A world on one map

We started building the world itself: a generated atlas of a rugged main island split between two rival realms, a contested river valley between them, and lawless island chains around it where the best loot lies. Every town, road and dungeon is placed, drawn one pixel per step.

Felucca Online needs a world big enough to get lost in, and a reason for its people to fight over it. Before we build a single playable hill, we drew the whole world, Felucca, as one map: a plan that a generator lays out and paints as pixel art, where one pixel is one tile, the square a character stands on.

The atlas with the realms shown: Karrak in red to the north, Aelwyn in green to the south, the March in gold between them, and the lawless isles hatched in red around the main island

How big

The map is 16,384 tiles across. Running one tile every quarter of a second, crossing it edge to edge takes over an hour, longer once you go around mountains, lakes and rivers. Ultima Online's Britannia, for comparison, is 6,144 tiles wide.

Two realms that need each other

A great river, the Sunder, runs down a valley across the main island and splits it in two.

The Karrak Dominion holds the cold northern plateau: miners, smiths and stone castles. Its mountains hold the island's gold, gems and rare ores. Its pine makes poor bows, and its short summers make poor harvests.
The Aelwyn Concord holds the warm southern forests around the magic Elderwood. Its groves grow yew, heartwood and bloodwood, the best bow woods there are, and its fields feed it well. It has almost no metal beyond bog iron.

Each realm needs what the other has, and between them lies the March: the river valley both claim and neither holds. Its bridges have forts at both ends, its fields are the best farmland on the island, and the ruins of the old imperial capital, the largest dungeon in the world, sit on its river.

The isles: the richest land, and no law

Around the main island lie chains of islands. They have the deepest veins (valorite included), the rare woods of both realms, black pearls, and the most dungeons, packed closer and deadlier than anywhere on the main island. One chain is volcanic, and only its ash makes the black powder that siege kegs need. No realm rules the isles and no law protects anyone there.

A capital at one pixel per tile: walled streets and roofs, a castle, the river through the town and patchwork fields around it

Everything placed

The generator also lays out about 270 towns and villages, the roads between them, forts, about 170 dungeons and 2,700 smaller sites: ruins, shrines, standing stones, bandit camps, battlefields, shipwrecks and roadside inns. Every stretch of land has a danger level and an encounter table, so the March brings deserters and raiding parties while the Elderwood brings wisps and fey hunts. The provinces drawn on the map are meant to become fiefs for lords and their vassals.

What comes next

This is a plan, not a place you can walk yet. Next we review the shape and the politics and then build the playable map from the atlas: its ground, towns, roads and dungeon entrances. Names are working names, and the whole map changes with a new seed until we pick one. Tell us in the comments what you would fight over first.