So, it looks like your lake is drawn on the LAKES sheet, but you want it to cut all the way down to the sea?

You have a couple of choices.

Option 1: Don't have your lake cut down to the sea. Instead, change it to a blue color, or the same fill as the sea, and let it sit on top of the other terrain.

Option 2: If you want it to cut through, you will need to:

1. Add the COLOR KEY effect to the LAKES sheet and move it to be the first effect.
2. Change the color of your drawn lake to be the magenta color (#6)
3. Make sure all of the other sheets between the lake and the sea also have the Color Key effect added as the first effect.
4. And then, copy that magenta lake to all of the other sheets.

If you want to copy it to all of the intervening terrain sheets, the easiest way is to hide all sheets, then unhide the LAKES sheet and everything between it and the SEA, and then use the Copy to All Visible Sheets option (found by right-clicking on the Copy icon) to simultaneously copy it on all of those terrain sheets.

Please let me know if this is unclear, and I can try to do more screencaptures.

Reinstalling seems to have done the trick. Still had to manually delete the lines that were already there, but the lines weren't reintroduced when I redrew more farms and forests. Thank you!

In fairness, it's an awfully long manual. It's great for reference, but I struggled when I tried to learn the software with just the manual. For me, the video tutorials were very helpful.

One of the things I struggled with, and this may be the same for you, was understanding how layers and sheets differ, and how layers differ from the other art design and desktop publishing software I was more experienced with.

In CC3, layers help with organizing similar things so that you can hide, reveal, or freeze them, but they have no impact on the order in which things are shown. You'll notice that the layers are all listed alphabetically because the order they appear in the list doesn't affect anything.

Sheets have the big impact here. The software renders things in order they appear on the list. In this screenshot, the BACKGROUND would render, then BACKGROUND HILL, then OUTSIDE SHADOW, etc.

This allows you to control in how your symbols and drawn polygons sort, so that your floor will always be below your furniture, for example.

The Move to Front command only affects things on the same sheet (regardless of layer). If you have two symbols on the SYMBOLS LOW sheet, then the Move to Front command could force that symbol to be on top of the other one. Both symbols, however, will be above any other symbols on the SYMBOLS FLAT sheet (because the SYMBOLS FLAT sheet would render first, and then the SYMBOLS LOW). And both symbols would be below the regular SYMBOLS sheet, because it will render after the SYMBOLS LOW sheet.

Screen captures are always helpful, but I hope this gets you on the right track.

May I adopt this little unnamed elven village marked in the red box on Virinress'Arl? (Quenten, since you did the parent map, please let me know if this is encroaching on your future plans.)

Here's an area map of the Eknapata Desert region on the northeast corner of the Gold Coast map. I decided to do it in the Scorching Sun annual. The mapping guide for the annual recommended Mike Schley Overland as a complementary style for additional symbols, so I used that for the pyramid at the city of Nekhmatunis, the ziggurat at the city of Khemtufu, and the half-buried statue and obelisk at the Sakherma Ruins. I also threw in a few of his camel-with-guide symbols to represent nomadic tribes, and a sandworm just for fun. There are a few more villages, too, and another monastery that I figured were too small to be on the parent map for the entire Gold Coast region. I also added a volcano, but figured that would be on the parent map. Since the parent map hasn't been submitted to the Atlas yet, I went back and added it to the parent map, too.

I'm enjoying the opportunity to try out different map styles with this project. I plan to design one city with Mike Schley's Mideastern symbols from SS5, and another with the Desert Oasis annual.

Made a few tweaks. I think some of the smaller mountains in the foreground were repeating, so I swapped out a few, including adding one with a mountain pass. That may be one route that adventurers could take to reach the dragon's lair. (Another possible entrance is a cave in a small hill in the jungle area that connects to a network of underground caverns.)

Also added a little crevasse separating the jungle from the swamp.

I'm ready to submit this intermediate map for the Kingdom of Enía, along the northern edge of the coast for the parent map above. This map will be the parent (or possibly grandparent) for a few villages I will be submitting to the contest.

Primary Style: Mike Schley Overland

Toggles: BORDERS/POLITICAL to show/hide political borders

Here is the FCW along with a PDF of the description:

Should I do a plain text file that strips out the accent marks? Here's the text of the description (with accent marks):

The elven kingdom of Enía is the northernmost coastal kingdom in the Gold Coast region of Dórian. The human Kingdoms of Vacuria and Travi lie to the south and east, respectively. Enía is significantly smaller in both population and geographic size than its neighboring kingdoms. The kingdom’s borders are marked by the Enía River along its southern border, and the Firessí River and edge of the Firessí Woods along its eastern border.

Enía is governed by a hereditary monarch who is advised by two political bodies: the Council of Adept Mages, and the People’s Assembly. The Council of Adepts consists of those archmages and adept mages able to cast the most powerful spells. The People’s Assembly includes a hundred citizens elected throughout the realm.

