That's a drawback whenever you deal with fantasy. In classic fantasy, one has to suspend disbelief a bit in the face of magic, which can do stuff not normally possible. In steampunk, one kind of have to accept the same of their steam technology. It's basically their "magic". I guess it is quite similar as to how utterly unbelievable our modern world would be to a renaissance person (It's just that our version turned out to be possible under the laws of physics)

It's not that lego got involved (AFAIK), it's just peoples tendency to build everything out of lego. Lego is a great outlet for creativity, you don't need the lego company to make a set for you to be able to make nice things. These days, you can even build lego online on their website, making designs without owning a single brick.

I think it is important to realize Steampunk is fantasy though. And with that I mean, they do fantastic things with the steam that isn't possible at all under real world physics. In many cases, you see them approaching semi-modern concepts (while still being in the Victorian age) but using steam instead of electricity and more practical fuels. So when drawing steampunk, it isn't "will this be possible using steam", but more "does this seem cool and somewhat plausible if we ignore actual physics?" all the way to "this doesn't seem plausible at all, but it is damn cool".

Many steampunk settings uses things like automatons, which are large steam-powered robots, both "human-like" and "this-is-a-big-machine" like. Sometimes intelligent, self-operating, in other settings controlled by an operator.

I like the city-building computer game Frostpunk for it's visuals. It' is basically Steampunk in the cold (concept art) (automatons)

Another interesting omputer game that takes the concept pretty far and some more, is Sunless Skies. Here you pilot a flying locomotive through the void between the remains of a broken world floating as islands in the void. Even the sun itself is an artificial steam-powered contraption.

For overland maps, I think the difference lies much in the symbology used. Steampunk likes to say, "Hey, here I am!". A typical steampunk map would be something in between a modern map and a fantasy map, and would use symbols and map decorations with a steampunk flair. Symbols would look more like the fantasy symbols, i.e. drawn from an isometric view, not the minimalist top-down symbols on modern maps. Instead of a caravan representing a trade route, you would see a train symbol, you may have dirigibles instead of ships, the city symbols would probably have some smoke stacks and visible pipework in the artwork, and so on.

Are you using "change like draw tool" when converting those entities? If you just use change properties and change the fill, you won't get that automatically, but if you use the change like draw tool command instead (found by right clicking change properties) it sets up things correctly.

As an alternative, you can also set up an outer glow using effects, that can often give a neater result (but not the exact same though)

Dragging and dropping an image into CC3+ is the equivalent of doing a Draw -> insert image, but it skips the dialog box. Unfortunately, this also means it skips the dialog where you can turn off the border, and uses the default which is applying a border to inserted images.

You can turn this off by using :CC2EDIT: on the images, and turn on the hide outline option. Unfortunately, this can only be used on one image at a time (Don't worry about the purple selection rectangle this operation seems to leave behind, that goes away the next time you select something else)

The better way to insert symbols to avoid this in the first place is to do as Raiko suggested, and use the :ICON_CATALOG: button and browse for your folder. This will show all the images in that folder in the symbol catalog window, and you can insert them the same way as regular symbols.

If this is symbols you are going to use often, the even better option is to make proper CC3+ symbol catalogs for them. This allows you to set up scaling and things correctly in the symbols themselves, so you don't have to re-scale every image inserted, among other things.

Yea. The default behavior of drawing tools and symbol sis to pick their own sheet. This can seem weird/annoying at times, but generally one tends to end up putting things in the wrong places much more often if they didn't do that, so the net result is that this behavior is quite nice.

Note that (almost) all these tools are prefixed based, for example the landmass tool in most overland styles look for a sheet name starting with LAND. If your current sheet does so, it stays on that, if not, it goes to the main LAND sheet. You can use this when you create new sheets to get the tools to put things where you need it.