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:

If you enjoy Nortantis, please consider supporting us.

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.

Map Examples:

Land of Sisbury.jpg
The Land of Usiris.png
Land of Laham.jpg
Land of Eurgh.png
Land of Ravit.jpg
The Land of Durtella.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.

Bonus art pack example

Art Packs

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.

To share or sell art packs, I recommend using cartographyassets.com. It has a “Software Specific” category for Nortantis.

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).

  • Nortantis generates random background textures from images using 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 light and dark look and feels are from FlatLaf.

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

Contact:

If you 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.

For questions and help, you can also contact me using this form, or post on the reddit community.

Support Nortantis

I created Nortantis to make maps for the books my wife and I are writing. If you like clean fantasy with a touch of romance, please consider buying our book. Or if you’d rather help by reviewing it as an ARC reader, you can get a free copy here.

If you’d prefer to donate directly, you can do so here.