The world editor
The world editor turns a drawing into a 3D map. You draw on a flat map, the way you'd sketch on parchment, and the editor builds the land, mountains, rivers, towns and roads from it.
New here? The quickstart takes you from an empty sea to a world you can fly over in about ten minutes. The tools, generators and shortcuts pages list everything the editor can do, and the guides walk through the bigger jobs.
The editor at a glance
| Where | What's there |
|---|---|
| Top bar | The world's name and whether it's saved, the switch between editing in 2D and 3D, undo, redo and export, Show in 3D, Share and your account. |
| Left | The tools, grouped: land and water, hills and mountains, places and routes, map markings. A tool with more than one mode shows its modes under it while it's in use, along with its generators. |
| Middle | The map. A line along its bottom says what the tool in use does and which keys help. |
| Right | Three tabs: Selection (the settings of what's selected), Layers (every shape, in folders if you like) and World (its name, size, scale, snow, traffic, a map image to trace, and earlier versions). |
Everything is a shape
A world is a list of shapes drawn on the map: coastlines, zones (areas of forest, desert, snow and so on), rivers, mountain ranges, peaks, towns, roads, borders and labels. Each has its own settings in the Selection tab. The 3D map is built from these shapes, so changing one changes the 3D map too.
- The map draws coastlines first, then zones, then mountains and the rest, with towns and labels on top. Among shapes of one kind, the ones higher up the Layers list lie over the ones below, so a forest drawn over a desert covers it.
- Shapes can be selected, moved, reshaped by their points, copied and deleted.
- The ground's height is the one thing that isn't a shape: it's painted with the sculpting brushes (see Shape the ground).
Where your worlds are kept
Without an account, worlds are saved in your browser as you work. Sign in and new worlds are saved to your account instead, where you can open them on any device, share them with a link and go back to earlier versions. See Save, share and go back.