You can pick several different house styles and have a random mix of them. Most of the presets are mixed. Click the Street Settings button and add another 3 different house types to your mix. The road on the map was populated by a single swipe of the Street tool using the 4 style mix you can see in the dialog box.

This is good for getting the basic fill of a city, and yes they are a bit the same even though I now have a nice mix of 4 different colours, but the idea is that you use a range of Street settings (remember to save any you edit under a new name so you can get them back).

Once the filling in is done you can then pick and delete houses here and there and take the time to draw a slightly more special shape using the House tool. Remember that you can add dormer windows and extensions. I used those tools a lot in Orde.

Once that is all done you can then add more little details, like garden boundaries and trees. That's all Orde is - a load of random street stuff jiggled around using the move tool, and with special buildings and trees added. Plus the city wall and the canyon of course.

I often use the Street tool to fill everything out, and then pick buildings to delete and replace with something more special. I built Orde with the House tool, making the special buildings first. In fact I think the only buildings in that map which aren't made with the House tool are the large rectangular ones with courtyards in the middle, which were drawn as polygon roof pieces and then shaded.

This week Ralf will be presenting the Banners & Seals symbol pack from the Cartographer's Annual 2021. As part of the process he will also be explaining catalogue settings and how to create them, so it is well worth coming along to see how it is done.

You can visit Youtube and book a reminder by clicking the link above.

Thanks for the announcement, Wyvern :)

Hi Driechel :)

The only way to really make it work is to put the ocean above the land, and put all the water on the same sheet, whether it is river or ocean. If that river is going to be a major feature of your map it might be worth drawing it as an extension of the sea, rather than an additional line with a width. That will help even more.

As for sheet effects, a light shore can be created by having a paler blue glow set to inner on the water sheet. Deeper water can be added a couple of different ways, but I'll not get too far ahead of where you are just yet.

Here is a small section of a map I'm working on now that shows what I mean. The water is above the land, even though the sheet effects are designed to make it look like the land is above the water. You can see how drawing the rivers as part of the ocean in city maps can make a lot of difference.