Build your own battlegrounds. The Map Editor lets you draw territories, group them into
continents, connect them with borders and shipping lanes, and play your creation against bots
or friends.
Desktop only. The Map Editor ships with the PC version — the mobile builds don't
include it, and other players' maps are downloaded through Steam, so on mobile you play the
official maps.
Open it from the Main Hub → Map Editor. Maps you make appear under the Custom Maps
tab when you create a Single Player or Casual game. (Ranked
uses official maps only.)
The editor is laid out like a professional editing tool:
- Menus along the top — File, Edit, View, Map, Tools and Help. Every
command's keyboard shortcut is shown beside it in the menu.
- The toolbox down the left edge — one button per tool, each with its own key.
- The tool options bar under the menus — the settings for the tool you're using (brush size,
Snap, the prop picker…) and its bigger actions on the right.
- The board in the middle — your map, seen straight down, looking the way it will in a match.
- The Outliner and Inspector on the right — your groups and territories, and the properties of
whatever you've selected.
- The status bar along the bottom — a hint for the current tool, what's selected, your
territory and group counts, the cursor position and the zoom.
The play area is a fixed 1920×1080 rectangle. You build everything inside it — the size is
locked. Start New Map takes you straight to the map's setup.
| Keys |
Does |
| Ctrl+N / Ctrl+O |
New map / open a map |
| Ctrl+S / Ctrl+Shift+S |
Save (straight back to the same file) / save as |
| Ctrl+Z |
Undo (last 50 actions) |
| Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y |
Redo |
| Ctrl+Shift+A |
Deselect all |
| Ctrl+Shift+V |
Validate and repair |
| Home |
Frame the whole map |
| Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0 |
Zoom in / zoom out / 100 % |
| F3 |
Switch between the top-down view and the 3D orbit view |
| G |
Groups overlay on / off (colour the board by group, as Tab does in a match) |
| Ctrl+\ |
Show / hide the right-hand panel |
| F1 |
How to build a map |
Tool keys are listed under The toolbox. Shortcuts don't fire while you're typing
in a text box.
- Drag with the left mouse button to pan, as in a match. This works when no tool is picked
and with Select. Tools that draw or place things keep their own drag.
- Middle-drag pans with any tool. The mouse wheel zooms. Home frames the whole map.
¶ The right-hand panel
- Outliner — the map at the top, then each group (with its colour and territory count) and
the territories in it. Click a row to select it; double-click a territory to centre the board on
it. + adds a group or an empty territory. When something on the map needs your attention,
an Issues list appears at the very top — see Issues & save.
- Inspector — the properties of what's selected: a territory, a group, or — with
nothing selected — the map itself (name, hazards, backdrop and biome, day / night, trace
image and thumbnail). The Map menu items jump straight to these sections.
- Drag the panel's left edge to make it wider or narrower. The ▾ arrows fold the Outliner or
the Inspector down to their title bars, and » tucks the whole panel against the edge —
« brings it back. The editor remembers your layout.
Pick a tool on the left (or press its key, or use the Tools menu). A typical workflow goes
top to bottom: draw the land, fill it into territories, wire up the connections, then dress the
board.
You never have to "refresh" anything. Fills, land connections and shipping-lane ends are all
worked out from your borders and anchors, and the editor keeps them up to date as you go: redraw a
border and every territory it touches refills itself; move an anchor and its territory follows;
territories that come to share a border are linked straight away. Each of these happens inside the
same undo step as the edit that caused it, so one Ctrl+Z puts everything back.
¶ Select and territories
- Select (Q) — click a territory to select it and edit it in the Inspector. Never creates
anything. Dragging pans the board instead of selecting, so the selection happens when you
release a click that didn't move.
- Add territory (T) — the editor is anchor-first: a territory exists where you place an
anchor. Click inside an enclosed region to drop one — that creates a territory and fills the
cell around it. You'll name it and pick its group as you create it. Regions you don't anchor
stay empty space. Drop an anchor where the borders aren't closed yet and the territory waits
with no shape — it fills itself the moment you close its borders. + Empty territory (tool
options bar, or the Outliner's +) makes a territory record with no shape and no anchor yet,
if you want to plan your count before drawing.
