keeps the scale, distance and coordinates.
No text is cut off any more. Every button, menu item, tab, option and label now shows all of its words at 1440, 1280 and phone widths, in both themes: a name too long for its place wraps onto a second line, or the words were shortened, instead of trailing off into "…". The command palette, the map readout, Map layers on a phone, the App settings sections on a phone, the Draw canvas toolbar, the Compendium's Realms row, the atlas plate list and the Manuscript's book selector were the places it happened. Nothing was hidden to get there.
Labels no longer end in "…". "Choose a map file", "Vector map", "Bound atlas", "Hexcrawl or hex map", "Printable terrain or globe", "Run history", "Open Layout", "Combine several files" and the rest open the same dialogs as before; the dots read as words that had been cut off. Only things that are happening right now ("Saving…", "Reading the world's borders…") still trail off.

Safety

The usage report sends only what the agreement lists. A Delta session start also sent the computer's free memory and the version of Python inside CartoVox, neither of which the agreement names (section 6.3(a)). It no longer sends either; installed memory, which the agreement does name, stays.
The usage report now names the map views and styles you use. It counted features only by the names some buttons happened to carry, so most of the app went unrecorded: the map views, reading desks, Create choices, realm actions and most settings. Now about 85% of the app's controls are counted by CartoVox's own name for them, along with which projection, style, preset or export format you choose (section 6.3(b)). It still never sends anything of yours: no world, book, place or lore names, no coordinates, nothing you type. Choices that list your own worlds, books or places count only that you used them.
Another website cannot drive CartoVox. A web page open in your browser could ask the local CartoVox server to write exports and previews into your worlds. CartoVox now refuses any request that another site makes.
Run from source, CartoVox listens only to this computer. studio.py --host now accepts only a loopback address. Another interface served no one, since every request must name this computer, but a client on the network could forge that and reach the session. A world route that may name a folder the library does not list yet is held inside the library like every other.
Files inside a world cannot act as CartoVox. An HTML or SVG file that arrived in a shared project used to open as a live page with CartoVox's own rights. World files now open sandboxed, and web pages download instead of opening.
Names are always escaped. Twenty-six panels (the gazetteer, the lexicon, the lore editor, campaigns, the chronicle, map keys and others) kept a fallback text escaper that escaped nothing. It only ran when a panel was opened without the app's own escaper, but there a name containing < or & would have been read as markup. Every one of them escapes now.
The globe holds still when you reduce motion. It no longer starts turning when Reduce motion is on, in CartoVox or in your system settings; the spin button still turns it.

Fixes

"You have not tried N of these" fits a phone. At phone width the line ran past the screen's edge and opening its list slid the whole World view sideways. It now sits at the right edge and its list opens on screen.
Continue works straight after a search. A fresh search could leave Continue greyed out with "The brief changed since this search" although nothing had been edited: the brief was compared in two different states.
Generate and Import/Draw light up the one you are on. Coming back to Generate from Import/Draw left Import/Draw lit. The chosen one now carries a rule under it, and hovering the other no longer looks the same as choosing it.
Empty lists and loading lines say so again. With explanations on hover, a line such as "No sessions yet." or "Reading the tongues…" that was a list's only content folded behind an i, and the list looked blank. A note that is all its container holds now always stands.
A world opens as itself. Opening a world from the Library, Resume, the world switcher or the command palette reopened whatever tool was last open, usually the Sculptor with its settlements and landmarks marked, and the map layer the last world was left on, even after a restart. A world you open now shows its own home map, with no tool panel, no overlay and nothing switched on. Moving between the World tabs while you work still keeps what you had open.
Seasonal rainfall says what it is. The Seasonal precipitation map and the water-security map listed their source as rainfall in millimetres a year, but the saved seasonal values are relative rainfall, which the maps scale by each place's annual rain before drawing. The pictures were right; the stated units were not. They now say relative rainfall.
The Climate Lab reads seasonal rainfall in millimetres. Its year scrubber showed rainfall as bare relative numbers ("0.00 rel to 28.06 rel"). It now reads Rainfall, yearly rate, in millimetres like the annual rainfall map: each season is scaled so the four average to that place's annual rain, as the Köppen map reads them. A town with 933 mm a year reads about 16, 1,777, 163 and 1,777 mm through the year instead of 0.04, 4.7, 0.43 and 4.7, and a point's four seasons average to the figure the cell inspector shows. Imperial units show inches.
The atlas colophon stays inside its margins. On A4 its paragraph about colour ran to the right edge of the page, and every line sat a fixed, wide step below the last however long it was. Its paragraphs now break at the page's margins and sit at an even line spacing on every paper size.

