New World Map - Drawing Rivers - Criticism?

[silverishwind]

Hi there! I'm quite new to worldbuilding, but I love high fantasy and geography!
https://imgur.com/a/QDOQp#WgUGWUm
Here's a link to a few different pictures of my map. I'm now working on making the rivers. Note - there's a change in the mountains when I start making the rivers. I just chose to remove one line of mountains that looked weird. Anyway, yeah. Just look for some criticism on how I could improve my rivers. Doesn't look like I'm making HUGE major mistakes, but yeah. Should I be making them longer? Thanks!

[Hai-Etlik]

Try looking at some real river systems at a similar scale to what your map is intended to represent.

Rivers don't all start in mountains. They start all over the place; anywhere there's precipitation there's the potential for rivers starting. Think more about the mouth of the river, and then look at what might be the watershed for that end point. Then try to spread the river system out to cover that area, including some branches that start in the interior of the watershed.

Controlling how dense the start points of rivers are lets you show how much precipitation there is. Lots of rivers starting indicates wet areas while areas where rivers may flow through, but none start, are dry areas. Take a look at the Nile, Indus, or Colorado (Few tributaries in their lower stretches which are all dry areas) or the middle section of the Niger and compare them to the Amazon, Mekong, or Congo which are all in very wet areas.

[Pixie]

Your tectonics are fundamentally flawed. Nothing wrong with the continent shape and you can place mountain ranges wherever you want, but those tectonics don't make sense, so I would delete/skip that phase.

As for rivers, like Hai-Etlik said, we'd need a little bit of extra information. Scale and climates or, alternatively, a placement of this continent on a global map, just so we could imagine, roughly, where it rains a lot and where it doesn't rain, where ice sheets are expectable and where dust-blown deserts are in order.

Lastly, try to keep in mind that elevation isn't just high mountain ranges and super flat plains. Have a look at this map for the Congo basin:

(source: http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.ed...ongo-River.png)
The Congo river, clearly, doesn't flow in a straight line from the mountain range to the sea. Spread some "hills" around, even if on a temporary layer to delete later, and have your rivers flow around them.

[Hai-Etlik]

Your tectonics are fundamentally flawed. Nothing wrong with the continent shape and you can place mountain ranges wherever you want, but those tectonics don't make sense, so I would delete/skip that phase.

Yes, I didn't really look at your tectonic map but it is really hard to get right. You need to think in terms of rotation on the surface of a sphere instead of straight line motion on the flat plane of a map, and in terms of relative motion of plates. You also need to understand how the motion itself affects the shapes of the plates. If you are just trying to justify a preselected geography, don't bother. Tectonics is for generating that geography in the first place and even then, if you aren't doing it on a sphere, it's best to just use a few rules of thumb like mountains tending to be borders of blocks of land rather than spines down the middle of continents (although a "spine" can make more sense for an island)

[Mapsburgh]

The thing that stands out to me about your rivers is that they are too consistent -- you have a line of evenly spaced headwaters, and they all flow directly toward the nearest ocean, combining with their neighbors at regular intervals. Natural rivers have curves and bends in response to the underlying topography, and don't look just like their neighbors.