When Bots Create Fantasy Maps...

The Twitter account @unchartedatlas creates automated, bot-generated fantasy maps on an hourly basis. The bot was created by Swansea University's Martin O'Leary using his knowledge as a glaciologist. Adding real physics into the bot's code, its virtual worlds are more coherent than many automated terrain generators. "I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different." There's a bunch of information on his website, along with the code itself, which you can use.

The Twitter account @unchartedatlas creates automated, bot-generated fantasy maps on an hourly basis. The bot was created by Swansea University's Martin O'Leary using his knowledge as a glaciologist. Adding real physics into the bot's code, its virtual worlds are more coherent than many automated terrain generators. "I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different." There's a bunch of information on his website, along with the code itself, which you can use.




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Von Ether

Legend
Compared to my old homemade maps and fake fantasy town names, I can't judge.

Though I'm trying to decide if that's fake Gaelic or fake Native American.
 








Lanefan

Victoria Rules
The landforms etc. look great; a much-needed aid for those poor at continent/region/area scale physical geography.

I'm not all that keen on whatever he's using for a random name generator, however - the results behave as though you stick in (or it generates on its own) a subset of the alphabet and it'll only use those letters...rather self-limiting.

Lan-"D&D is perhaps the only place in my life where having a degree in physical geography has in fact come in handy"-efan
 

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