Heya all, some of you might remember me from the month or so I was active here last summer. I was toying around with programs like Fractal Terrains 3 and Campaign Cartographer 3 because I wanted to recreate a world map from a story of mine with these programs. Well, I never really did that because recreating my entire (quite complex) world map with either of those programs would have been hell. Luckily for me, within the last few weeks I realized that recent changes in my world had rendered the world map I had hand drawn years ago obsolete. So I made a new one using FT3, and it came out not horrible! So yay.
One thing before I get into it: obviously I've written a lot here, probably (a lot) more than I strictly needed to, so sorry about that. It's not really necessary to read any of it if you don't want to, I mainly just want people's thoughts on my map so far, whatever those may be. I tend to get carried away when talking about my world heheh.
I'm posting two versions of my map - one showing altitudes and the other climates - in the hopes of getting some constructive criticism on them. My main concern here is not appearance/style but clarity and realism. Is this map realistic from the standpoint of physical geography? Note that I am trying to make a habitable "garden world" that is also as exotic and different from Earth as possible, so judging its level of realism can be a challenge, even for people who actually know this subject. But I put a good deal of thought and research into its features, so it should be, again, not horrible. Also, obviously this map is devoid of most traditional features of maps, like names for geographical features, political boundaries, and cities. I also have CC3 and that will be the next thing I try with this map, but I wanted to get some feedback before I progress to that next step. The planet is called "Salvumar," by the way, from the Latin words "salvum mare," meaning "safe sea." It's ironic, because the seas are very much not safe.
I couldn't figure out a way to put labels on the map in FT3, but I did label each continent in both maps with letters in my photo editor. The letters correspond to the first letter in the name of each continent. Thus the continents are named:
K --> the Northern Kingdoms (northern most continent)
I --> Iunhra/Illius (name changes depending on who you ask and when you ask them) (large north-south stretching continent)
M --> Makia (thin east-west stretching continent)
S --> Nik Shixha (southeastern most continent)
U --> Urga'rok (southwestern most continent)
Salvumar is a planet with about 85% of its surface covered in water. It has (more or less) a single "supercluster" of continents which take up about half the surface area of the planet (that's including the seas between them). The planet itself is several times the mass and volume of Earth, so the continents are much larger than they look. As far as I can tell, the largest continent is the Northern Kingdoms, which is about the same size as Africa. The smallest continent is Urga'rok, which is about half the size of Australia. The main feature of the supercluster is a "ring" of continents comprising of Iunhra/Illius, Makia, Nik Shixha, and a large archipelago connecting Nik Shixha to Iunhra/Illius. This continental ring contains the majority of the most important nations through Salvumar's relevant history. The Northern Kingdoms generally (meaning through most of history) features a multitude of smaller, transient nations and Urga'rok is the home of a "less civilized" race, so both continents are less influential on the world stage than the continents in the main ring. Right now I'm thinking of calling the continental ring something like "Circa Vita" or "Circ Civi," from the Latin words meaning "Circle of Life/Civilization." Not completely sure about either of those, though.
My altitude map is the blue and purple one, because reasons. So the primary concern with this map is mountain placement. My idea for the world at this time is that all the continents on the planet were recently (in the geological time frame) grouped together in a single supercontinent, similar to Pangaea. They are now in the process of breaking apart and drifting away from each other. The bullet points below discuss my reasoning for each mountain range on the planet and how realistic I think the mountain placement is. If anyone disagrees with my reasoning I would love to hear your thoughts.
The small mountainous continent to the southwest of the continental supercluster is barreling away from the other continents at a particularly rapid pace, and thus is forcing a good deal of the oceanic plates in its path underneath it, which in turn creates the mountains that dominate its surface. I'm pretty sure this reasoning works, but I specifically want this continent to have the highest mountains on the planet, and I don't know if this justification is sufficient to make the mountains that high.
