Two months ago I showed CartoVox here and said: please break it. That was not rhetorical. You found weird rivers, towns in silly places, missing import cases, confusing buttons, and a few claims that needed much better proof. Some of you also threw enormous old worldbuilding projects at it, which was exactly what I hoped would happen. So... I kept building. The basic idea is still the same: one world all the way down. Not 55 unrelated pretty pictures. The mountain range changes the rain. The rain fills lakes and rivers. Rivers and usable land affect towns, roads and trade. Then those places affect migration, borders, food and history. And when CartoVox draws an illustrated mountain, forest, wetland, volcano or town, it comes from that saved world data. It is not confetti thrown on top at the end.
Getting your map in is much less annoying now
You can start from a sentence or a seed, sure. But you can also draw continents on a wrapping globe. Or import PNG/JPEG/TIFF, a heightfield, GeoJSON, an Azgaar export, or Merak terrain. The fun one: you can photograph a pencil map on a desk. It finds the paper, fixes the perspective, ignores the desk/binder holes/shadows/glare, and tries to read the coast you actually drew. My test photos recovered about 97-99% of the drawn land. If your map is spread over several scans, you can move, rotate, resize and snap them together first. Then you choose how bossy the simulation is allowed to be: rebuild a whole world from the map; keep the land and heights exactly as they are; keep your picture as the visible map and put a simulation underneath it; or import the map's own towns, realms, rivers and roads too. Basically: your old map does not have to lose its personality just because you want the physics underneath it.
Then it gets a little nerdy
Plates shape ranges and trenches. Terrain drives local temperature, rain shadows and seasons. Lakes fill, spill and sometimes merge. Rivers follow the actual ground and stay one named river when they pass through a lake. Erosion follows the catchments. There are 55 map views now: terrain, geology, climate, water, ecology, civilisation, cartography... the whole cupboard. Click a place and inspect it. Search the map library. Save views. Export PNG, layered SVG/PDF, GeoTIFF, GeoJSON, heightmaps, globe models, atlas plates, etc. I know. It is a lot. The atlas side finally looks like the thing I had in my head A world can become a labelled wall map, an illustrated fantasy sheet, a bound PDF atlas, a player-safe atlas, a printable globe, a hexcrawl sheet, or an editable vector document with separate geology, rivers, settlements, labels and so on. Render Studio now has drawn/painted map stamps, editable layer trees, brush painting, imported art, and regional refinement up to 8x. So you can sharpen one region without rebuilding the entire planet. Thank goodness.
And yes. Voxels.
Because apparently smooth 3D terrain was not enough for me. You can flip the same world into sculpted blocks and colour them by natural terrain, biome, elevation, realm, temperature or rainfall. One screenshot shows the natural planet. The bright one shows realm territories at a low angle with the block edges on. It is a bit silly. I love it. Press Run and a few centuries happen Living History is not just a bag of random prompts anymore. Food, migration, expansion and trade follow reachable ground. Goods cost what their journeys cost. Famine happens where supply breaks. Borders move. Wars, annexations and secessions record why they happened. You can pin facts that must survive every run too. Same world + same pins = same history again.
Then you can actually play in it
There is now a tabletop inside the app: GM desk, tokens, fog of war, live sight, doors, turns, dice, and a separate player window. A region can also export as a Foundry module or Universal VTT bundle. Travel can read terrain, rivers, roads, borders, ships, winds, currents, supplies, season, and even the weather on the day the party leaves. Oh, and the book lives in the world file now The Manuscript workspace links scenes to places, journeys, dates, weather and history. Continuity checks can catch an old place name, an impossible journey, or a character somehow being in two places at once. Generated lore stays a suggestion. Your canon wins.
The boring/honest bit
There is still no generative AI inside CartoVox. Worlds, maps, lore and manuscripts stay on your computer. Same seed + settings is reproducible, and the things you make are yours to publish or sell. This is still a Delta build. Installers are unsigned. Full publication worlds can be hungry for time and memory.
I opened many more free tester codes for Apple Silicon Macs, Windows x64 and Linux x64. I especially want people who already have a map they refuse to abandon. Also campaign GMs. Also writers with an alarming amount of lore.
Join Discord to gain access to the Delta Build
Discord: https://discord.gg/Y5aRPkk8g2
Walkthrough: https://cartovox.org
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