Hey there, Guild! Another update! And it's only been 3 days, not 4 months!!!
Link to the full album of this update.
First, we have volcanic hotspots! OH BOY! I am not happy with myself. I procrastinated (and forgot) about volcanoes and did this way, way too late into the project. Because of this, I had to add some new, smaller mountain chains of volcanoes, which caused me to have to re-do the land elevation in those areas, and completely re-do the contours I just finished a few days ago! Completely re-do them! The only bright side to it all is that the new contours have absolutely no feathering, and are much, much cleaner, not that it's easy to tell unless you have the ability to zoom in clearly on the image. Either way, here's the pictures:
Volcanic Hotspot locations.
Volcanic Hotspots + Plate Boundaries.
Volcanic Hotspots + Contours.
I would also like to mention this: These are major volcano locations, hotspots enough to cause mountain chains. These are not the locations of every volcano on the planet. For the same reason as rivers, I am not going to make the location of thousands of volcanoes on the map. Also, you may have noticed looking at past images, but all the mountain chains on my world seem newer, there are no very old mountain chains. That's because of the creation of the world. Even though I'm taking pains to make it very scientifically accurate, it's funny, because I don't want the creation of the world to be scientifically accurate. It was created by magic, not a big bang. The world itself is probably only like, a million or so years old? Maybe half? Not billions. Because of this, there are no 65-million-year-old dinosaur fossils. There are 500-million-year-old mountain chains like the Appalachians. There are no oil/petroleum deposits, because those take millions of years to form. Coal exists because it takes roughly 12,000-60,000 years to form, but it's rarer than it is in our world. But there are also plenty of fantasy/magical alternatives. But I digress, you're here for cool maps, not for worldbuilding information, probably.
Next up, I went back to Artifexian's tutorial on Ocean Currents, because it has some rough information on ocean resources like reefs and fishing hotspots. I'm not super interested in going into too much detail on ocean resources at this stage, but fishing hotspots will be important to do before I get to political maps. Reefs will just be a rough 'possible reef locations' because reefs will only really matter on local maps. Regardless, here they are:
Ocean Currents + Rough Warm & Cool Coastal Regions.
Ocean Currents + Rough Fishing Hotspot (cyan), Possible Reefs (yellow), and ENSO Event (blue) Locations.
Top Two Combined.
Next Goal: Inland Resource Placement. Oceanic resource placement was less important so I just did rough areas, mainly fishing hotspots. Reefs only really matter on local maps. But Inland Resource Placement, like major ore deposits and stuff, is more complicated and annoying. But once that is done, I'll FINALLY, FINALLY get started on the borders/political map!
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