Nortantis is a fantasy map generator originally created as an academic project. It uses a simple tectonic plate simulation to create islands and continents with trees, rivers, and mountains. Using image convolution and micro texture generation, it creates random paper textures on which it draws maps using randomly generated color schemes, and it uses words extracted from books to randomly create region, river, mountain, and city names. The result has the appearance of an old-fashioned, hand-drawn map. Nortantis also has an editor that can be used to change the placement of land/ocean, mountains, rivers, and cities, as well as update text.
This project is maintained by jeheydorn
Welcome to the Nortantis fantasy map generator! I recently coauthored a fantasy romance novel, Script Summoner, Into the Disorder, which includes a Nortantis map of the book's world. The map shows some of the generators more advanced features. You can see it here.
If you enjoy Nortantis and would like to support it, please consider purchasing our book. It's available here, or on most e-book platforms.
To run Nortantis you must have Java 10 or later installed. If you don't already have it installed, you can find it here. Make sure to choose 64-bit if you have a 64-bit computer (almost all computers are). With 32-bit Java you can't generate high resolution maps because it can't allocate enough memory.
Your computer must have at least 3 GB of RAM memory.
Get the latest version of Nortantis here.
The download above gives you a zip file containing an executable jar file and a folder of assets such as mountain and tree icons. The way to run Nortantis depends on your operating system:
Generating a map requires some intense computing, so it can take up to a minute depending on the speed of your computer and the size of the map you generate.
If you want to generate maps at higher resolutions than the default, you can modify 'run in Windows.bat' or 'run in Linux.bash' to increase the amount of memory Nortantis can use. Find the line that contains -XX:MaxRAMPercentage=50.0. The 50.0 is the percentage of RAM memory it can use. Change it to whatever limit you want up to 100.0. Make sure to include the .0 at the end because Java requires it. When Nortantis opens, it checks the amount of RAM allocated and adjusts the upper limit of the Resolution slider in the Background tab to the maximum size of map you can generate with that amount of RAM.
Nortantis is built on top of a polygon-based island generator by Red Blog games (here). It also uses several other open source libraries, one of the most important of which is JTransforms, which is used to do very fast image transformations.
Nortantis has the ability to generate random background images of arbitrary sizes based on a texture image. To do this, I used step 2 of the algorithm in section C from Random Phase Textures: Theory and Synthesis by Bruno Galerne et al. I used my own methods instead of steps 1 and 3.