With a territory selected, the Inspector lets you:
- Rename it and set its group.
- Anchor ▸ Move… — move the troop marker. The fill follows: the territory becomes whichever
enclosed region the anchor now sits in.
- Add island… (give it a second piece), Remove fill…, and Refill — forces a fresh
fill. You only need it to retry a territory listed under Issues.
- See and edit its connections — remove a link, toggle a lane to coastal, or add a link
(land or lane) to any other territory.
- Delete territory.
¶ Borders — draw the land
Sketch the coastlines and internal dividers:
- Border: polyline (B) — click to drop points; Enter or right-click to close the shape;
Backspace removes the last point.
- Border: freehand (F) — click-drag to trace a freeform line; release to finish.
- Edit nodes (N) — select and drag points; click a line to select the whole border; Delete
removes a point or line. The options bar adds Close / open border (polygon ↔ line).
- Insert node (I) / Remove node (R) — add or delete points on existing borders.
- Snap (options bar) snaps the cursor to nearby border points for clean joins. A line end
that stops just short of another border (within the snap distance) is joined to it
automatically — even if you drew that other border afterwards.
Clear all borders… sits on the right (behind a confirm).
Border lines only show while a border tool is active — the rest of the time you see the board
as players will.
Decide what can attack what. Two territories fight only if they're connected.
Territories that share a border are connected automatically — you only use the link tools
for the exceptions.
- Land link (L) — click two territories to toggle a land connection (solid red): link two that
share no border (a bridge, a narrow strait), or cut a pair that does share one. Your links and
cuts are remembered and survive any later border edit.
- Shipping lane (S) — click two territories to toggle a shipping lane (a dashed sea
route, cyan in-game). Lanes let far-apart coastal territories reach each other. In a
territory's connection list you can change a lane's look: Sea lane, Walkway (a
plank bridge, for indoor and space maps) or Vent (a dotted duct with grates). The look
never changes the rules; every style plays exactly like a shipping lane.
- Coastal lane (C) — route a lane neatly around the map edge.
- Edit lane (E) — drag a lane's nodes (endpoints snap to the coast), add or remove vertices,
and switch it between Bowed / straight.
- Lanes stay on the coast by themselves: reshape a coastline and the lane ends that touched it
move with it. A lane you've shaped by hand keeps its waypoints; only its end moves.
- Reset links to borders… (options bar, or the Map menu) forgets every land link you
added or cut by hand, so connections follow the borders alone. Shipping lanes are kept. It's
behind a confirm and can be undone.
- Re-route all lanes (same places) throws away hand-shaped lane paths and re-routes every
lane coast to coast.
Links show while a link tool is active, or whenever the Links overlay is on.
The visible gap rule: territories that touch but are not connected get a small
visible gap baked between them — so players can read at a glance that they can't cross there.
Paint terrain (P), Sculpt heights (H) and Props (O) shape the land and scenery around
your territories. They're covered under 3D land & objects below.
¶ Arrange — Move landmass, Trace image
- Move landmass (M) — hover over a continent or island to outline it, then drag it somewhere
else. A ghost follows the mouse and the move happens when you let go; Esc or right-click
cancels mid-drag. One Ctrl+Z puts it back.
- What counts as a landmass: any group of borders that touch each other, plus the
territories drawn inside them. A lone outline with no territories yet counts too, so you can
trace an island and park it before filling it in.
- What moves with it: its borders, territories and anchors. Props, painted terrain and
sculpted heights are scenery, edited separately — they stay where they are, so arrange your
land before you decorate. If the moved land ends up over a prop, the Issues list warns
"Prop hidden under …"; click the warning to select the prop and drag it clear.
- Shipping lanes fix themselves. A lane between two moved territories moves as a whole; a
lane with only one end on the moved land keeps its shape and re-attaches that end to the new
coast.
