Sometimes getting things to stand out more means just changing the colour or line thickness a little (or font size for text). An outer glow of some kind can help, but it can also make things look too misty, which I think it what's happening with some of the smaller text labels presently. I'm not sure that brown colouring on the labels is working well enough, and even the grey labels could be a little clearer.

The general textures seem fine, although the desert edge is maybe a bit too abrupt (very obvious where the green coloration alongside the river ends currently). That seems to be accentuated by the line of desert-edge dunes north of the river too. The more wavy edge of the dunes south of the river looks more natural to my eye at least.

I just don't know when to stop sometimes ?. Lifetime of designing RPG scenarios, I suspect, coupled with a desire to explore many avenues. All the time...

So, stand-by to repel borders, then? 😉

As for alignment issues and other minor mistakes, this is all very familiar territory! The worst ones are those you find only after you've submitted something, of course, usually after the map's been published somewhere...

I'm not sure such a sheet would have much utility for all mappers. I've never had any need for such, but then I plan or sketch all my maps out on paper roughly before-hand, and simply use a bitmap scan of the hand-drawn version as the template in CC3+. If I need construction lines while mapping, as does happen sometimes, it's very easy to simply draw and then delete them once I'm finished with them. If I think I might need them again later, I save a separate copy of the FCW map file for that purpose before deleting them.

If you do find these are important, it's easy enough to create a Sheet on its own Layer (you can only freeze Layers, not Sheets, in CC3+) for use in the way you've described. If you're likely to be doing a lot of similar maps the same way, you can always save that as a personal set-up for the future having done it once. That way you can set the name and placement in the Sheets list as best-suits yourself.

You'd have to hide the Sheet before exporting, but you'd likely be doing that anyway to check the map without the construction lines getting in the way prior to that stage.

I doubt it would ever be possible to set up any single Sheet in CC that would somehow automatically "know" what colour you might expect different kinds of drawing entity to have. There are just so many variables involved - all of which you can adjust to whatever you require in CC3+ now, as Jim noted. If you might regularly require specific items of particular line thicknesses, styles and colours, it would be very easy to keep a sample of each on your "Construction Sheet" (or another Sheet set aside for such samples) that you could readily access using the "Draw like..." or "Extract properties" commands.

Thanks very much Remy!

Slightly shocked on doing a quick tally-up today, while downloading the latest Atlas version, to discover this makes 140 maps of mine now in the Atlas! I'd forgotten quite a chunk of the earlier materials I'd done, looking at the list.

Still some way behind the great leaders of Quenten and JimP of course, but not doing too badly by comparison 😊

Plus, I think once the contributions from the recent mapping contest are added, this could take us over 850 maps in all!

@Royal Scribe I think it was who was asking on today's PF livestream about stain symbols on maps, like the ring left by a coffee cup.

I couldn't find anything like this in the two more recent Annuals I mentioned in the livechat, the Sticky-Note Dungeon one, CA214, or the Investigations Props & Handouts one, CA73. However, there are some stain options, like inkblots and multiple circular features, in CA06, Parchment Backgrounds. You can see some in action on this map in my Gallery.

There may be more elsewhere too, but I suspect this Parchement Backgrounds style was what I'd thought of.

For the crystal city concept, it may depend exactly how you envisage it. For a large-area map such as the Dungeon Worlds Annual will let you create, you could perhaps repurpose some of the standard CC3+ overland map symbols, like glaciers or icebergs (though you may have to get creative about hiding what are intended as water lines for the latter!), and making use of the varicolor options to recolour other features - and also with CD3 house symbols, for instance, if you wanted to map the city itself, or parts of it, in more detail.

It's definitely worthwhile to take some time to look through all the symbol catalogues you have available, and make a note of any symbols that might work in such map creation, even if that's a long way from what the symbol was originally meant to be! As you can resize any symbol in CC3+, imagine too how it might look if a given symbol were larger or smaller, or a different colour (which you can set and see while you're browsing through each symbol catalogue that includes varicolor symbols).

Map six - Hex 1304, Arvika:

Arvika was one of the three settlements in this area that were originally shown on the existing Atlas map. In the absence of any text notes for it there, I simply looked at what the symbol was - a hamlet. As luck had it, no random feature was selected during the creation of my Whispering Wastes regional map for the hex it was in, but there was something in an immediately adjoining one, a mysterious ravine partly filled with webs, where a legendary artifact was guarded by a nest of Ettercaps. So I simply moved the ravine into the hamlet's hex, combining both elements. The hexes are six miles across, north-south, after all, so there's room for a lot more than just a single feature in each one.

The setting for the place was to be in a river valley, the Silvertongue, and I randomly discovered instead of the fords, so popular elsewhere so far, the proximity to the uplands had clearly provided stone enough for a bridge here for once, and it also turned out to be notably ancient, something that, like the Stormy Cleft ravine, simply helped reinforce why this hamlet had ended up being shown on the Atlas's area map, while other, seemingly larger or similarly-sized, settlements in the Whispering Wastes had not appeared there. Mapping it was straightforward enough, with the contour symbols fitted-in to act as the entrance to the ravine, although I did add a few more fields than I'd initially thought to provide some further interest around the settlement itself, which also lessened the impact of the ravine on the whole drawing.

Just as well Wyverns can fly 😎🐲

As you might tell from my frequent use of random options in my Community Atlas maps, I've been a long-time fan of such random design systems, for all they can need a bit of nudging sometimes to get things to work out OK. I've not used the 5E system as yet, though almost exactly 20 years ago (July-August 2001), I created a classic 12-level dungeon using the random system in the original (1979) AD&D DMs Guide, each level filling an A4 page of graph paper. All done by-hand then, however. I did make a start converting it to CC3 not long after I got the program, around 2014 or 2015, I think, but that was very slow going, as I hadn't the option then to scan the hand-drawn maps to trace in CC3.

Have to say that your map looks a lot more elegant and less cluttered than any of my old ones from that dungeon set, so the 5E system may be something I should experiment with in future, perhaps...