Nortantis Fantasy Map Creator
Nortantis is a free, open source fantasy map generator and editor, created by an author for authors. With it, you can quickly generate a random world, then fine tune it to match your story’s world.
Downloads:
Mac OS installers are not currently supported. For any desktop OS that supports Java, you can build and run Nortantis from source. The source code and build instructions are here.
Beta version: Windows x64, Ubuntu x64
If you enjoy Nortantis, please consider donating.
Map Examples:
Features:
Generate random maps. Nortantis uses a simple tectonic plate simulation to create continents, islands, ocean, deserts, mountains, trees, regions, and cities, with text.
Adjustable coastline shading and 4 styles of ocean waves
Optional political region coloring
Borders: Frames with adjustable width. Randomly generated frayed edges and grunge.
Paper backgrounds randomly generated from texture images
Tools with brushes for ocean, lakes, land, rivers, political regions, mountains, hills, trees, sand dunes, and cities.
Add, remove, and edit text
Random name generator for person and place names
Export to PNG or JPEG
See our blog for the latest updates and features.
Free Bonus Art Pack
Art packs allow you to expand the available art in Nortantis, making your map more uniquely yours. To give art packs a try, download the free bonus art pack. See this post for instructions on how to install it.
For detailed steps on how to make your own art pack, see this post.
System Requirements:
At least 6 GB of RAM
The installers only support 64-bit (x64) Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu, although you can build any other version from source if it supports Java 17 or higher and Swing.
A faster CPU will give you a much better experience, since Nortantis does heavy image processing on the CPU.
Acknowledgments:
Nortantis is built on top of a polygon-based island generator by Red Blog games (here). It also uses several other open source libraries, one of the most important of which is JTransforms, which is used to do very fast image transformations.
Nortantis can generate random background images of arbitrary sizes based on a texture image. To do this, I used step 2 of the algorithm in section C from Random Phase Textures: Theory and Synthesis by Bruno Galerne et al. I used my own methods instead of steps 1 and 3.
The look and feel is from FlatLaf.
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