Cartography

Early in-game view of map making

Cartography will be one of the earliest skills available to players. The skill allows you, using in-game tools, to draw/sketch/stencil maps of your area. The higher your cartographic skill, the more precise and high fidelity the tools available to you will become. Then, you can distribute your maps to others for free, for money, or for trade. Likewise, others will be able to take your maps and add additional information to them. (X marks the spot!)

The first thing you need to decide is what scale of map you are going to use and based on this selection, the drawing tools will change accordingly. For example: If you are drawing a regional map, you will see stamps for mountains and forests, as well as spline tools to help you draw rivers, lakes and roads. The stamp tools will randomly cycle through a set of stored images so as to give an aesthetically pleasing look to your maps.

At the beginning, most of the maps will be very inaccurate because there are not going to be the tools to make better maps. This will require some experimentation. As people roam around, and realize the map is not accurate, they can make changes.

Names

When crafting a map, a cartographer has the ability to give names to areas, mountains, villages, etc. The Soulborn Engine will keep track of all the names given in maps and the ones more frequently used in maps will be the ones used by the NPCs.

This has many implications. First, to change a name of an established place someone needs to destroy all of the old maps and create new maps with the new names. Secondly, it might be that old maps might make reference to places that no longer exist or have a different name.

Maps will be written in any language the maker has sufficient skill in, that means that you can run into a map that you can't read.