World of Nossin (critique appreciated)

[Riorlyne]

Hello wonderful mapmakers!

I have been a 'guest' lurker for a while now and only just joined in hopes of learning from the greats and trying some work of my own. The project I've started is a map for a fantasy world of my creation, currently named Nossin.

I find that I prefer to work on my worldbuilding or map-making from the top-down, but this is the first time I've begun all the way back at plate tectonics. Having read through several articles and tutorials (both on here and otherwise), I feel I have a rough grasp of how it's supposed to work but I'm very much new to this and any advice or critique would be welcome! My areas of expertise lie mainly in the fields of linguistics and character creation - far, far away from geology and the like.

I sketched out the rough shape of where I would like my continents to be and broke the world up into plates. The direction of the plates' rotation was influenced a lot by where I would eventually like to have mountain ranges.



Quick Key for plate boundaries: Blue = Convergent, Green = Divergent, Orange = Transform

The numbers represent the speed of the plates, on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being fastest). I used these because I was unsure of what happened when a plate moving north, for example, bordered a plate moving west. They're not colliding, they're not moving apart, they're not sliding against one another... so I just pretended the slower plate was stationary for this plate map and chose interactions based on the faster plate's movement.

I know the arrows in the polar regions look funky, but I'm pretty sure that when I transfer this equirectanglar image to a globe like on Google Earth, the polar plate arrows are all pointing the same direction. It's hard to tell with the distortion.

Please let me know what you think. Here's hoping I'm not completely off!

[LostCoastlines]

I have absolutely no idea about tectonics and that sort of stuff, so I might not be a great help on this subject, but it definitely looks plausible to me. Much more realistic than what the tectonics would look like in my world aha

[Riorlyne]

With the plates mapped out, I've been working on the coastlines of Nossin. I added lots of little islands (which I'm really fond of) where there are convergent plate boundaries and worked out where the mountain ranges might be, though they're not on this map.



I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem like Nossin has enough ocean. I looked at the ratio of land/water by changing the projection to equal-area and I think it's 1/2, which is similar to earth, so perhaps it's just the way I've positioned the landmasses.

Next step - working out altitudes so I can have a go at Pixie's climates tutorial. Not quite sure how to do that yet.

[Riorlyne]

Since my attempts at showing altitude aren't progressing very quickly so far, I took a detour and worked on surface ocean currents, as per Pixie's climate-tutorial-thing here. I'm not sure if I should name the currents (though naming them sounds like an even further detour) but I do like the way they show up very cleanly against the blue of the water.



As for altitudes, I do like the system of generating cloud noise for variation in the height of the terrain, but I think it works better at a regional level rather than a global one. To me, it makes all the landmasses look pretty similar except where I have a few mountains. Does anyone have tips and tricks that work for them to get the height map/altitudes of their world looking right?

[Diamond]

I'm the last guy to ask about the crunchy technical side of world creation, but I love the world layout you have here! Very unique and cool.

[damonjynx]

I agree with Diamond. Haven't a clue about what is "right" from a proper geological POV but look like you have the bones of a great map. If the rest of your work is as well done as this it will be a beauty.

[Azélor]

Arctic and Antarctica are specific to Earth's continents like Europe, America, Asia, Africa, Oceania.
It's not impossible to have the same names since they come from the Greek, it just look a bit odd to find them on a fantasy map in my opinion.

Anyway, the land/sea ratio is good since as you said, it's similar to Earth's.

The oceanic currents look fine too. I don't see any major problem.

[Riorlyne]

I have absolutely no idea about tectonics and that sort of stuff, so I might not be a great help on this subject, but it definitely looks plausible to me. Much more realistic than what the tectonics would look like in my world aha

Thanks, LostCoastlines!

I'm the last guy to ask about the crunchy technical side of world creation, but I love the world layout you have here! Very unique and cool.

Thank you! I wanted my landmasses to be fairly connected and still keep that 1/2 land-sea ratio that earth has without the enormous expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

I agree with Diamond. Haven't a clue about what is "right" from a proper geological POV but look like you have the bones of a great map. If the rest of your work is as well done as this it will be a beauty.

Thanks, I hope so. Mapping out the altitudes hasn't been quite as straightforward as the ocean currents!

Arctic and Antarctica are specific to Earth's continents like Europe, America, Asia, Africa, Oceania.
It's not impossible to have the same names since they come from the Greek, it just look a bit odd to find them on a fantasy map in my opinion.

Anyway, the land/sea ratio is good since as you said, it's similar to Earth's.

The oceanic currents look fine too. I don't see any major problem.

I agree with you, Azelor. The names don't really fit what I'm going for. Hopefully for now they're mainly placeholder names, since I haven't quite decided where to locate my main fantasy culture. The continent names at the moment literally mean "west land", "south land" and so forth, but I'd like to come up with more names, and more interesting ones, when I have a better idea of what the explorers might have found when they journeyed there.

Thank you for the feedback - it means a lot as I make this first major foray into mapping.

[kacey]

Looks good so far Riorlyne, it will be interesting to see how the climate turns out with those tall land masses.

[Riorlyne]

I have been following Arsheesh's Eriond tutorial to get a good height map, and finally managed to get rivers to work on Wilbur. I didn't follow the steps to the letter because I prefer to work in Paint.Net as much as possible, even though it isn't as versatile, since my computer freezes up too much with GIMP. But I did need GIMP for the airbrushing part.

I still need to fix some of the rivers since I Wilburfied the map in quarters to preserve detail without having Wilbur crash on me. If you look really closely at the map you can see rivers that start small, begin to grow, and then stop abruptly in the middle of a landmass when they reach the halfway point on the map.



But overall I'm really pleased with how it turned out!

Here it is converted into 8 (or 9?) shades of grey in preparation for working with climates. I see a lot of work in my future...