A map editor that divides the Earth into hexagonal tiles. It runs in your browser, and what you draw is never sent to a server.
01 · What this is
A map editor that divides the Earth into hexagonal tiles. Paint the tiles, draw lines, place symbols, add labels.
What you draw stays in your browser and is never sent to a server. Save it to a file and open it again later.
There are four resolutions.
163,842 tiles — about 60 km wide · 12 MB on your first visit
1,024,002 tiles — about 24 km · 16 MB
5,898,242 tiles — about 10 km · 28 MB
10,485,762 tiles — about 7.5 km · 41 MB
★ Finer resolutions are more precise but heavier; a desktop is recommended for 10 million tiles. Data is downloaded on your first visit only and then kept in your browser.
02 · The screen
A menu bar sits above the map. Choosing a tool opens that tool in a floating window.
File — Save work (.json) · Open · ⊞ Attribute table · ⤓ Attributes (.csv) · ⤒ Import data (GeoJSON/CSV) · 🖨 Layout (export an image) · 🔗 Share link
Edit — Undo · Redo · Clear all
Explore — Pan · Pick · Distance
Draw — Paint · Erase · Fill inside · Fill country · Fill region · Center line · Edge line · Units · Events · Icons · Text · Chart
Facilities — power plants, mines, ports, universities, research institutes, factories and other points
Reset — clears everything you drew and every saved copy, back to the start
Drag a window by its title bar, fold it with ▾, close it with ✕. Positions are remembered.
03 · Viewing the map
Five projections — Globe (exploring) · Robinson (world thematic maps) · Wide Mercator (direction and routes) · Polar N · Polar S (poles).
★ Wide Mercator is a variant stretched 1.5× horizontally for looks. It is not the true projection, and polar distortion remains.
Drag to move, wheel or pinch to zoom, two fingers to rotate. Click a tile to see its values on a card.
04 · Drawing
Paint — brushes of 1, 7 or 19 tiles. Restrict to all, land only or water only
Erase · Pick — remove, or lift a colour or symbol that is already there
Fill inside · Fill country · Fill region — paint a whole area along its boundary at once
Center line · Edge line — choose solid or dashed, and thickness
Units — 66 symbols. 56 military plus 10 civil (fire service, rescue, medical, police, civilians, displaced, relief, shelter, search and rescue, volunteers). Choose formal symbols or picture symbols
Echelon — nine levels. I company · II battalion · III regiment · × brigade · ×× division · ××× corps · ×××× field army · ××××× army group · ×××××× theatre. Naval and air symbols show a number instead of crosses
🧲 Magnet — turn it on while drawing a line and each point snaps onto a line layer you have turned on. Rivers, borders, roads, railways, sea and air routes — twelve layers, and only the ones you have on. A red circle shows where it will snap before you click
Events — 97 kinds: war · politics · disaster · economy · construction · culture · fantasy and SF
Icons — 168 kinds: religion · resources · facilities · nature · fantasy and SF
Text · Chart · Distance — labels, bar/line/pie charts, great-circle distance between two points
The Units, Events and Icons windows each have a size slider. Size is measured in tiles, not screen pixels, so the area on the map does not change when you zoom. Set the size before you place a symbol.
05 · Layers
Layers you have turned on appear as rows under Layers on.
Click the name to turn it off
▲▼ changes the drawing order
The slider fades that one layer
06 · Colour breaks
The population, GDP per person, total GDP, built-up and non-residential legends each have four buttons. They decide how the same data is cut into colours.
Default — breaks chosen by hand
Equal interval — the range split evenly
Quantile — the same number of tiles in each colour
Natural breaks — cut where values cluster
★ Skewed data like population density comes out almost one colour under equal interval. Quantile or natural breaks read better there. But this is less about which is right than about what you want to see — quantile can make anything look evenly spread.
07 · Selecting by value
The magic wand selects every tile that meets a condition at once. What you select can be painted, narrowed further, or widened.
Value range — conditions such as elevation above 500 m, or GDP per person below $20,000
Set operations — new · add · subtract · intersect
◎ Buffer — widens the selection by a radius. The radius follows the unit system you chose
⤒ Import data — brings your own GeoJSON or CSV in as a selection (points and polygons)
★ A buffer covers up to 2 million tiles at once; beyond that it stops and says so. Lines (LineString) can now be imported too — the tiles a line passes through are all selected, so railways, roads, routes and borders come in as they are.
08 · Table and export
File › ⊞ Attribute table shows the tiles you painted as a 17-column table — tile number, latitude and longitude, area, land or water, country, admin area, elevation, climate, land cover, population, density, GDP per person, total GDP, built-up, non-residential, and the colour you painted.
⤓ Attributes (.csv) — downloads and opens straight in a spreadsheet, with non-Latin text intact
The area, elevation and density columns follow the unit system you chose
★ The table shows up to 500 rows at a time. Use the CSV to get everything. Click a column head to sort, type in the search box to filter, and use Columns to hide columns. The CSV follows what you see.
09 · Migration flows
Overlays › ⇄ Migration draws arcs between countries. With nothing selected you see the largest flows worldwide; click a country and only its own flows remain.
Red people leaving · Blue people arriving
Width is the logarithm of the count. The two directions bow apart so they do not overlap
★ These are estimates, not records of actual movement. Most countries do not publish country-to-country migration, so the figures are worked backwards from changes in UN migrant stocks (Abel & Cohen 2019, pseudo-Bayesian estimate). They are five-year totals and stop at 1990–2020.
