Paint terrain, place landmarks, draw rivers and borders

In one line: paint terrain with five brushes, place and name landmarks, draw rivers and borders by hand, and understand why terrain can only be painted over, never erased.

Everything lives on the rail at the left of the canvas

The rail floats over the canvas, and its order is the order you actually work in.

1. Undo and Redo
2. Select — clicking, dragging, renaming and deleting all go through it
3. Terrain — opens the brush panel
4. River, Road, Border — three hand-drawn line tools
5. Elements — 37 place symbols plus text labels

A second cluster sits in the top-right corner: Regenerate, Clear Canvas, File.

Five brushes

Click Terrain and a panel opens with every brush there is:

Group	Brushes	What it does
Terrain	Water, Land, Mountains	Rewrites the base layer. A cell is exactly one of the three
Vegetation	Forest, Clear Vegetation	Sits on top of the base layer without touching it

Under them is the Brush Size slider, levels 1 to 6. While a terrain or vegetation brush is active, = makes it bigger and - makes it smaller, so your hand never leaves the canvas.

Hold the left button and drag to paint. You will see the affected cells tint as the brush passes; when you stop, "Generating world…" appears and the engine recomputes once, and that is when the ridges, coasts and shading show up. Several strokes in a row only trigger one recompute, at the pause, so paint the whole thing before you judge it.

Because vegetation is its own layer, a forested mountain is two passes: raise the ground with Mountains, then cover it with Forest.

You do not draw the coastline

There is no coastline tool because there does not need to be one. Paint Water and Land and the coast is simply where they meet. For an inland lake, paint Water in the middle of Land and it closes into a lake on its own.

Terrain has no eraser — you paint over it

Terrain and vegetation live in cells. They have no ids, they are not objects, so there is nothing to select and nothing to delete. To change them, paint a different value: Mountains back to Land, Land into Water. Clear Vegetation is the only eraser here, and it only lifts vegetation — the base layer underneath is untouched.

Landmarks: pick a symbol, click once

Open Elements and you get 37 symbols in eight groups: Settlements, Military, Faith & Mystery, Nature, Plants, Transport, At Sea, Monsters & Hazards. The search box at the top narrows them — type "port" and only the relevant ones stay.

Pick a symbol and click once on the canvas. It lands, the tool flips back to Select, and the thing you just placed is already selected with the floating bar beside it. Name it right then; you will not have to hunt for it again.

If it refuses to land, the terrain is wrong. Ship, Sea Monster, Shipwreck and Whirlpool only go on water, and on land you get "This element needs to be placed on water". Danger, Dragon and Slime go anywhere. Everything else is land-only, and dropped in the sea you get "This element needs to be placed on land".

Naming

Village, Town, Capital, Camp, Port, Inn, Mill and Sacred Tree arrive with a generated name already on them. Everything else starts nameless. Two ways to change a name: double-click the landmark, or select it and hit Rename on the floating bar.

The sea, mountain, region and river names and the map title work the same way — double-click to retype. They cannot be deleted, and dragging one pins its position for good.

Size and deletion

A selected landmark has corner handles; drag one to scale it. Three ways to delete: Delete on the floating bar, the Delete key, or right-click it with the Select tool.

Text labels sit at the bottom of the elements panel in Large, Medium and Small. A new one reads "New Text" until you double-click and type.

Rivers, roads, borders

All three line tools are freehand: press, drag, release, and the line exists. A stroke that is too short is treated as a stray click and nothing is created.

• A river is smoothed into a natural bend and it carves a valley into the terrain. That is why the map recomputes when you let go: the banks really do drop, and the river mouth opens into an estuary by itself.
• A road snaps its endpoints to nearby settlements and is then smoothed, so the last stretch reads as going into town.
• A border is smoothed too, but it keeps the corners you drew — useful for following a ridge or a river line.

Select a river or a border and drag its corner handle to make it wider. The generated roads between towns are on the map as well, and they shift whenever the terrain is recomputed.

Want desert, snowfields or bamboo? Ask the AI to paint it

The rail carries three terrains plus forest, and that narrowing is deliberate. The engine itself knows more: grassland, swamp, hills, plateau, desert, snow, and flowers, bamboo and deadwood. Today those are reachable through the AI's map tools — say "make the eastern slope of the North Hills a snowfield" and it comes back with a proposal, a review banner appears above the canvas, and nothing is written until you accept. It works in grid cells, not pixels.

Clear Canvas and Regenerate are not the same move

	Clear Canvas	Regenerate
Seed	Kept	A new one
Terrain	The whole map becomes water	Grown again from scratch
Your landmarks and lines	All cleared	All cleared
Undoable	Yes	No — and it wipes the undo history
Afterwards	Switches to the Land brush and opens the brush panel so you can start	Hands you a new world

Both ask for confirmation first.

Keyboard

Action	Keys
Undo / Redo	Ctrl／⌘ + Z / Ctrl／⌘ + Y
Back to Select	V
Brush bigger / smaller	= / -
Delete the selection	Delete
Close panels, drop the selection	Esc
Zoom the canvas	Mouse wheel

(None of these fire while your cursor is in a text field, so typing in the element search box and pressing undo will not roll back a brush stroke.)

Related

• Docs: What a world map file is
• Docs: Export the map, share it with readers, and what phones can do
• Docs: Reviewing the AI's edits
• Docs: Full keyboard shortcut list