- No accidental gluing. Dropping a landmass close to another doesn't join them. They join
only if their borders actually touch, just as if you had drawn them that way.
- Shipping lanes and hand-made land links never tie landmasses together, so a link from an
island to the mainland won't drag the mainland along.
- Trace image (K) — drag the trace image to move it, and Ctrl+wheel to scale it around the
cursor (Ctrl+Shift+wheel for fine steps). See Trace image.
- Add a group with the Outliner's + — it auto-picks a colour from the game's palette.
- Select the group in the Outliner to edit it in the Inspector: its name, colour and
bonus (0–20) — the reinforcement bonus a player earns for owning every territory in that
group. This is the heart of map balance: bigger, harder-to-hold continents should pay more.
- Put a territory in a group with the Group dropdown in its Inspector.
- Turn on the Groups overlay (G) to colour the board by group, exactly as players see it
when they hold Tab in a match.
There's no "set capital" tool — capitals are chosen by players during a match's
Capital Selection phase, not baked into the map. You
don't need to do anything in the editor for Capital Conquest to work on your map.
The board in the middle is the real 3D game board, seen straight down. To show how your map will
look in play, its territories are shared out between a few stand-in players in game colours,
each with a troop badge. That's only for looks: it changes nothing about the map, and groups
are shown by the Groups overlay and the Outliner rather than by tile colour.
Territory names appear once you zoom in, as in a match. Turn on Names to show them all the
time.
The Overlays toggles at the top right (also in the View menu) change what the board shows.
They work in both the top-down view and the 3D orbit view, they're preview-only, and they change
nothing about the map:
- Groups (G) — the same group view players get by holding Tab in a match: every
territory takes its group's colour, each group gets a floating label with its territory count,
and the troop badges and names hide so the colours read clearly.
- Links — every land link and shipping lane. Top-down they're drawn in the editor's colours
(red land links, dashed cyan lanes). In the 3D orbit view you see the game's own link graph.
- Portals — the animated portal on every
territory, so you can judge how it reads and where the troop anchor sits relative to it.
- Badges — the troop badges (on by default). Turn them off for a clean look at the land.
- Names — every territory name, at any zoom.
- Backdrop and Heights — previews for the older flat view; the top-down board already
shows both for real.
Want to trace a real-world map or your own sketch? Open Map ▸ Trace image… (or the
Trace image section of the map's Inspector) to lay a picture from your computer under your
territories. Every map maker can use it.
- Load image… — pick a .png, .jpg, .jpeg or .webp file. A Current: line
shows which file is loaded.
- Opacity — slide to fade the image in or out; it updates as you drag.
- Remove image — takes it off the map.
A newly loaded image is stretched over the 1920×1080 canvas. To move or resize it:
- Trace image tool (K) — drag the picture to move it; Ctrl+wheel scales it around the
cursor (Ctrl+Shift+wheel for fine steps). Right-click or Esc mid-drag puts it back.
- Scale %, X and Y — type exact values in the Inspector.
- Fit to canvas — fits the whole picture inside the canvas without squashing it.
- Reset (stretch) — goes back to stretching it over the canvas.
- Lock — stops the image from being nudged by accident once it's placed.
Once you move or scale it, the image keeps its own proportions. A handy trick for maps with
insets (like Alaska and Hawaii on a US map): trace the insets first, scale the image up so the main
area fills the canvas, then use Move landmass (M) to drag the traced insets into the corners.
Loading, removing, each drag, each run of scaling, and each opacity drag are one undo each.
Only you see it. The trace image is saved with your map, so it's there the next time you
open the map in the editor — but it's never part of the playable map. It isn't shown in matches
and is never sent to other players, including through the Workshop.
By default the number of portals and
firestorms a match places scales with your map's size. If your
design needs a specific number, open Map ▸ Hazards… (the Hazards section of the map's
Inspector) and set a Portals or Firestorms override (0 = use the size-based default).
