See our New in 2025 page for a full list of what’s new, but here are some highlights:

General UI

• Left sidebar controls are on tabs instead of drawers. This lets each tab have individual scroll areas.  For example, scroll through all the Terrain/Feature choices without moving the other controls to toggle things like sizes, gm only, etc.
• Better layout of controls helps you to keep more related controls on screen at one time.  For example, a Feature’s label settings are all on one sub-tab of the Features tab.
• Buttons of Terrain and Features can be resized so you can better see them.  Labels appear at the bottom of each.

World/Region Generation

• Faster! Because it is much faster the preview area auto-updates to any setup changes for much larger maps (up to 1000×1000 hexes vs. 200×200 before).
• Check a box on the setup screen to auto generate coasts, rivers, empires/nations (with cities, towns, etc.), hex crawl locations, and roads.
• Better world generation algorithm that factors in wind patterns and different latitudes when placing vegetation and places deserts much more often at 30 degrees N & S latitudes.

City/Town/Village Generation

• More Street Layout options.

Dungeon/Battlemat Generation

• New, more configurable Dungeon Generator. See the bottom right area of the section of the Battlemat setup screen.  Enter a set of room names and sizes and how they should be connected into a text field.

New Functionality

• Terrain can now be on any map layer.
• ‘Dynamic’ Terrain.  Set up terrain to be blank/just a color, then have the system auto-magically add features (clusters of trees, hills, mountains) based on the terrain type.  Requires setting up a ‘dynamic terrain’ file and adding it via the Configure menu.
• Road Generator for world/region maps to auto-connect cities/towns/castles and optionally villages/forts/ruins.

With this small tool, you’re able to give it a road color, road style (whether you want straight lines, curved lines, or fractal-ish* lines). And the tool will connect all the cities, towns, and castles on your map with roads.

Even better, you can optionally set it to connect villages & forts or ruins as well. You can even run the generator twice: First for the larger sized settlements, then give the generator a different color (for trails) to connect the smaller settlements.

We’ll have a crowdfunding campaign starting soon for this new update. Please do follow the link and click the “Yes, count me in!” button to help us know who is interested.

In the sample below, all the labeled locations were placed by the empire/nation generator. We’ll have a crowdfunding campaign starting soon for this new update. Please do follow the link and click the “Yes, count me in!” button to help us know who is interested.

When drawing lines, in Worldographer you can create a curved line.  In the current version, the first point is green and the last is red and all the other points are cyan/blue. But now a curved line’s control points are yellow, while the others are blue except the first (green) and last (red).

These control points can be dragged to control how subtle or sharp is that section of  the curve. When drawing the line, after the first point, the next two points are controls, then the fourth overall point is another anchor point that the line will go through. This is followed by two more control points then another anchor point, and so on.

See the sample below–note the green and red points are under the city & town icons.  Plus another regular blue point is hiding under the fort icon.

When you add custom features & terrain to the software, you’ll get to pick a category for each.  You will also be able to create new categories. These categories are added as new options to the terrain & feature tabs’ filtering drop downs, so you’ll be able to easily pick & filter by them!

As you hover over the map a rectangle will appear showing you where the room will be… and when you click the room and all its furnishings will appear.  If it isn’t quite right, all the furnishings are features and the floor and walls are a shape–so you can easily tweak it using the controls on the Features and Shapes drawers.  Or undo it and try again!

Now next to the Feature’s Rotation spinner is a drop down with even more pre-set options.  Previously we tried to fit the preset options as buttons on one line.  We switched that to a drop-down to let have more choices: Since many Worldographer maps are hex-based, it made sense to have every 60-degrees as options in addition to the 45 degree options previously.  And once we did that, for completeness we should actually make it every 45 degrees.

See the screenshot:

The easiest was is:

1. Download the Java/Jar version of Worldographer from the Download page.
2. Rename the end of the file from .jar to .zip (the jar format is a zip with some extra details that don’t matter for this).
3. Unzip the zip.
4. Traverse the sub-directories to com/inkwellideas/ographer/model/
5. In there you’ll find folders (and more sub-folders) for terrain, features, textures, isometric column & row terrain, and isometric features.

Note that the regular/classic terrain backgrounds are transparent.  Worldographer adds the background which is configured via the “Configure Terrain” dialog that you can get to from Worldographer’s Configure menu.

1. Spend time detailing what’s essential for the beginning of your campaign.
2. Also add detail where you’re inspired/where you have cool/fun ideas.
3. Include your players’ interests as you build the world.
4. It is OK to not detail aspects of your world that aren’t essential & they can change. (Here the article gives a few good ideas on how/why aspects of the campaign changed.)

We also made a video version of the article which does go into more detail and use Worldographer (but only to a limited degree).

Recently someone in our Discord asked for help importing a Donjon fantasy world map into Worldographer.  While we don’t have a direct way to import their maps (nor do I think they provide the raw data) you can trace the map.  And it can be pretty easy.

Get the Map Image & Setup Worldographer

1. Go to the donjon Fantasy World Generator website, create a world map, and save the image file to your computer.
2. Open Worldographer, go to the File menu, and pick New World/Kingdom map.
3. In the large “World/Kingdom Setup Screen” dialog, set “Hexes Wide” to 200 and “Hexes High” to 86.  This seems to be the default size of a donjon world map. Map sure “Hex Orientation” is “Columns Line Up” and “Map Projection” is “Flat”.  On the right of the setup screen, pick “All One Terrain” and select “Blank” for the terrain type next to it. The other settings aren’t used.  Then click “Generate Map” on the bottom.

Set the Image as the “Underlay” to Trace

1. Now we’ll set the donjon map up to trace it. In Worldographer, go to “Trace Underlay” on the right side.  Use the file chooser (initially it says “Choose File” to select the image file you saved.  Set Opacity to 50% (so you can half see the map you’re making and half see the image you’re tracing. Set “Image Width” to 200 and “Image Height” to 86.6.  (It is 86.6 because of the staggered columns of a hex map, and the donjon image has a little sliver of extra image area on the bottom.)
2. At this point you should see the donjon map, and you can go to the “Terrain” drawer in Worldographer to place terrain; use the “Features” drawer to add icons for cities, castles and so on; use the “Shapes” drawer to draw rivers and refine coastlines; and use the “Labels” drawer to add map labels.  I often find myself switching back to the trace underlay drawer occasionally to adjust the Opacity–at times I want to better see the map I’m making, and at other times I want to better see the image I’m tracing.

Potential Time-saver!

But Wait!  We also have a “Convert Underlay” feature on our “Tools” menu.  It tries to pick a terrain for each hex based on the color in the image below that hex.  Because the donjon maps use a fairly flat color palette and forest, grassland, and desert (for example) are almost the same color–they are marked mostly by icons–it is best to simply convert the map to just farmland & sea/water. Then do the rest by hand.

So when you open “Convert Underlay”, pick the “Classic” icons from the first dialog, then de-select all the terrain from the next dialog that shows what terrain will be used except “Farmland” and “Water Sea”. This should get you close to a map that is farmland over any land in the image and sea over any water in the image.  Occasionally an icon or a label can throw off the algorithm and you’ll get water where it should be land or vice versa, but these are easy to fix.

And after that, you just use the Terrain, Features, Shapes, and Labels drawers to refine the map to match the image. As mentioned above, you can always go back to the Trace Underlay drawer to change the opacity if you’re having trouble seeing a detail in the map you’re making or the image you’re tracing.