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, if you want to build Nortantis yourself, the source code is available here.

Map Examples:

Land of Sisbury.jpg
lava.png
Land of Laham.jpg
Land of Eurgh.png
Land of Ravit.jpg
Land of Hen.jpg

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.

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.

  • Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.

Contact:

If you have questions or find a bug, I recommend creating an issue on GitHub. If you need to send me a nort file as part of investigating an issue, put it in a zip file first so GitHub will allow you to attach it to the issue. You can also contact me using this form.