Cartographer’s Dream
Make every map worth exploring, and plant your throne wherever you dare.
This mod does two things at once: it cranks up the drama of procedurally generated settlement maps, and it removes the rigid restrictions that used to dictate where you could found your capital.
1. Settlement-map generation overhaul.
Lakes are larger and more irregular. Archipelagos and dendritic island patterns appear naturally. Rivers run wider, mountain ranges sprawl across the map, and cave systems are denser and more connected. Layouts that used to require manual editing in the settlement editor — peninsulas, fjords, canyons, mountain valleys — now emerge from the procedural generator.
2. Found your capital almost anywhere.
Vanilla blocks the cursor with "Blocked by terrain!" the moment the capital area touches a mountain. Not anymore. You can now plant your throne:
- On top of a mountain range
- In the middle of a lake or open ocean
- On a tiny island
- On a wide river
- Or any mix of the above
The only invalid configuration is when all nine tiles of the 3×3 capital area are fully covered by mountain. Everything else is fair game.
3. Sea-bound and mid-ocean capitals are fully playable.
A capital surrounded by water has no land road touching the map border, so vanilla declares "Capital Closed!", stops immigration, and other factions cannot reach you for trade, war or any caravan traffic. This mod fixes all of that:
- Immigrants arrive by boat. When you admit a citizen, a small boat — the vanilla fishing dingy with a passenger rendered in the immigrant’s own species — appears at the water edge, sails across the deep-water and bridge tiles between map border and your island, and the passenger disembarks on your shore. They then walk inland to occupy a house or workplace like any normal citizen.
- Caravans, armies and bandits can reach you. If the world-map’s path graph leaves your capital tile isolated, the mod connects it to the nearest faction-owned regions so other factions’ shipments, your own army movement, resource transport to garrisons, and bandit raids all route to and from the capital as if it were a normal landlocked region.
- The "Capital Closed!" warning is preserved on purpose. If you deliberately wall off your throne inside the settlement, the vanilla warning still fires — sea isolation is fixed but player-built blockages still count.
- An island fortress alone in the open sea, with immigrant boats arriving from off-map
- A mountain stronghold carved deep into a peak
- A canyon city strung along a river that splits the map
- An archipelago capital scattered across a maze of small islands
- A coastal fjord with mountains pinning narrow lakes against the shore
- Game version: V71 (0.71.31)
- Safe to add at the start of a campaign. Removing mid-campaign is not recommended: the world-map path-graph edges and any in-transit ferry boats are persisted in the save, and without the mod loaded vanilla cannot interpret them — the capital may appear "cut off" even with land borders, and ferries in transit will crash on load
- Does not regenerate the world map — continents, regions and country roads are vanilla. The mod only adds path-graph edges from your capital to nearby faction regions when it detects the capital was placed in an isolated component, so caravans and armies can reach you
- World generation, region assignment and connectivity validators all use vanilla rules, so the engine never crashes from a relaxed capital placement
- Heroes of Syx compatible from v2.14.2 onward. Load order matters: Cartographer’s Dream must load after Heroes of Syx (the order was reversed in V70 — this changed with the V71 port)
The relaxed placement opens up scenarios the original game never expected. Recent updates fix the most common ones — v2.10 resolved the "ghost immigrants" stall on sea/mountain-bound capitals, v2.11 fixed the visible road cross on mountain settlements, and v2.13 introduced the ferry and world-map connectivity that finally make open-ocean and island capitals fully tradeable and reachable.
If you run into anything strange, please leave a comment on this Workshop page describing the situation. I read every comment.
Workplace Species Filter — per-building species and class filters for both workers and users. Filter bathrooms, temples, canteens and more by race and citizen/slave status, individually per building. A must-have for multi-species kingdoms.
Plan Ahead — place any building before researching its tech. Tech-locked placements are forced into the existing Planning Mode and can’t be activated until you actually unlock the technology.
Fixing the Syx — a bundle of quality-of-life fixes. Place houses on mountain rock, drop decorations in evenly-spaced rows with the mouse wheel, fill river shorelines with one Ctrl+Click in the Fishery tool, and run roads straight through mountains.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
