This generator makes wilderness maps – outdoor locations with features that you can use in your game whether part of travel or as destinations in their own right.
This version of the wilderness map generator makes maps containing ruins (the shells of buildings, ideal for hiding monsters, treasure, or the entrance to dungeons below), bridges (which span rivers and act as natural chokepoints for encounters), roads (which can run alongside a river, in a forest, or through open countryside), and clearings (spaces within enclosing woodland or forest). Future updates will introduce more options.
The generator starts with the river if it is necessary, then places the primary feature, then trees, then finally extra features such as bushes, plants, rocks, and other pieces. These are all placed in layers on to the map.
Rivers use Catmull-Rom splines to make the curves which also allows bridges to cross the river at the correct angle.
Ruins are built in layers from a library of shapes. You may see anything from a small cottage to a whole village. Designs align to the grid making them ideal for use as tactical maps in a VTT.
Depending on the map type you may get a forest or a scattering of trees. A forest may only cover part of the map rather than all of it.
All of the details that appear on the map are decided at random, from whether a bush has flowers, to the number of rocks that are scattered across the map. The generator is designed to create practical and usable maps with just enough randomness to make them interesting.
All art used on the maps was drawn and coloured in-house.
The legacy Wilderness map creator used different art and worked very differently to this generator. This is a complete rewrite from scratch that is designed to incorporate features that the old version could not support such as curving rivers, bridges, and detailed ruin maps. The all new art style allows for greater flexibility in the future where there are plans for monochrome (printable) maps, and other settings such as desert and Underdark.
It is actually quicker than the legacy generator! The size of the image, even for 30 pixel square preview images, combined with the amount of assets and some complex maths, means that loading a map can take a moment. It's well worth it though!
No but you can reuse the maps produced by the generator under a Creative Commons license.