Provinces
Divides the map into the smallest unit a strategy game plays on. Everything in the Hierarchy panel is built on them.
Primary action — Generate provinces, in the pinned bar. The brush button beside it jumps to hand editing.
How it works
Provinces are seeded across the map and grow until they meet, in two independent populations — land and sea — so an ocean is not chopped into the same fine mesh as a continent.
Seeding density is modulated twice: once per elevation stratum, again per biome. That is how you get finely cut mountains and coarse plains out of a single pass.
Counts
Open by default.
| Read-out | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Land provinces | How many exist right now |
| Sea provinces | Likewise for water |
| Control | Range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Land target | 50 – 50,000 | Roughly how many land provinces to aim for |
| Sea target | 10 – 50,000 | Likewise for water |
These are targets, not guarantees. The actual count depends on how much land there is and on the density modifiers below.
800 land provinces generate in seconds and tell you whether the shape is right. Move to production numbers once you are happy.
Irregularity
Collapsed by default.
| Control | Range | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Land chaos | 0 – 10 | Irregularity of land boundaries |
| Sea chaos | 0 – 10 | Likewise for water |
At 0 the result is close to a clean Voronoi tessellation — provinces read as geometric cells. Raising it perturbs the boundaries into something that looks drawn rather than computed.
Cleanup
Collapsed by default. Requires provinces.
Generation leaves slivers: one-pixel provinces wedged between larger ones, mostly along coastlines.
| Control | Range |
|---|---|
| Minimum size in pixels | 1 – 100 |
Clean micro-provinces absorbs everything below that threshold into its neighbours and relinks the hierarchy afterwards, so no territory points at a province that has gone.
The notification reports how many were removed.
Density per stratum
Collapsed by default.
One row per elevation band, each showing in brackets how many provinces it holds.
| Control | Range | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Density | 0.01 – 3 | Seeding-density multiplier for that band |
Below 1, larger and sparser provinces. Above, smaller and denser.
Each row also carries a Regenerate button that re-runs generation for that band only, leaving the rest of the map alone. That is what makes tuning practical: adjust the mountains without waiting for the oceans.
The button reads Generate first and stays disabled until provinces exist.
Biome density
Collapsed by default.
A second multiplier, applied on top of the stratum density, one row per enabled biome.
| Control | Range |
|---|---|
| Modifier | 0.1 – 5 |
1.0 leaves the stratum density alone. Use it when the distinction you want is ecological rather than topographic — dense provinces through farmland, sparse through desert, though both sit in the same elevation band.
Hand editing
The brush button in the action bar takes you to Sculpt → Province editing, edit mode already on.
Remember to press Apply new province on the way out: painting changes the pixel map immediately, but adjacency and the hierarchy are only rebuilt on request.
What gets exported
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
provinces.png | Colour map, one distinct colour per province |
definition.csv | ID ↔ RGB, contiguous IDs from 1 |
adjacencies.csv | Which provinces share a border |
provinces.csv | Per-province data, via Export → Individual files |
IDs are renumbered contiguously from 1 at export time, so gaps left by deletion or hand editing never reach the engine.