I Barely Remember Highschool Geography: Let's Make a Fantasy Map!

Xeric Shrubland / Semi-Arid Shrubland are a bit weird. Adding to the confusion is the fact that Xeric and Semi-Arid Shrublands tend to be right next to eachother, as the only real difference I know of is Semi-Arid gets a bit more rainfall. You'll find creosote and mesquite in the Chihuahua Desert, Regular Mexico, and you'll also find both in the Basin and Range area, New Mexico. And also there's some overlap with what exactly counts as the Basin and Range and Chihuahua Desert, like for example, the entirety of the Tularosa Basin (El Paseo up to Carrizozo), which is where I grew up.

"I realized that what I had made was essentially just a funky funhouse mirror map of our regular Earth." Just rotate the map and nobody will notice. (I speak from experience.)

Have I ever told you how much I despise traveling through deserts? I have been taking Steppes to avoid them. Wonderful video, and that art you made personifying the mammoth steppes and taiga biomes was way too cool, took me completely by surprise! For anyone else out there trying their hand at this kind of realistic worldbuilding, I HIGHLY recommend Artifexian's series about the process. It goes over everything in as much details as you could possibly want, and he makes the science pretty easy to understand.

Not sure if you took this into account but a useful thing to remember is that their tends to be more moisture on the ocean/sea side of mountains, this is because as air rises in the atmosphere to go over mountain ranges it is less able to hold moisture and so most water precipitates out before it gets to the far side. Sounds like your map is pretty much set at this point but it’s something I always try to keep in mind when making maps.

As a worldbuilder myself, I look forward to seeing what you have in store for the future. Your channel seems like it has quite a bit of potential

@6:00 I like how you noticed also that you made an earth clone and didn't just gloss over that. There are very successful earth clones, off the top of my head best are Warhammer and Dungeons and Dragons, Game of thrones is also an earth clone but hidden much better by never showing the whole map at once. This is a great vid even if you didn't know the science :D

Personally I’d solve the funhouse mirror earth by literally flipping it around as if being viewed through a mirror. Actually now that I think about it, flipping the world around and warping the terrain would make something mostly unrecognizable to all but the most eagle eyed viewer and would feel crazy unique…

Awesome video! Very excited to see where this leads. I discovered a way simpler method to developing world maps from a blog called "Worldbuilding Pasta". The method goes as this: draw a jagged, blobby shape. Draw in some random mountain ranges. This will be your world's last supercontinent. Now, break the shape into numerous pieces and spread them out from each other, or collide some to make Himalayan-style mountains. The mountain ranges from before will be worn down from erosion, but not entirely (think of the US's Appalachian mountains). Worldbuilding Pasta has a far more complex method involving a program called GPlates, but coming from someone who's done multiple attempts at making a world map with it, it is very hard and honestly just not worth the trouble, even if it does give you realistic results. But it's clear you've put a lot of effort into this world map, and I enjoy it as it is. Plus, since your goal is to have Tala's culture develop towards a modern-esque level of technology, it only makes sense for your world's continents to be Earth-like.

Good video! I know more than a layman about this kind of thing, so a few bits of added context: The reason coasts often hug the tectonic plate lines is because there are two kinds of crust: Oceanic and continental. Basically, continental is like oceanic but with a bunch of lighter rock and earth (stuff other than basalt) piled on top. If a continent splits, the new crust is oceanic, since there's nothing on top of it. And if a bit of plate that's got continental crust meets a bit that's got oceanic, that also forms a coastline (and the oceanic subducts beneath the continental, pretty much always, as it's denser). Another feature of this distinction is that continental plate forms bigger mountains such as the Himalayas (which are still forming) and the Rockies (which are not as their plates have fused, and they've since worn down). On the other hand, those formed when a oceanic plate meets continental are smaller and tend to be volcanic, as they're formed when crust that falls into the mantle melts and floats back up. With regards to the mountain standing by itself in a flat place, this can happen in real life, although it's quite rare. The most famous is Hawaii, which is a chain, but it's formed from a volcanic hotspot that the crust has been drifting over. But the individual mountains are spread out enough that it's not highly visible because of sediment and water obscuring low parts. Wind and weather patterns can be complicated but there's a simplified version that's pretty accessible imo: The convection cells formed by the Coriolis effect. Basically, alternating bands of pressure (and, therefore, precipitation/humidity) according to the way that the air swirls as the planet turns. It boils down to: Put a band of mostly desert at about 30º north and 30º south, skewed a bit in either direction if you want, and the poles are also dry while the tropics are wet. The only other big thing to keep in mind is orographic precipitation, which is that the mountain squeezes moisture out of the air (by pushing it up and therefore decreasing its density and pressure) so you get a lot of rain on the upwind side of mountains and then not so much on the downside side. The same coriolis gyres I mentioned before tell you which direction is usually going to be upwind, you can google a diagram and just look at where the arrows point. They don't account for small-scale variation but you can easily get away with ignoring that or making it up Oh also seasonality can shift things north or south a bit but that's just because the earth's axis is on an angle, and the air isn't directly attached. All biome classifications are subjective and fuzzy, so I'm not surprised this part threw you a couple snags. It seems like people think in terms of biomes more now than they used to when I was coming up (I blame Minecraft) but while it can be a useful lens, it's important to remember that biomes are just frameworks developed by humans to classify groups of ecosystems, mostly to allow us to apply knowledge from one area of the world to another. When you're writing your own stuff, they're a good guideline but if you understand a bit of the basics of how temperature and water quantities interact, you can design your own environments for narrative purposes and not need to worry about matching up specifically to environments that exist on Earth. After all, look at the Fynbos – A unique biome that exists in just one small area. If something by chance can be that rare, it only stands to reason that there are possible biomes which by chance don't exist at all. No reason why your world can't have similarly unique biomes if conditions allow. You had the science pretty well figured out for someone without a background in it overall, but there's always more to learn for people who want to. Of course, when it comes to world-building, you can always subvert these ideas. Maybe there's no tectonics, because some gods put the continents in their place – but then if real hydrology and weathering are applied to those landforms, it still makes an interesting and varied world.

