Build a world from the ground up.

1. 
   01

   Plates and mountains

   Moving tectonic plates form mountain ranges, volcanic arcs and broad plateaus. Where plates pull apart, rift valleys can fill with water.

2. 
   02

   Erosion

   Erosion reshapes the terrain. Slopes collapse, rivers carve valleys, and sediment builds floodplains, fans and deltas.

3. 
   03

   Seas and ice

   Continental shelves lie along the coasts. Glaciers shape cold mountains, and ice sheets leave behind basins and lakes.

4. 
   04

   Climate

   Seasons, ocean currents and terrain shape temperature and rainfall. Climate zones decide where forests, grasslands and deserts form.

5. 
   05

   Rivers and lakes

   Water flows downhill into rivers, lakes and seas. In dry inland basins, evaporation can shrink a lake and leave salt behind.

6. 
   06

   Realms and peoples

   Geography shapes borders and settlement. Realms follow rivers, coasts and watersheds, while peoples spread into familiar terrain and across political borders.

Five things the generator made on one stretch of coast. Each pin was placed by the generator itself, which found the place in the world's own data: where the plates meet, where the rain falls and where the rivers run.

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1. A coastal range An ocean plate sinks beneath the continent along this coast. Compression thickens and lifts the crust above it into a mountain range. On Earth: the Andes, above the Nazca plate.
2. A rain shadow Moist sea air cools and drops its rain as it climbs the range. Beyond the crest, far less rain falls. On Earth: Patagonia, east of the Andes.
3. A drowned valley A river cut this valley when the sea stood lower. The rising sea flooded it, leaving a long, narrow inlet. On Earth: Chesapeake Bay.
4. A delta The river drops the sediment it carries as it enters the sea. Over time this builds low new land out from the coast. On Earth: the Mississippi delta.
5. The continental shelf The continent continues beneath shallow water. At the shelf edge, usually 100 to 200 metres down, the sea floor steepens towards the deep ocean. On Earth: the North Sea.

Compare the same landscape in Atlas, Schoolroom and Natural.

Left Atlas Vellum Ink wash Nautical Midnight Schoolroom Verdant Scroll Pen and ink Mars Natural Colour-blind Right Atlas Vellum Ink wash Nautical Midnight Schoolroom Verdant Scroll Pen and ink Mars Natural Colour-blind

The temperature, ocean currents, winds and rainfall calculated for the same coastline.

More map styles and data views are in the generator.

Views

Fifteen views, including political borders, peoples, elevation, biomes, seasonal temperature and rainfall, tectonic plates, ocean currents and winds.

Styles

Twelve map styles, including Atlas, Vellum, Ink wash, Nautical, Pen and ink, Mars, Natural and a colour-blind-safe palette.

Themes

Seventeen interface themes, including light, dark, high contrast and colour-blind options.

Editing

Edit generated names and borders. Your changes are saved with the world.

Saves

Save a world and reopen the same file in the browser or the desktop app. In Chrome and Edge the browser's library can live in a folder on your computer, including one a sync service keeps in step.

Export

Export map images as PNG, WebP or JPEG, drawn at the world's true shape, or the data behind the map, one sample per cell: a 16-bit heightmap with its metre scale, and biome and realm index maps with their legends. Worlds up to 4096 × 4096 in the browser and on the desktop, whose map image is 8192 × 4096; phones are capped at 2048 × 2048.

Resolution

Choose the world's resolution. Higher settings add detail and need more memory; the browser starts at 512, the desktop app at 1024.

Acceleration

Optional graphics acceleration speeds up erosion and export rendering: WebGPU in the browser, OpenGL on the desktop.

Choose a download for Windows or Linux, or run Cartogenesis in the browser.

sudo curl -fsSL https://cartogenesis.com/apt/key.asc -o /etc/apt/keyrings/cartogenesis.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/cartogenesis.asc] https://cartogenesis.com/apt stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cartogenesis.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install cartogenesis

Planned releases and what each one brings. No dates: a release lands when its work is done.

3.0.0

The realism audit: the plates, the seas, the air and the water measured against Earth, and corrected where the measurement showed how.

3.1.0

Rainfall that holds up at larger map sizes, monsoon coasts, ice sheets with the shape and weight of ice, and softer woodland edges.

3.2.0Current

Erosion shaped by rain and vegetation, rivers that begin with the slope and the flow, and ice sheets without stripes down their flanks.

3.3

Waves that shape beaches, spits and barrier islands.

3.x

Saved worlds that keep opening after an update.

3.x

Wetter continental interiors, and cold currents that make coastal deserts.

3.x

Rivers that widen downstream, with meanders, braided reaches and marshes.

3.x

More control over how the map is drawn: relief exaggeration and the direction of the light, how small a lake is still shown, the strength of the climate colouring, line weight, and the graticule's spacing.

3.x

A topographic map style with contour lines.

3.x

Hydraulic erosion on the graphics card.

3.x

A choice of world width.

4.0

The world as a sphere: a globe to turn, and a choice of map projections for the whole-world map and for exports.

4.x

Faster generation on more desktop graphics cards.

4.x

Import a heightmap, from Wonderdraft or any greyscale image, as the terrain a world is generated from.

4.x

Choose the kind of world the generator starts from, and paint the land yourself: continents form where and as you draw them, coastlines stay where you put them subject to erosion, and the climate, rivers and everything else are still generated on top.

5.0

The atlas: named land and sea features, with labels arranged the way a printed map arranges them. Renaming places and moving labels already work and stay.

5.x

Estuaries, reefs and atolls.

6.0

Symbol packs placed on layers over the generated map.