Mapping your world

Start with the thing that matters most: the Atlas is a picture of your story and never an input to it. Nothing it draws is fed back into chapter writing. A map that quietly steered the prose would have started writing the book, which is not what a map is for.

Three ways in

• From your chapters — a small model reads accepted chapters for geography. You can leave it running on every accept, or press Read them for geography when it suits you.
• Describe your world — write it in plain sentences. “The Valerian Empire is vast and spans the south. Border Town sits on its northern border, Frosthaven a little inside.”
• Sketch the map — draw blobs for realms and seas, tap to drop cities, and name each one. Rough is the point.

All three produce the same kind of map, and there is one rule between them: what you say or draw always wins over what a chapter seemed to imply.

Drawing on top of a map you already have

Open the sketch canvas once a map exists and your current map appears faded underneath, lined up so a dot dropped on a city lands exactly on that city. Draw straight over it to add or correct things — the map is refined, never replaced. What the model reads is only what you drew, not the faded map under it.

Moving and renaming by hand

Press Edit places and the map becomes editable. Drag a place and it pins exactly where you dropped it — pinned means pinned, and no later chapter can move it back. Click a place to rename it; the old name is kept as an alias so extraction still recognises it in your prose.

Reading the map

Solid lines are confirmed by your canon. Dashed lines are the renderer's best guess from what it knows so far, and they firm up as chapters — or you — say more. Clicking a place opens its bible entry.

Taking it with you

Download SVG saves the map with its colours resolved for whichever theme you are in, so the file works anywhere — a wiki, a cover, the front of a paperback.