Upgrading a world's resolution keeps your names on their places. A Sketch or Quick world rebuilt at a finer tier came out turned by anything from a few degrees to half the globe, and every settlement you had renamed gave its name to whatever town now held its number, often thousands of kilometres away. The finer world now keeps the frame of the one it came from, and each name you gave follows its place when the place is still there; a minor realm keeps its number, and what you wrote for it, while its seat does. A name whose place moved too far, and a renamed capital that is no longer a capital, waits in the name review for you to place instead of landing somewhere wrong. Measured on three Sketch worlds upgraded to Quick: 70 of 111 renamed settlements kept their names on the same ground, the rest went to the review, and none were lost. Upgrades are also now recorded in the build history.

A build's progress is read whole. The progress panel's status check shared parts of the running job with the build still writing them, so it could in principle catch them half-written. No tester has reported it; the check now reads a complete copy.
The growing-window map read the rainfall wrong. The agricultural calendar scored each season's rain as millimetres a year, but the saved seasonal samples are the climate solver's relative rainfall -- a few units, not hundreds of millimetres -- so almost every season looked too dry to grow in: on one saved world, 426 of 431 settlements showed no viable window at all. Each sample is now scaled so the season-weighted mean is the place's annual rainfall, as the Koppen classification reads the same fields. The same world now shows 218 settlements that can grow all year and 62 with one season or none. The map redraws itself the next time it is opened.
Painted stamps export at the size the canvas shows. A tree, town or peak that fell on exactly half a pixel was drawn a pixel smaller in the export than on the Render Studio canvas, and a scattered piece of your own artwork could come out a pixel shorter. Both now round the same way, so what you paint is what you export.

Coming back from Scenes keeps your map. Scenes is its own page, so "Back to the world" reloaded the app, and the world reopened on Physical relief whatever map you had left it showing. Each world now remembers the map it was left on for as long as the window is open, so a return from Scenes, Settlement Studio or any other page lands where you were.
Library cards show the same picture every time. A card drew the world's relief in whatever projection and style you last tried in the map viewer, so it changed as you explored. Every card, the world switcher and the home desk now show the biomes map stretched edge to edge, without its title band. A book cover you chose still wins.
Scenes and Settlement Studio open inside the app. Both were separate pages that replaced the whole app, so every trip to a scene and back reloaded your world from nothing. They now open in the Scenes tab, under the usual header, with the world still open behind them: Back to the world is instant and lands on the map you left, and the scene you were editing is still open when you come back. Links from a place, a Compendium page, a regional map or a map hotspot open the right scene in the same tab; the command palette, App settings and theme changes work from inside them. The players' view still opens in its own window, so it can go on the players' screen.
Choosing an era in the era form works when reading by year. It read the year back and snapped to the era it had just left; it now reads the year the chosen era begins.
A draft's event kind survives the year scale. Every redraw refilled the kind list and reset an unsaved event to the first kind.
The Chronicle's status line says "1 era · 1 mapped or recorded event" rather than "1 eras · 1 mapped or recorded events".
The "i" beside a fold's title opens the fold. With explanations on hover, a click that landed on the small mark in a section header (Custom art library, for one) did nothing; it now opens and closes the section like the rest of the header.
Nothing hides what a view is telling you. "Your books use none of the names this world has changed", the loading line and any error in Old names in your books now stand instead of folding behind a hover mark.
On a phone-sized window, Use this coastline is in view again. The confirmation bar of the Import/Draw review holds to the foot of the screen instead of sitting at the bottom of the whole review.
The layer tree holds still while you drag. The line under the tree that says where a row will land no longer moves the tree under the pointer, so a row dropped into a group lands in it.