Here's my own world of Virana. The map below is my world map. This is my first campaign in it, and the areas with colored borders are the areas the players have been operating in. Well, parts of them anyway. I made the map in the Mercator style from the very first annual. It is one of my favorite styles to this day, especially when it comes to world maps like this. I deliberately kept the map clean and simple, and make more detailed maps of continents and regions as I need it.

More maps on my wiki. Many of the maps in the geography setting are zoomable and have clickable hotspots. The wiki is a bit spare when it come to information, but it has the basics.

Virana is more or less a classic fantasy setting. I keep it somewhat low-magic, because having magic play too much a role in everything never appealed much to me. I mean, it is still an AD&D campaign, with mages and priests and spells, but the everyday inhabitant rarely if ever see anything magical, and as far as magical items for the players go, I try to keep the amount low, but rather make each item meaningful instead of yet another +3 sword. Right now, the players are playing their first campaign in this world, and I am making this campaign about setting up a lot of the background story of the world.

To allow players to be part of the process of shaping the history of the world, I am actually playing a split campaign. The main campaign is set in the campaigns present time, which is the more or less typical AD&D fantasy medieval-inspired time. But, every so often, typically just as they are about to discover something important, I switch timeframes on them, and switch to the secondary campaign, where they play as dragons (under the Council of Wyrms rules), the first rulers of the world, and where their choices and outcome influences what that important discovery in present time is. Dragons are extinct in the present time, mythical beasts just existing in some forgotten lore, but in the past, they were the rulers and world-shakers.

We have now almost completed that first campaign, so I have a good grasp of the world history, so let me outline the basics.

1st Age - The Age of the Great Dragons

In this age, dragons rules the world. They operate in clans (as per the Council of Wyrms rules, but I use my own world and my own clans and my own politics, disregarding the setting from those rules) and the various metallic dragons live on Kambaria, the continent outlined in green on the map. During their time, they see the younger races, Dwarves and Elves rise from small barbaric tribes to a civilization in their own right, and serve as their protectors. The dragons to learn of a threat to the world, the evil dragon-god Tiamat is trying to enter the world and take it over. A lot of the characters time as dragons focused on learning about the threat, figuring out what the treat was all about, before finally learning about Tiamat and trying to stop her. However, the dragons have learned that stopping her permanently will probably not be possible, so their mission is two-fold, prevent her entry into the world at this point in time, as well as prepare the younger races for the fight they will face in the future.

2nd Age - The Age of the Great Races

By this time, the dragons are all dead, the threat from Tiamat has been prevented for now, and the younger races, the elves and dwarves build their great civilizations. It is a good and prosperous time, a time of great civilizations, art and crafts.

But trouble lures in the shadows. This time, Tiamat doesn't have the power of the worship of the evil dragons to rely on, but she is sneaky, planning for the long term. By subtly using her influence, she manages to trick people into believing in her and praying to her, in the guise of 5 benevolent gods. Once she has enough worshipers, she starts to twist the religion, and soon brutal religious wars breaks out, believers in the old true gods versus believers in the new fake gods (Tiamat's aliases). This starts to go well for Tiamat, but she had overseen one thing, with elves and dwarves being killed by the millions, and their civilization collapsing, an opening for a new race to rise to power opened up. The humans entered the scene, and with their short lifespans and rapid breeding, they quickly took over, and at this point, the false gods she had constructed was not very palatable for the humans. She was not defeated, but this setback temporarily halted her plans. However, the civilizations of the great races was now in ruins.

3rd Age - The Age of Humanity

Humans quickly rose to power, and as the years passed, the elven and dwarven civilizations were more or less forgotten, just existing as ruins for the intrepid explorers to discover. The elves and dwarves are now in a minority, and most of them live in the human cities, being outnumbered 100-to-1, generally finding some respect as master craftsmen.

Tiamat quickly realized that these humans was probably even more susceptible to religious manipulation than the older races. She didn't have enough power at this time to maintain more aliases, so she dropped the old ones that had worked against the dwarves and elves and started a new fake pantheon of 5 gods; Marcus the red (Sun; War), Avina the White (Winter, Peace), Khalim the Black (Death, Afterlife, Birth, Life), Kira the Blue (Skies, Seas), Varinda the Green (Spring, Plants, Growth). This new pantheon soon completely replaced the old one (This is partly because she takes a much more active hand, while the old gods, the real gods, take a much more passive approach and expect their followers to govern the world themselves. This was also why her ploy worked in the 2nd age).

