Malka's Multiversal Maproom

Fantasy cartography and vector calculus. Still under construction.

[multiversal-maproom]

In this week's video, we talk about iterating through many eras of history to layer on deep lore with interesting storytelling potential. I also can't make up my mind about how to pronounce "ruin". Sorry about that.

[multiversal-maproom]

Levelling up these procedurally generated cities by giving them some procedurally generated history - because fantasy maps need that feeling of an ancient world with a heavy weight of lore. They can now transition between inhabited and uninhabited but also ancient, holy, ruins, or cursed. Very psyched with how this turned out. Very worried that tumblr is going to absolutely scrungle this gif. In case it does, here's the world in the first era:

And here's the same world in the tenth era:

[multiversal-maproom]

Part of what's been fascinating about generating all of these maps procedurally has been ending up with these maps where things go wrong in a way that suggests an interesting story. Like, here's a map that generates multiple cursed cities but no holy cities. That wasn't the intended behaviour but it feels like an interesting situation from a fantasy worldbuilding perspective so I really can't be mad about it.

In case tumblr scrungles the gif, here's the world in the first era:

And here's how it looks in the seventh era of its history, with three cursed cities and no holy cities:

[multiversal-maproom]

Part of what's been fascinating about generating all of these maps procedurally has been ending up with these maps where things go wrong in a way that suggests an interesting story. Like, here's a map that generates multiple cursed cities but no holy cities. That wasn't the intended behaviour but it feels like an interesting situation from a fantasy worldbuilding perspective so I really can't be mad about it.

In case tumblr scrungles the gif, here's the world in the first era:

And here's how it looks in the seventh era of its history, with three cursed cities and no holy cities:

[multiversal-maproom]

Levelling up these procedurally generated cities by giving them some procedurally generated history - because fantasy maps need that feeling of an ancient world with a heavy weight of lore. They can now transition between inhabited and uninhabited but also ancient, holy, ruins, or cursed. Very psyched with how this turned out. Very worried that tumblr is going to absolutely scrungle this gif. In case it does, here's the world in the first era:

And here's the same world in the tenth era:

[multiversal-maproom]

Getting into the fun parts of procedurally generated mapmaking. This week's video is all about urban geography, hierarchies of places, and how to assign populations to cities.

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Enjoy a very rough draft of place name generation complete with some awful fantasy placeholder names.

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New video out! This one is all about placing settlements on the map. Some new algorithm design in here that I'm really excited about. Things are looking a lot more lively now that we can start seeing where the cities would go.

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Working on settlement placement and yeah this is the part of the whole fantasy mapmaking software that I've wanted to get to the whole time. The dots are potential settlement locations and the rings are the radius around them they need to control to be viable.

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I got OBS working again so here's another video! This one is about biomes, but it's really about clustering algorithms, and also the worldbuilding iceberg. Let me know what you think!

Also, this is the last video where I'll be talking about physical geography. From here on out its going to be cities and polities and trade routes for the next couple months at least. That's the part of the project I've been excited to get to this whole time.

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This week's video is all about adding lakes and rivers! Every possible error happened while recording this, so it took about half a dozen tries. I think the lakes and rivers are looking pretty solid, though.

[multiversal-maproom]

Got inland lakes working! Took a really brute-force approach of finding inland low points and filling them up from there until precipitation plus evaporation didn't provide enough water to go any deeper. This turned out to run way faster and be way more robust than anything more elegant I tried. I'm not sure yet how it's going to look with rivers, though, and I worry that the brute-force approach is going to create some nonphysical river structures? So the next step is going to be trying that out.

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In between videos I've been putting in some time fixing parts of the basic terrain map that had been bothering me (especially edge oceans and island generation) and it's still not perfect but this is way closer to what I'd originally envisioned.

[multiversal-maproom]

This week's video is all about using real-world data to inform climate generation for a fantasy world. I really wanted to post more about the process on Tumblr during the week, because the goal here is more documentation and giving myself a diary of the process, but putting this video together ended up being way too much of a heads-down scramble for any coherent posting about it along the way. This next week is going to be less real-world data and statistics than this, and I'm hoping that'll give me some time to post more conceptual plans.

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In this week's video, I get into the process of labelling features like mountains and islands. This is one of those steps that's going to make things way smoother further down the line for this project. Looking forward to hearing what people think of this!

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update on terrain generation and the corresponding magic flows generation

Yeah I think this is a good place to leave terrain generation for now while I work on other things.

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Got another video out about what I'm trying to do here! Spent an embarrassing amount of time over this past week trying to upload a gif of the slime mould growth I talk about in this video, but they've all been over Tumblr's gif size limit. Anyway, managed to get it all in the YouTube video.