It shows your territory count and the default it would compute. A non-zero override is then used
for your map in every mode — including Ranked.
¶ Backdrop and biome
The backdrop is what surrounds your map on the 3D board. Open Map ▸ Backdrop and biome… (the
Backdrop and biome section of the map's Inspector):
- Biome — the map's look: the colours of the painted land, the grass, the lighting and which
3D objects are listed first. Switching biome keeps your painting and suggests a matching
backdrop.
- Kind — Solid colour, Water, Lava or Space.
- Base colour — picking a new kind resets it to that kind's default; you can change it from
there.
- Strength — 0–1. At 0 you get just the plain colour.
Like the rest of the scenery, the backdrop and biome are purely visual.
Give your map a day / night cycle: the sun crosses the board as
the match is played, and a clock appears in the top bar. It's off by default and purely
visual — it changes no rules.
Open Map ▸ Day / night… (the Day / night section of the map's Inspector):
- Day / night cycle — tick it to turn the cycle on for this map.
- Day length (hours) and Night length (hours) — 1–48 each, defaulting to a
16-hour day and an 8-hour night. They're greyed out while the cycle is off.
- A summary line underneath works out the result for you, for example Cycle 24 h — day
67 %, night 33 % · 1 action = 1 minute, 1,440 actions per cycle. That's the length of one full
day plus night, how it splits between the two, and how many counted actions (troop placements,
attacks and fortify moves) it takes to go all the way round. An hour is always 60 minutes, so
a shorter cycle turns over more often in a match.
Changes here can be undone like any other edit. Every match on your map starts at a random time
of day.
¶ 3D land & objects
Paint land around your territories, sculpt it into hills, islands and lakes, and dress it with
trees, rocks and buildings. It all shows on the game's 3D board. It's purely visual and
changes no rules.
Territories always stay on top. Under and right around every territory the land is capped
below the tile tops, so a hill never rises through a territory.
You build the map top-down, looking straight down on the real board. Press F3 or the
Top-down ⇄ 3D orbit button (top right) to orbit around the board in 3D, and again to come
back.
- Draw top-down. Borders, territories and links are built in the top-down view; those tools
are greyed out in 3D ("2D view only").
- Shape in either. Paint, Sculpt and Props work in both views. In 3D you work directly on the
terrain, which reshapes live as you drag, and a brush ring follows the ground.
- Camera: middle-drag orbits; Shift + middle-drag or Space + drag pans; the mouse
wheel zooms. Reset view and Top-down snap the camera back.
- On maps with the day / night cycle on, a time-of-day slider in the 3D
view previews the lighting.
Coming back keeps your view, selection and tool as you left them.
Paint the land that rises out of the water around your territories.
- Materials: three per biome (on Temperate: Land, Beach, Stone), or Erase.
- Size 10–200 (default 48) and Strength 0.05–1 (default 0.6).
- Left-drag paints; right-drag erases. Each stroke is one undo.
- Clear paint… wipes it all (behind a confirm).
On the 3D board, painted land stands up to 12 tall and slopes down into the water. Steep
slopes show as rock.
Raise and lower the ground anywhere on the map. Raise the seabed into a new island, or lower the
land into a lake.
- Brushes: Raise, Lower, Smooth, Flatten. Flatten levels toward the height
where your stroke started.
- Size 16–300 (default 80) and Strength 0.5–8 (default 2).
- Left-drag applies the brush; right-drag does the opposite (Raise ↔ Lower; Smooth and Flatten
work the same either way). Each stroke is one undo.
- Sculpting adds roughly −64 to +63 on top of the painted land. The cursor shows the ground
height under it.
- Contours toggles contour lines; Clear Sculpt resets all sculpting (behind a confirm).
Ground raised only by sculpting, with no paint nearby, is grass (rock on steep slopes). Next to
painted ground it takes on the nearest painted material.
Place 3D objects on and around your land. The picker button in the options bar shows what your
next click places; press it to open the prop browser — every object as a picture, sorted by
biome and category, with search. ⟳ Refresh re-reads the list.
