Coast of [something] Hex Sandbox

Terrain is done! I spent a few hours (OK, more than a few), finishing off all the six-mile hexes with basic terrain, and then dropped in a couple islands for good measure. Here's the final result.

Final Terrain Map

By way of comparison, here's the original 36-mile per hex map, showing the underlying terrain types.

Original Large Hex Terrain

And here is the entire process thus far, in convenient gif-animation format!

Ooh, Sparkly

So what's next? I've been giving some thought to where to go with this, and I have a few ideas. Theoretically the next steps would be to generate all the detailed features: roads, rivers, dungeons, towns, sites, and such, but there are a lot of hexes to fill in, so I need a plan of attack. With that in mind, I've started developing a bit of a back story for this place.

Rather than doing this hex by hex, I'm going to treat this as a virgin continent, and send in a bunch of randomly generated expeditions to do the exploration and settlement for me. These won't be parties of adventurers, instead they'll be colonists from Somewhere Else (TM). Where exactly I haven't decided. I'm sure some random tables culled from random games will provide answers to that.

I also still need a name for this whole project. I'm leaning toward Coast of <something> given the generally coast-like layout, but I'm terrible with names. Ideas?

Oh and if you're interested in how much space this actually represents, here's a chunk of the US Pacific Northwest that roughly matches up to the hex maps above.

Look at all that Space!

That's about it for today. Next time I should have some more thoughts on how I'm going to fill this in, and a start on the first expedition into the dread Coast of <something>.