It took me some experimenting to make it work but this is sort of how I do it: It's basically going "bottom-up": I have a file with the land shape and paint the sea. When that is done i save it as a flat bitmap and load it as smart-object in my next file. I then build on top of that and save that again as a bitmap, etc. During the work process I use lower-res bitmaps in the smart-objects, but for the final build I replace the smart objects with the actual PS files, so I get a good final resolution. This final build takes around 15 minutes to completely load and render all the labels. As for a tutorial, I'm afraid there is no real one but there is a thread with some explanation on how I did this. Hmm, I hope this makes sense... As for the geography, the map layout was provided to me as a pre-production sketch. They have a forum with info and questions on the world (like size, geography, etc.) so if you drop a note there, I bet they'll provide anwsers to your questions. cheers, DJ