About

hexagonearth cuts the Earth into hexagonal tiles and lets you draw on it. Paint territories, run borders, drop symbols, and play a map through time. Nearly sixty data layers sit underneath — population, elevation, climate, crops, power plants, shipping lanes and more — so what you draw sits on top of something real.

How it works

The map is a geodesic grid: an icosahedron subdivided until the Earth is covered in hexagons (and exactly twelve pentagons, which is unavoidable). At the largest build there are 10,485,762 tiles about 7.5 km across. Everything is drawn on your graphics card.

It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paint is sent anywhere. Your work stays in your browser's storage until you save it to a file.

What it is for

• Alternate history and worldbuilding — draw the borders that never were
• Reading the data layers against each other — where people live, what grows, what burns
• Teaching — every layer says where its numbers came from and how sure they are

What it is not

It is not a survey instrument. Every layer comes from someone else's dataset, some measured and some modelled, and a hexagon 7.5 km across cannot be more precise than the data folded into it. The data sources page says which is which.

Choosing a build

Smaller tiles mean more detail and more memory. The 163,842-tile build opens in seconds on anything. The 10,485,762-tile build needs a desktop with plenty of RAM and downloads about 41 MB before it shows anything. Pick from the front page.

Contact

Found a mistake in the data, or a layer credited wrongly? Please tell us — corrections are welcome and we would rather fix them than defend them.