- Place: click empty ground. The object uses the current Rotation and Scale sliders.
- Select: click an object. It gets a highlight ring and the sliders then edit it. Drag to
move it, or type an exact position into the X and Y fields next to the sliders.
- Rotate: Shift + mouse wheel, 15° a notch. Scale: Ctrl + mouse wheel, ×1.1 a
notch (0.25–8).
- Remove: right-click, Delete / Backspace, or Delete Prop. Esc deselects.
Clear Props removes them all (behind a confirm).
- Each edit is one undo.
Objects can't go on a territory or outside the play area. The preview turns red and tells you
why ("can't place on a territory" / "outside the play area"). They're decoration only: they never
block a click, and they stand on the land (or in the water, out at sea).
Props, painted terrain and sculpting are scenery, edited separately from your territories:
changing them never touches borders, fills or links, and editing territories never moves them.
If land ends up covering a prop, it gets an orange ring on the tile and a "Prop hidden under …"
entry in Issues. You can still click it through the tile and drag it off; it's only refused if
you let go on a tile.
The editor checks the map as you work. Whenever something needs you, an Issues list appears
at the top of the Outliner (the count also shows in the status bar). Click an issue to jump to
it. Red issues are problems; yellow ones are worth a look but may be deliberate. It reports:
- Loose border ends — a line that stops short of the border it should meet. One gap and a
region can't be filled.
- Territories not on the map yet (no anchor), or with no shape (their borders aren't
closed yet).
- Fills that couldn't follow an edit — for example a border was deleted and two anchors now
sit in the same region. The editor won't let one territory swallow another; it keeps both
shapes and asks you to add the border back or move an anchor.
- Territories with no neighbours, and groups of territories cut off from the rest of the
map — nothing could ever attack them. Add a land link or a shipping lane.
- Overlapping fills (also washed orange on the board) — a point can belong to only one
territory, so one of the two would silently lose that ground in play.
- Groups not in one piece (yellow) — fine for a deliberate island chain; otherwise a
territory is in the wrong group.
- An anchor outside its own shape (yellow).
- Prop hidden under a territory (yellow) — you moved or reshaped land over a prop. The editor
never moves or deletes props on its own: click the issue to select the prop, then drag it off
the tile (or type a new X / Y).
Map ▸ Validate and repair (Ctrl+Shift+V, also a button on the map's Inspector) is the
deep pass for a map that needs tidying up. It joins loose ends from further away (up to 30 px),
re-fits every territory to its anchor, highlights borders that run through a single territory in
magenta, then checks everything again. The whole sweep is one undo.
On Save, the editor tells you if problems are still listed. A map is marked playable only
if it has no loose border ends — match-setup screens won't launch an unplayable map.
"Playable" means "no loose border ends" — nothing more. The other issues don't block the
save or the map pickers, so clear the Issues list before you share a map.
File ▸ Save (Ctrl+S) writes straight back to the file you opened or last saved; a new map
asks where. File ▸ Save as… (Ctrl+Shift+S) always asks. Maps save as encrypted .popmap
files (to user://maps/ by default).
The map's Inspector has a Thumbnail section: Frame region lets you drag a 16:9 frame over
the map, and Capture PNG (also File ▸ Capture thumbnail) saves the picture players see in
the map browser.
While a map has unsaved changes, the editor takes a recovery snapshot every 20 seconds — the
● Unsaved marker at the top right shows the time of the last one. It's a safety net, not a
save: it never writes to your own map file.
If the editor closed without saving, the next time you open it you'll get a "Recover Unsaved
Map?" prompt naming the map and when it was autosaved.
- Restore loads that snapshot into the editor and re-points Save at the file you were
saving to, so a single Save puts the work back where it belongs. It comes back as unsaved work
— save it to keep it.
- Discard deletes the snapshot.
Saving normally clears the snapshot too, so a finished session leaves nothing behind. You won't
be asked when you jumped straight into a specific map (for example Community Maps → Edit) —
the editor assumes you want that map, not your last draft.
