It's a bit slower than I expected, but then it's also a bit bigger than I expected... not necessarily a bad thing, since it is going to comprise most of the world. Still, I ended up having to prune the map down, so fortunately it's not going to be the 200x400 monstrosity I'd originally thought it would end up. Its current height is 181x300, which is just about right for all the features I wanted to stick into it.

I did discover a trick that makes the mapping much easier: I open Paint.NET (my substandard free image editing program), turn on the pixel grid, and draft the map there, each pixel representing one tile. This makes it much easier to do things like the river and road, because I can just use the squiggly line tool and get a good shape in a few seconds. Then all I have to do is redraw it on the map.

One of the main reasons this works out so well is because the actual map, as I said, is huge. That means that when I'm working on an individual part of it, I have no way of knowing how it's going to look in relation to the rest of it - even when zoomed out on maximum. The pixel map is much smaller, so I can take a look at the map as a whole and make sure it's working.

So far I've placed the mine entrance, the waterfall, about two-fifths of the river, the road, and the boundaries for the two "civilized" locations - the town of Sunset and the Reynolds' estate. Of course, it's still draft-quality at this point, as the Reynolds' place is going to need a lot of terraforming to transform it into the rich man's oasis that I intend. The rest of the place will need it as well, of course, but that's all desert, and all I need to do is make sure that there are some clear footpaths and a ton of wilderness. (Footpaths are where Undulation comes in - I can use it to mark them quite well.) Of course I'll want to draft all that first, too, just to make sure it looks interesting.

At the moment, though, I've got to finish the canyon walls. They need shape, they need sides, and most importantly they need a lot of jutting hilly things to put trees and stuff on. Wilderness is hard. *phew*