The Generator
The generator roughs in a whole world (land, coastlines, and terrain) so you have somewhere to start instead of a blank grid. You then paint over anything you'd like to change.
Rolling a Map
Click Generate Map. Infinihex builds an initial world you can immediately tune.
The Dials
The generator settings control the shape of the world:
- Land amount: how much of the map is land versus water.
- Clustering: low spreads land into scattered islands; high pulls it into one solid continent.
- Dimensions: the map's width and height.
- Seed: the random seed. Re-roll it for a completely different world, or keep it to refine the same one.
Temperature and polar caps have their own section below.
Climate: Temperature and Polar Caps
Two settings decide whether the map has a climate, and how strong it is. Together they control where warm and cold terrain ends up.
Temperature sets the climate model for the whole map:
- Random: no climate order. Terrain is placed without regard to latitude. This is the default, and it's the right choice for a map where you don't want a north/south temperature story.
- Bi-polar: cold at both poles, hot at the equator, the way Earth works.
- Mono-polar: a single gradient across the map, cold at one end and hot at the other.
Polar caps places a cap region at the cold extremes, and is only available when Temperature is set to Bi-polar or Mono-polar (Random has no cold axis to place them on). A cap is drawn with whatever swatch you mark as the polar-cap fill, so its look is entirely up to you; there is no built-in ice tile.
- Off: a soft temperature gradient only, with no distinct cap.
- Full caps: a distinct cap band at the poles, filled with the swatch you mark as the polar-cap fill.
When Temperature is Bi-polar or Mono-polar, each swatch's own temperature preference (below) starts to matter, because now the map has warm and cold regions for swatches to prefer. Under Random, a swatch's temperature preference has nothing to act on.
Swatches
A generator swatch is a piece of terrain the generator can place. Each one has:
- a base color or tile (and an optional overlay),
- a role that sets how it's placed (the sea or background, the ground everything sits on, mountain-like ranges, compact clusters, or scattered detail),
- a temperature preference: Any (no latitude preference), Cold (hugs the poles), Temperate (mid-latitudes), or Hot (hugs the equator). This biases where the swatch appears, and only has an effect when the map's Temperature is set to Bi-polar or Mono-polar (see above),
- a weight that sets how much of the available land it takes, relative to the others,
- an optional polar-cap fill: mark one swatch to fill the poles when Full caps is on.
You can add, edit, duplicate, and remove swatches, and save a set to reuse later.
Regenerating: Nothing Rolls Until You Say So
Changing a dial or a swatch does not immediately roll a new map. Instead the Regenerate Map button lights up to show there are pending changes, and you click it to roll the new version. This is deliberate. A stray edit, like blurring a dimension field, can't surprise you with a full re-roll, and a very large map can't be generated by accident.
- Regenerate Map: rolls a new map with your current settings. If the dimensions are very large, Infinihex warns you first, since a large map can be slow to build.
- Accept Map: commits the generated map to the canvas. The result is a normal map and is fully editable.
- Discard: throws the preview away and leaves generate mode.
Gotchas
- Polar caps with no polar swatch. If full polar caps are on but no swatch is marked as the polar-cap fill, the poles won't draw. Infinihex warns you. Check "Use as polar-cap fill" on one of your swatches.
- Unsaved swatches or settings. If you leave with unsaved changes to your swatch set, Infinihex asks before discarding them. Your map is unaffected, and can always be regenerated.