The 3rd age is where my main campaign takes place, and it started out with several of the players being priests and paladins of Marcus. The campaign have been a journey towards learning the truth about the world, the gods, and finally learning about Tiamat and stopping her, using the tools they helped create/discover when playing as dragons in the first age. The players are getting close now, I expect the campaign will be over in a handful of sessions.

These tools use a raster image for their fill, which is just a 1-pixel image with either a black and white pixel. This image is set up with built-in transparency. You'll find these fills in the fills list as Solid 10, Solid 20, ... Solid 90 and Solid White 10, ... Solid White 90, where the number indicates the opacity (10 is almost fully transparent, 90 is almost fully opaque).

When overlaid other elements in the map, the pixels below are mixed with that fill according to the transparency level of the fill, thereby serving to lighten or darken whatever they overlay.

Sorry about your job. Hope this situation normalizes soon so people can get back to their jobs, or at least have an easier time finding a new one when not everyone is trying to hunt in the same limited pool.

At least the time isn't wasted when you spend it mapping :)

I can't make all potential useful topics sticky, the front page would just be a long list of stickies, which is not very user-friendly. Instead, it is listed in the resources category, which you can find directly from the left-hand navigation menu (Helpful resources and FAQ link)

These tools should work just as fine on Metric as Imperial overland maps.

I know they don't work as well in small-scale maps as large scale maps though. What is the size of those maps (the dimensions you entered in the new map wizard)?

Also, have you modified the symbol scale from the default value in the map?

In any case, if you are not happy with the distribution after running the tool, simply undo once, as this removes the trees but leaves behind the background polygon, then immediately run the Draw -> Symbols in Area command. This will bring up the dialog with the same setting the tool just used. Then modify the distances in the pattern section, hit ok, and pick the background poly you created with the tool. This will fill it with your new settings. If you still didn't quite like the result, undo once to remove the trees you just placed, and repeat. When you find a setting you like, you can save it (but I recommend NOT saving over the existing setting used by the tool, make your own)

There isn't any restore to default feature except reinstalling. When you change the symbol catalogs, you do changes to the actual catalog and configuration files, and these are persistent. There are no "default settings" for most things in CC3+, other than to replace the various files with clean versions.

If it is just the map settings in a single map that is messed up, causing it to load wrong catalogs and tools, you need to hit :CC2PRESETS: and set the map style back to the correct style for that map type, and if you have changed the OnOpenMacro map note, revert it back to the original settings by just copying the macro commands from a fresh map in the same style.

Note that if it is a single map, reinstalling will NOT help, as that won't change your map.

Just reinstalling the latest update won't help when restoring files to default, as that only replaces files contained in the update, i.e. things that have been updated since release, to restore original files you need to run the original installer (CC3+ base or add-on, depending on what you want to fix), and then re-run the latest update after doing that.

The best option is to keep the template lines in a clean file.

If you copy them over to another (temporary) map, you can just go wild in that one, deleting all the fill styles. You'd have to do it manually, but at least you don't need to consider which to keep and which to delete, just do them all. Then you can copy the lines from this clean file afterwards.

(You may want to save that temporary map every now and then, mass deleting fill styles sometimes causes CC3+ to crash)

Unless you need to spend a lot of that on a graphics card (which won't do anything for CC3+, but if you plan to use the computer for gaming, you may want one), the 13th generation Intel i5's are pretty good, both in actual performance, and value for money. If you can get an i5-13600K, I would go for it.

Recommend getting 16GB of RAM. CC3+ itself can't use more than 4, but your OS and other programs want their chunk of it, so 16 allows CC3+ to get it's fill. Probably best to go with DDR5 these days for the future, but if the budget constrains you, you are better off going for DDR4 ram instead of scaling back the CPU.

I also recommend having a NVMe system drive, and make sure it is big enough to install CC3+ on it. Personally, I recommend 512GB+. CC3+ do use RAM caching, so it won't be terrible on a slower drive, but getting the extra speed is good.

For the rest of the components, get what you can. You don't need a huge PSU (unless you are also getting a powerful graphics card)

Extra storage, more ram is always good.

These are smart symbols. In this case, this features is made to enable you to both align them correctly with the edge of the roof, and also allow you to place them as far in/out as you want. So therefore they take two clicks to place, after you click once to place them, you can move your mouse to adjust the position before clicking again to finish the placement.