ooh hell yeah I loved my high school geography classes, and like, a really fascinating thing about plate tectonics, so yes the basics are convergent, divergent, and transform, HOWEVER, there are three sub-types of convergent: the first one which you mention, continental plate, and oceanic plate, since the continental granite plate is lighter than the oceanic basalt plate, the basalt plate subducts under the continental plate, forming volcanic activity on the continental plate above, as the oceanic plate gets melted, and that melt then reaches the surface in volcanoes. the second is oceanic plate and oceanic plate, here is a fascinating process, instead the OLDEST oceanic plate is the one that subducts since there's more deposit on it, and its heavier, this is how a lot of the island chains in the "Ring of Fire" were formed, since the pacific plate subducts under the Australian and Philippine plate, causing volcanic islands to emerge HOWEVER that is not how Japan was formed, Japan was part of the Asian continental plate, until the sea of Japan was flooded in with ocean water, causing the appearance that Japan was an island. FINALLY the last type is continental and continent plate convergence, most famous is the Indian plate, which crashed into the Eurasian plate, and unlike the other two types, instead of one plate being pushed under the other, and forming volcanoes, instead both push eachother upwards, hence why the Himalayas have some of the tallest mountains, since its two plates pushing eachother upwards. however there's a lot more fascinating stuff too, so for example, the Appalachian mountains, the Mountains in North Africa, the Scottish Highlands, and the Scandinavian Mountains, all don't have a clear tectonic plate matching them, its because millennia ago, when the continents were still Pangea, they all formed the same Caledonian mountain range, but then the Atlantic ocean started to diverge, and split the continents and the mountain range. (this is why Edinburgh is famous for its volcanoes) Finally, just wanna note the absolute majestic scale that is the Hawaiian and Emperor chain (so mad I can't post pictures in YouTube comments) BUT looking at them, they are actually part of ONE long chain, and what happened was that originally the Pacific plate was moving northernly, and a "hot spot" (area of local volcanic activity underneath a plate poking a hole through it) basically as the plate moved off the hotspot, a new volcanic island would form ontop of the spot, while the old one would be dragged along with the plate, so originally islands were dragged NORTH along with the plate (forming the Emperor Chain), but then the Pacific Plate at some point radically altered direction, and now it is moving more Eastward, which then formed the Hawaiian Chain, while dragging the Emperor Chain further east from the original Hot Spot, which is so fascinating, that all the island in the Emperor Chain, would at some point, have been located where Hawaii is today. (also the difference between oceanic plate basalt and continental plate granite, is that granite formed SLOWLY in the ground, forming the basis of the plate, while BASALT is rapidly cooled when it emerges from a "divergent" plate in the ocean water, since as the plates move apart.) (absoloutely love your whole setting so far from all your videos)

I think something cool that could be thought about for something like this would be an explanation for the seasons. In Earth's case, the seasons likely exist, because Theia collided with Earth, which made it tilt a bit (and created the moon). The Earth being tilted means that the light hits Earth from different angles depending on how far North or South you are and as the Earth travels around the sun, those angles slowly get switched (this is how seasons work. Less light = colder temperatures = winter). You obviously don't need to just copy Earth's seasons and their explanation. Maybe you do want a similar explanation. Then you could maybe decide that the impact tilted the planet even more strongly, which would create different seasons. Maybe you want the explanation to be more mythological or supernatural. Perhaps summer is just the earth god taking a hot bath. Maybe winter is a devine punishment. It could also just be that the gods play poker to see who has to take care of the planet's shenanigans, all of whom take a different approach (this could be combined with an aura of unpredictability surrounding the seasons). Anyway, nobody will read this anyway.

I'm suprised by the fact that you don't have more subscribers.I would have never been able to put in the effort to do something like this.

Thank you very much for making this video! I am world building hidden worlds for my web-comic and I needed the extra encouragement to work along to. No, this video is not too long and is perfect for fellow artists who need a virtual studio environment full of other artist working on similar tasks. Please make more videos! I have liked and subscribed!

I learned more in map making with this very video than in my 10 years of geography at school, you get my sub :D

Had to comment just to say thank you. This is one of the most insightful and interesting videos on worldbuilding/map making I’ve watched 👏 Can’t wait to check out more!

Holy crap I just found my next channel to binge watch.

1:35 "-Because you're insane" this is true as a person who draw maps as a hobby and who plays map painting games (Paradox Interactive games)

The process of making Ta Mando's map was easy at first and then TOP TIER HARD toward the end xD Had to literally just hire a fantasy map maker cause our art skill is not nearly good enough xD

Such an underated channel! Very thoughtout videos! I would love to read your story.

Great job on the research and great art work. A tip incase you didn't know, prevailing winds carry desert sands to forests which provides minerals to help all the trees grow. Could be a cool globe wide storyline to run.