Mercator is honestly one of my favorites. Of course, it doesn't go with Schley at all, but since you are thinking different map levels here and not mixing them in the same map, I don't think that matters. I imagine my different maps and map levels being made by different cartographers, and don't have an issue at all with them being different styles.

But there are so many pretty styles out there, and most of them works fine as world maps, it is usually more about limiting detail level when you map rather then a specific style needed for world maps.

No. While Cosmographer allows you do draw star systems, it is a manual process. It has no concept of things like orbits and calculating positions or the effect of bodies on each other.

This is due to the particular fills you have picked. Unfortunately, most templates contain some truly ancient fill options which doesn't work very well with modern CC3+. These are the leaves, tiles, stone and woodgrain fills in the list. Avoid these. I am unsure which style your map was made in, but if you have Dungeon designer 3 (DD3) or Symbol Set 4 (SS4) I recommend starting a map in one of those styles as they contain proper bitmap fills you can use with the room and corridor commands. If not, you should also have access to the Annual John Roberts dungeon style which also have nice fills.

You'll normally also want to avoid those vector (line) based fills.

Yea, fills in CC3+ are always drawn without rotation regardless of the angle of the room. You need to use the shaded polygon command on them to rotate the fill

This is again down to your choice of fill. This command only works with bitmap filled entities. If you use one of the proper bitmap fills from the styles I mentioned above, it should work fine.

For the Dracula dossier, I am guessing those geomorph floors weren't intended to be there. Ralf repurposed an older set of symbol catalogs, as they work fine with that particular style, but I guess he forgot the geomorph catalog. The reason it doesn't work is that the fill style used for the floors in the symbols doesn't exist in the actual Dracula dossier template.

Yea, I think the first option for each product should have gotten you the right installers, but generally, what you should be looking for is if there are separate download links for the CC3 and the CC3+ version, in which case it is important you get the CC3+ one, the installers for CC3 will not install properly into CC3+.

And yea, getting the monthly content installer is good, it contains extra free stuff.

Now, make sure to install the base product, CC3+ first, all the others (except FT3) requires it.

Now, as for products installing things other than in program data, this is optional. Many of these add-ons allow people NOT owning CC3+ to install them just for the artwork, and in that case, it will install that artwork into documents. There should be a checkbox to just turn off installing that extra copy altogether during the installation. Just turn it off, and it will just install the standard copy for use with CC3+ in the ProgramData folder.

You talk about floorplans here. Did you create that using the floorplan tool from a city map? Did you perhaps pick a floorplan template for a style you don't own?

It depends what you are going for. To create a top-down overview, any city style should suffice, you'll probably be mostly using the house tool to create your own shapes rather than using finished building symbols.

If you're looking to map the interior, dungeon styles will allow you to do that. I think you're probably be best off with a regular dungeon style, the Castles add-on will probably not give you too much for a magic scool, other than perhaps some castle drawing techniques, but in general, you'll probably enjoy a modern bitmap based artwork dungeon style more.

If you are after the perspective views, then Castles may help you a bit, but it is probably better to start out with Perspectives 3 instead. But a perspective view of such a building is going to be a complex task, so not a good starting point for an inexperienced user.

Not for lines. Polygons gets a hollow middle whenever the line width is greater than 0, but lines will be solid all the way, unless you use the "hollow" fill style (You're not, since your rivers are using a bitmap fill) OR you have an Edge, fade inner effect on the rivers, where the inner opacity is set to be lower than the outer one.

Looking at your drawing, you do have an edge fade inner which is way wider than your rivers which is also the partial cause of your rivers being very difficult to see. I didn't notice that immediately when I looked at the map earlier because I worked with effects off to see it without the glow. You can try changing the width of this effect to something like 0.2 and see if that works for you.

That's generally a good approach. The most important for people reading your story is to identify the places they read about on the map. Then you can expand on it later with more names if you write more stories set in that location.

Try this workaround:

Also note that both CONTOURSM and TRACED are commands that does this automatically, none of them require tracing by hand. You probably do want to use TRACED (after applying the fix from above)

Thanks @Wyvern . It is now in the atlas.