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Getting Started
This page walks through a full mapping session from a blank canvas to an exported scene, and explains why things go in this order. It doesn't re describe what each control does — for that, see Map Canvas, Creating and Managing Maps, Map Making Tools, Module Settings, Style Library and Map Management Tools. Open this page the first few times you build a map; once the order of operations feels natural, you probably won't need it again.
Before opening the "Create New Map" tool, have a rough idea of what you want: a single continent, an archipelago, a specific coastline shape you already have in mind, or "I'll know it when I see it." That decision points you at a Generation Engine:
- Know roughly what shape you want, but happy to let the engine texture it? Guided — draw the landmass, let the engine handle coastlines, hills and mountains.
- Want to browse random landmasses until one looks right, or plan to extract high-resolution regional maps later? Standard.
- Want a realistic, large-scale world with proper mountain ranges and continents, and don't need regional map extraction? Advanced (Tectonic).
- Want to hand-paint everything yourself from a blank slate? Flat.
See Creating and Managing Maps for the full comparison. This choice is the hardest one to change your mind about later — every other tool works the same regardless of engine, so it's the one decision worth pausing on.
When using Standard or Flat engines, it's tempting to start at 4000×4000 straight away, but larger maps take longer to (re)calculate every time the terrain engine has to run — and it has to run after almost every structural edit. Start around 1600×1200, do your terrain, river and fault line work at that size, then generate a high-resolution regional map from the entire area once you're happy with the shape (see Creating and Managing Maps and the FAQ performance tips). You keep every edit; you just don't wait for them at full resolution while you're still experimenting.
For Advanced (Tectonic) or Guided, prototype at a lower resolution. However, before adding any features, regenerate the map at a higher resolution using the same seed and terrain values. These modes do not offer the ability to create higher-resolution regional maps, so one you've found the map you like, you will have to work at the correct resolution.
The tools don't force you into an order, but doing them in this sequence saves rework, because each layer builds on the one before it:
- Terrain — sculpt the base topography first. Everything else (biomes, rivers, where you'd even want a settlement) reads the terrain.
- Biomes — biomes are calculated from terrain, latitude, temperature and moisture, so they'll look wrong if you paint them before the terrain is settled.
- Terrain Features — rivers spawn based on moisture and elevation, and fault lines physically deform terrain. Doing this after terrain/biomes means fewer surprise reroutes; doing it before infrastructure means your roads and settlements can react to where the rivers actually ended up.
- Infrastructure — place points of interest and routes now that the physical geography (coastline, rivers, mountains) is fixed. Routes can snap to points of interest, so place your settlements before drawing the roads between them.
- Regions — draw political/economic boundaries once you know where the infrastructure and geography actually sit.
- Labels — most labels are already auto-created by the steps above; this is where you rename them properly, position them so they do not clash with other features, and add labels that doesn't have a feature of its own (sea names, mountain range names, etc).
- Cartography — decorations (scale bar, border, compass rose) go on last, since they sit on top of everything and aren't affected by anything underneath.
Why last-to-first matters more than it looks: terrain edits reflow rivers, and river edits can nudge biomes at the margins. Vector features (infrastructure, regions, labels, cartography) don't feed back into terrain/biome/hydrology calculations, so once you've placed them they'll stay where you put them — but if you place them before finishing terrain and hydrology, you'll likely need to reposition some by hand afterwards.
You don't have to treat this as a rigid pipeline — going back to touch up terrain after adding a few rivers is normal. It's a starting order, not a one-way door.
There's no autosave. Use Quick Save (see Map Management Tools) after each major stage above, not just at the end. Undo/redo (see Map Canvas) covers your current session's edit history, but a save is what survives closing Foundry.
Every feature (and every layer) can be set to Player, GM, or Hidden visibility. It's easier to set this correctly as you place each point of interest, route, region or label than to audit everything right before export — especially since the layer and feature visibility toggles together decide what actually appears in a PNG or Scene export (see Map Canvas and Map Management Tools). If you're building a map you intend to use both as a GM reference and a player-facing map, decide that split early.
- Want a flat image to drop into a VTT scene manually, print, or share outside Foundry? Export to PNG.
- Want a ready-to-play Foundry Scene with linked journals and map pins already set up? Export to Scene.
Both are covered in Map Management Tools. Re-exporting a Scene later (after further edits) is non-destructive to anything you've already placed on that scene in Foundry — walls, lighting, tokens are untouched.
Once your Standard or Flat world map is finished, you can crop any area of it and generate a matching high-resolution regional map — same terrain, biomes and features, just recalculated at finer detail (see Creating and Managing Maps). This is also the answer to "I want a bigger map but built it small for speed": generate the regional map from the whole original area at a higher target resolution instead of cropping down.
- Keep brush Detail/Roughness low while experimenting on the Standard engine; turn it up just before your final export (see Map Making Tools Terrain).
- Set up your Quick Styles (see Style Library) before placing lots of routes/regions/labels — it's much faster to assign a style while placing than to batch-fix colours afterwards, though Mass Edit Visual Properties has you covered if you do need to fix things in bulk.
- If a custom river you've drawn carves an unwanted canyon, or a procedural river keeps rerouting itself after a terrain edit, see the FAQ — both are expected behaviour with a documented workaround.
- Toggle the reference image off (bottom-right map controls, see Map Canvas) before an Export to PNG if you forgot the module already excludes it automatically — it's a good habit for checking your visible layers generally.