¶ 🎲 Generate a random map
Short on time? Map ▸ Generate random map… builds a complete, playable map in one go:
territories, continents, connections, shipping lanes, bonuses, the visible gaps, and the painted
land, terrain and biome to match.
Pick a Layout. Each one has its own extra options, which appear under it.
Natural
- Continents — 3–7 landmasses of different sizes, with peninsulas, bays and offshore
islands, joined by straits and shipping lanes. Big landmasses can be split by a mountain
ridge with one or two passes. Some regions are packed with small territories, others have a
few large ones, and coasts are finer than interiors. Options: Landmasses (0 = random),
Water %, Ridges, Islands.
- Archipelago — chains of islands (biggest in the middle of each chain) and ring-shaped
atolls, all tied together by shipping lanes. Options: Island chains, Atolls,
Water %.
Planned
- Space station — concentric rings over a starfield, divided by bulkhead walls, with
spokes bridging the vacuum, a Command Core hub in the middle and docking pods
reached by docking lanes. Options: Rings, Spokes, Docking pods.
- Building / fortress — a castle floor plan: rooms grouped into wings, linked by
gallery halls through doors, around a courtyard, inside a moat and rampart. No shipping
lanes. Options: Footprint (keep, L, T, U, cross or random), Wings, Courtyard,
Underground (a dungeon look).
- Solar system — a star at the centre, planets on orbits (each planet is a continent), with
moons, planet rings and asteroid belts. Shipping lanes follow the orbits. Options: Orbits,
Asteroid belts, Moons, Planet rings. Holds up to 120 territories.
- Command base — a military base: a wedge-shaped core inside octagonal defense rings that
connect only through gates, with arms reaching out to corner hangars. Continents are
slices from the core out to the rim. Options: Rings, Sectors, Arms, Hangars,
Gatehouses, Core size, Look (deck plate, orbital, bunker), Props.
- Spaceport — hexagonal landing pads cut into wedges, reached only by walkways
from curved concourses around a central terminal. Each pad is a continent. Options: Pads,
Wedges, Concourse loop. Holds up to 120 territories.
- Starship — a ship's hull (cruiser, freighter or saucer) packed with rooms. Every room
is its own small continent, the main hallway is the big prize, and vents link distant
rooms. Options: Hull, Rooms, Vents.
- Airship — two or three decks and gondolas floating in open sky, joined only by
ladders and gangways. Every room is its own continent, with the Main Hall paying the
most. Options: Decks, Gangways, Envelope, Deck finish.
The older Split / Cross / Rect / Continent / Islands shapes are still listed under
Legacy shapes.
- Territories (8–200, default 50; Solar system and Spaceport up to 120)
- Groups (0 = auto). Continents follow the layout — a landmass, wing, ring arc or planet —
so sizes vary like a real Risk board: expect a small, easy-to-hold "fortress" and a big
sprawling continent.
- Gap px (minimum 14, default 16) — the visual gap between unconnected neighbors
- Wobble % — extra edge jitter (0 = clean edges, recommended; off for planned layouts)
- Style
- Classic — two ways into almost everything: no dead ends, at most one chokepoint
link, and one fortress continent.
- Corridor — deliberate chokepoints, a few dead ends, and pocket continents behind
a single link.
- Seed — leave blank for random, or set one to reproduce a map
Every connection on a generated map is either a shared border you can see or a drawn
shipping lane. There are no hidden links. Shipping lanes are short hops between coasts,
mostly tying islands to their own continent, with a few linking continents. Continent
bonuses depend on both size and how many border territories you'd have to defend, so a
big continent with many entry points pays the most.
Use a generated map as-is, or as a starting point you then tweak.
- Clear the Issues list (or run Validate and repair and read what's left).
- Save (no loose border ends = selectable in match setup).
- Start a Single Player or Casual game.
- Pick your map from the Custom Maps tab (maps with dangling endpoints are filtered out).
See also: Game Rules · Match Settings