For the southeastern continent with lots of elevated terrain, I actually don't want mountains but instead a large, high, flat plateau that takes up the majority of the continent's surface. Really the only reason I want this is because the race that lives on this continent probably would not be able to handle the extremely high surface temperatures of Salvumar as well as the other races, so I want to make this continent cooler than the other continents, and the easiest way I know of to do that is to raise the elevation of the surface. I'm justifying this geography by saying that the continental crust was raised 100 million years ago or so by a large mantle plume, similar to how the central plateau of South Africa formed. I don't know how high such a mantle plume would be able to raise the crust, however, and right now the "plateau" (it's not really flat at all right now; FT3 is very finicky) ranges from 5000-6000 meters above sea level, which is a lot higher than the central plateau of South Africa.
The large north-south stretching continent has a thin, sharply defined mountain range that cuts across it. This mountain range I'm saying is similar to the Ural Mountains in Russia, which also cut across their continent and are surrounded by low-lying land. This mountain range, like the Urals, was formed when two continents collided hundreds of millions of years ago, forming the current continent. This justification should work pretty well, I think.
And finally, we have the (half-)ring of mountains stretching over three continents at the northern end of the supercluster. These mountains all come from the same source: an oceanic plate that has forced itself between the northern most continent and the rest of the supercluster, pushing the northern continent away and creating large amounts of tectonic stress at the fault lines between it and the surrounding continents, which in turn raises mountains on the continental sides of those fault lines, especially for the northern continent which bears the brunt of the force from the incoming oceanic plate. I know of no comparable phenomenon on Earth, so I don't know how realistic this scenario is.
Okay, I lied. One more small mountain range, which is actually kinda part of the mountains on the northern most continent mentioned in the bullet point above. On that continent there is an almost semi-circular mountain range northeast of the aforementioned mountains, which together nearly enclose a circular-ish region of elevated land. This is where this world gets exotic. I want this region of the continent to have a lot of tectonic and volcanic activity, so much so as to make the area nearly uninhabitable. So those mountains were probably raised by earthquakes and volcanoes. I'm not sure how realistic this scenario is. Salvumar has a lot more tectonic and volcanic activity in general than Earth does, so it should be possible. One thought I had was that so much oceanic plate has been forced under the continent that it has "riled up" the mantle underneath the continent and created that region of tectonic instability. But again, I don't really know how that would actually play out.
The only places where I've intentionally altered Salvumar's climate are the three regions where I added deserts; everything else comes from FT3's climate model. Salvumar's climate is actually the thing that I'm least sure of, however, because Salvumar is incredibly hot, with an average surface temperature of 55 deg Celcius (130 deg Fahrenheit), and FT3 says that precipitation is incredibly high at basically every point on Salvumar's surface, which I'm pretty sure has to be wrong. One of the big questions I have right now is to what extent Salvumar has winters (because of its incredibly high surface temperature; it's axial tilt is 29 deg, so no problem there), because that apparently will have a drastic affect on Salvumar's climate(s). So with those caveats, Salvumar has the following climates, corresponding to colors on the climate map as indicated:
Light Green: Tropical Deciduous Forest
Green: Temperate Forest
Dark Green: Tropical Evergreen Forest
Orange: Tropical Shrublands
Yellow: Desert
The northern and southern deserts I'm at least somewhat confident in; they are located about 30 deg north and south of the equator, respectively, just as deserts on Earth tend to be. But again, because Salvumar is so different from Earth, I'm not sure this reasoning holds. The desert at the west end of Makia is only 10-20 deg south of the equator, though, so I don't really have any justification for it; I put a desert there purely for story purposes.
I do have one question to ask: does anyone know a way to get rid of individual rivers, either in FT3 or in CC3, without getting rid of them all? When I ran FT3's river tool, it made (I think) way too many rivers in desert areas, even when I made them deserts and then ran the river tool. I'd like to at least get rid of the rivers that spring up spontaneously in the middle of a desert.
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