10 · Time
The year slider follows the real period of each dataset. Population, GDP, built-up area and degree of urbanisation run 1975–2030; land cover 2001–2024; estimated migration flows 1990–2020, in five-year periods. Choosing a year outside the range snaps to the nearest one, so the year shown and the year actually used are always the same. 2030 is a projection.
Köppen climate comes in six periods — 1901–1930, 1931–1960, 1961–1990 and 1991–2020 are observed; 2041–2070 and 2071–2099 are projected under SSP2-4.5. ★ The projected periods are model output, not measurement. They are one scenario among several, and the map draws observed and projected periods in the same colours. Read the period label before you read the map.
Choosing a year outside the range snaps to the nearest one, so the year shown and the year actually used are always the same. 2030 is a projection.
11 · Units
Lengths, areas, heights and temperatures can be shown in metric or in US customary units. Pick one on the front page, or add ?u=imp (US customary) or ?u=si (metric) to the address. Your choice is remembered.
Metric — km · km² · m · ℃ · mm/day
US customary — mi · sq mi · ft · °F · in/day
★ Both systems use the same colour breaks. The steps are set once as a physical quantity, and only the labels change — so 25 mm reads as 0.98 in rather than a rounder number. The same colour always means the same value, and maps in the two systems can be compared side by side.
12 · Vector layers
Analyze › Vector layers splits lines, units, labels and charts into separate layers. There is no limit on how many.
◉ / ○ show or hide that layer
Lock — nothing is drawn there
Opacity for that layer only
↑ ↓ reorder — later layers draw on top
Clip shows the layer only inside one faction territory
Double-click the name to rename it
★ Painting is not split. Holding several 10.5-million-cell arrays would double the memory. Only lines and points are split.
13 · Colour by rules
Below Analyze › Select by attribute there is a Rules box. Store several rules and paint them in one go.
+ Add rule stores one rule with the current palette colour
▶ Run rules paints them in order — later rules cover earlier ones
▤ Smooth ramp blends between two colours instead of steps
★ Water is skipped. It can be undone.
14 · Saving
Autosave is on. When you stop working it is stored in the browser, and next time you are asked whether to continue from there.
There are several places to keep things, so here is what each one is.
Save my work (.json) — real safekeeping. A file with drawing, lines, units, layers and bookmarks
Autosave — this browser and device only
Keep for later › Keep this work in the browser — the same store, done by hand
Snapshots — keep the current drawing and show it underneath as tracing (five slots)
Bookmark › this place — keeps only where you are looking
Bookmark › this base map + layers — keeps the base map and which layers are on. Not the drawing
Preset › selection · unit settings — keeps settings to reuse
Link — puts the work in the address. If it is too big, save a file instead
★ Autosave lives only in this browser on this device. For real safekeeping use Save map (.json). The file holds not only your drawing but the map state you were looking at — projection, base layer, zoom, camera and year.
15 · Exporting an image
Use File › 🖨 Layout.
Type the width and height directly. The maximum is the browser's own limit (16,384 px per side)
Add a title and a subtitle
Turn the map legend and the colour legend on or off separately
Make the background transparent
Choose which corner the legends sit in, and adjust the margin
Choose the scale-bar unit — if you do not, it follows the unit system you chose
The site address is stamped small in the top right, so people who see the image can find where it came from
★ Large images are drawn in screen-sized pieces and stitched together. This uses no extra graphics memory, so large exports work even at 10 million tiles. Many pieces take a few tens of seconds, and progress is shown.
16 · The board
A message board sits below each map. Anyone can post — no account is needed.
★ Posts and photos are stored on a server. Unlike what you draw on the map, they do not stay in your browser alone. Photos are shrunk in your browser before upload, which removes the GPS location recorded by the camera.
17 · Search
Cities are found in any language — "부산", "Busan" and "釜山" all work.
Country codes (KR), coordinates (37.5 127) and tile numbers (#1000) work too.
18 · Limits of the data — please read
The map looks precise, but the data behind it is not always that precise.
Fisheries — an average over 1,102 cells formed by crossing FAO fishing areas with EEZs. Every tile inside one cell carries the same value; it is not where fishing actually happened
Built-up / non-residential — "non-residential" covers offices, shops, schools and hospitals as well as factories
Livestock — the colour breaks differ per species. Do not compare species by colour
Total GDP — not an observation but an estimated distribution: population × GDP per person
Sea and air routes — representative, approximate paths, not actual tracks
Universities and research institutes — 27% of the coordinates are city centroids, not the institution's own address (the card says so)
10 million tiles — some layers inherit data built for 5.9 million tiles, so they are coarser than the tiles
2030 — a projection
Migration flows — not observed, but worked backwards from changes in UN migrant stocks
River and lake names — taken as the source gives them. Where a language has no name, English appears
19 · When you get stuck
Slow or frozen — open a coarser resolution. A desktop is recommended for 10 million tiles
My work disappeared — if you saved a file, use File › Load. Autosave only returns in the same browser
A red line at the bottom of the screen — a download failed. Send us that message as it is
Facilities look clumped — use the Cluster slider in the facility window. The number merged is written as ×N
The magnet does not snap — turn on a line layer to follow (rivers, borders, roads…) under Overlays first. With none on, the measure line says so in red
20 · Keyboard
1–5 pan · paint · erase · lines · units
6 · I pick · B brush · E erase · F fill a closed area
[] brush size · Space pan for a moment
Ctrl+Z undo · Ctrl+Y redo · Enter finish the line · Esc close window or menu