Major points of interest include:

Arynnor: The capital of Enía, called the “city of glass.” Here, elves pioneered glassblowing techniques both for ornamentation and practical purposes. This includes a technique to make glass nearly as strong as steel, which has allowed the elves to safely cover their towers with brightly colored glass domes.

Sather Academy: To the north of Arynnor, Sather Academy is an institution of higher learning with academic classes of all sorts, from history to astronomy, poetry to accounting, but it is most famous for two things: its Bardic Colleges, and its Arcane Academy for the formalized study of wizardry and arcane lore.

Lynelon: The coastal city on the northern bank of the Enía River, Lynelon is a bit smaller than the Vacurian city of the same name on the southern bank.

Firessí Woods: Much of the realm is covered by a mighty forest, the Firessí Woods. The woods are home to numerous tiny elven hamlets along with a few notable features. Towards the southern edges of the Firessí Forest lies an ancient henge of standing stones, the Firessí Temple, erected to honor the elven gods. It is the holiest place in all of Enía, and the seat of power for the Archdruid of Firessí, the most powerful religious figure in the kingdom. A small village, Yréas Kôltyn, provides a home for the elves who tend to the temple and provides accommodations for the temple’s many pilgrims. To the northwest of the temple lies the Tampuwari Ruins, the haunted ruins of a people so ancient, they disappeared long before the elves moved to the area. The ruins are best to be avoided. Farther to the north, Lathalas Glen is a town built up around a monastery of the same name.

Taenya Island: The small island is home to a few small villages and hamlets of wood elves Just to the north of the island among rocky reefs, Eilân Danaäd is a harbor village of sea elves with homes both above and below the waves.

Here is the saucer shuttle from below.

I named this shuttle The Osprey. It is of a class of saucer ships that I've named a Nimbus Class. These shuttles are assigned to either a space station or larger interstellar vessel. In this case, it is part of The Perception, a research ship from a class of ships that I am calling the Copernicus Class.

On the left side, the airlock hatch can be opened planetside to extend a ramp. The very center has a docking ring for connecting to The Perception or other vessels or space stations. The twelve glowing disks are meant to be some sort of magnetic propulsion thrusters (the side thrusters are more for steering and course correction, not liftoff or acceleration). They were made using one of the sun symbols that come with Cosmographer. And the six metal disks are meant to be places where retractable legs can extend when on planet.

The text labels on the right are for toggles in the FCW file. They are off the map border and normally don't print, but I wanted to show it to you. They are mostly on/off toggles, but the Tractor Beam is a little more complex, which I will get to. Here is the syntax for the thrusters, as demonstrated in Remy @Monsen's recent Village Battlemap tutorial. It toggles between hiding and unhiding the layer called "Symbols - Thrusters".

GOLAYER BACKGROUND
TOGL Symbols - Thrusters
NULL

As Remy's tutorial explains, the GOLAYER line is done to make sure you aren't on the layer you're trying to hide, because active layers cannot be hidden. And the NULL line is to make sure that toggling a layer is not your most recent command.

Here's the map with the center docking ring open:

The docking ring is actually two separate symbols, with the closed hatch symbol on top of the open hatch. The "Docking Ring" toggle hides or unhides the sheet that the closed hatch symbol is on, allowing the hatch to go back and forth between open and closed.

In addition to using the center hatch for docking with other vessels, a tractor beam can be activated to lift cargo or specimens into the shuttle (like cows or battered pickup trucks in the deserts of Nevada). Here is the tractor beam activated (it's one of the varicolor suns):

The toggling of the tractor beam was a little tricky. I suppose I could have made it just be on top of the hatch symbols, but I decided to make it as separate "on" and "off" options. Clicking "on" simultaneous hides the layer that both docking hatch symbols are on while unhiding the layer that the tractor beam is on. Here's the syntax for turning it on:

GOLAYER BACKGROUND
HIDE Docking Hatch
SHOW Tractor Beam
NULL

Clicking the "Off" link reverses this, hiding the tractor beam layer and showing the docking hatch layer.

On to the Habitat and Engineering decks!

I changed the two labels to near-white for settlements and near-black for geographical names. (Let me know if you think I should reverse that, with dark names for settlements and light ones for geography.) Playing with text-along-a-curve for some mountain ranges and rivers, and moved some to the side to make them easier to read. (For a few of them, I had to explode the text and ungroup temporarily to adjust the kerning.) Made some effects changes to the political borders but I need to redraw them to reflect the river changes. Oh, and I embiggened the compass and moved it. It also has an inner glow to make it stand out a little.

May not have more time today to work on this -- about to head out to a family function for the day. Hoping to finish it this weekend.

Still working on this. Text is slightly larger, and the glow is as well. Added more names, though I still have a few more rivers and settlements to do. Should I be naming the roads, too?

I am think about putting country names, settlement names, and geographic names each on a separate layer so that end users can toggle them on and off as desired. They're already on separate sheets, though, so maybe that's sufficient for toggling individually, and a single layer for all of them to toggle all names on/off simultaneously?