Interactive Maps

Interactive Maps turns a piece of map art into a living layer of your world. Upload an image, drop pins that link to the places, characters, and factions in your World Bible, and readers can explore it on your public world page. It is a Pro worldbuilding tool that works alongside the Time Weaver, the Relationship Web, and the Consistency Sentinel.

Create a map and upload your art

Open the Maps tool, pick a world, and choose New map. You get two kinds:

• Uploaded art map for an invented world: bring your own map image.
• Real-world map to pin places on a live map of the real world (more on that below).

For an uploaded-art map, give it a title, then Upload art to drop in your base image (PNG, JPG, WebP, or AVIF, up to 100 MB). The image becomes the canvas. You can replace it any time without losing your pins, because pins are stored as positions on the map, not pixels of the image: a pin stays where you put it even if you re-export the art at a different size.

No art yet? You can still build the map. Pins, layers, and settings all work over a blank canvas, and you can add the image later.

Deep zoom for big maps

Upload a large, detailed map and it stays sharp all the way in. After the upload, the app slices the art into zoom tiles in the background, so the map loads fast and you can zoom from the whole continent down to a single street without waiting on one giant image to download. A badge in the toolbar tracks it: Preparing deep zoom while the tiles build, then Deep zoom ready. You can keep editing the whole time, and your pins move to the tiled view automatically. Small maps skip this step and load as a single image.

Real-world maps

Writing in a real place? Choose Real-world map at New map and you get a live, zoomable map of the world to pin real geography on, no art to upload. Pin a character’s home city, trace a journey across real countries, or mark where each scene happens. The pins, regions, secrets, and timeline reveals all work exactly the same as on an uploaded map, and distances read out in true kilometers.

Pick a look in the Basemap panel: Streets, Dark, Grayscale, or Vintage (a sepia, old-map style). Pan and zoom to where your story happens, then Save current view as start so readers open to the right place. Real-world maps are vector, so they stay crisp at every zoom.

Lay your own map over the real world

Drew a map of a real place, your own version of a city or coastline? On a real-world map, open the Overlay your art panel and upload it. Then pin it to the globe: click a spot on your art, then click that same spot on the map. Two points place your map (scaled and rotated to fit); add a third or more and it stretches to line up more precisely. Set the overlay’s opacity to blend it with the basemap underneath. Your art lays over the real geography, and readers see it on your public world page. This is georeferencing, the thing you would normally need GIS software for, done by clicking a few points.

Drop pins and link them to entries

Switch the toolbar to Add pin and click the map to drop one. A new pin is selected right away with its name highlighted, so you can type the name and move on. Select any pin to open its editor in the Display panel, where you can:

• Rename it.
• Give it a color.
• Link it to one or more world entries. A single place often ties to several things: a city, its ruler, and the faction that holds it. Focus the entry search and it lists your entries straight away, so you pick from what exists instead of guessing a name. Each linked entry shows by title; click one to read or edit that entry in a panel over the map, without leaving the map. On your public map, every linked entry becomes a link to its page.
• Mark it Secret (more on that below).

Back in Pan mode, drag any pin to reposition it and the move saves on its own. Clicking a pin selects it for editing; its linked entries open from the panel. The Display panel also lists every pin on the map, so you can select, rename, or delete from there. Dropped one by mistake? Press Delete to remove the selected pin, Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z) to undo your last placement or move, or Ctrl+Shift+Z (Ctrl+Y) to redo it.

Star maps for sci-fi

Writing among the stars? Choose Star map at New map and you get a dark, generated starfield to pin star systems, planets, and stations on, no art to upload. It works like an uploaded-art map underneath, so you get the same markers, regions, nesting, and fog, plus the coordinate grid is perfect for light-years or parsecs (open it in the Display panel and set your unit). Want a different sky? Regenerate the starfield for a fresh arrangement, and set its density for a sparse field or a crowded one. Once you have a sky you like, it stays put, so your map looks the same every time you open it.

Nest places: maps inside maps

A place on one map can open a more detailed map of its own. Open a marker and choose Add interior map to create a sub-map for it: a castle’s floors and rooms, a city’s districts, a star system’s planets. You drop straight into the new map with a breadcrumb back up, and the Places panel lists everything nested inside the current map so you can step through the whole hierarchy. Readers drill in the same way: clicking a marker that has an interior map opens it. Combine the pieces however you like: a region map whose city pin opens a city map whose castle pin opens an interior whose floors are overlay layers and whose rooms are markers.

Group your markers with categories

A busy map gets unreadable fast. Give your pins categories (Cities, Battles, Characters, Routes, or your own) and each category gets a color and a spot in the legend. Click a category in the legend to hide or show every marker in that group at once, so you can focus on just the battles, or just the trade routes. There’s a filter box too: type a name to find a marker on a crowded map. New maps come with a starter set of categories; open Manage categories in the Markers panel to rename them, recolor them, give each one an icon (a castle, a sword, a star, and more), add your own, or remove ones you don’t use. Readers get the same legend on your public map, so they can explore by group as well. Set a pin’s category from its editor.

Auto-pins from your locations

If you have already built location entries in your World Bible, you do not have to place them by hand. The Add pins from locations action (the sparkle on the Pins section) drops a pin for every location entry that is not already on the map, laid out on a light grid for you to drag into place. It is a running head start that neither World Anvil nor Campfire gives you: your map and your bible stay in step.

Overlay layers

A single map often wants more than one view: political borders over the terrain, the upper floor of a keep over the ground floor. Add a layer in the Display panel, upload its image, and it stacks over the base art. Toggle layers on and off with the eye icon, set each layer’s opacity, and reorder them. When a map has a lot of layers, give them group headings (eras, floors, factions) and collapse a group to keep the panel tidy. A map can hold up to a dozen layers.

Measure distances

Switch the toolbar to Measure and click a start point, then an end point. A live line follows your cursor between the two, and the distance reads out as you go, so you are never guessing where the second click lands. To read real-world distances instead of pixels, set the map’s scale in the Display panel: a value and a unit, read as “this many units per 100 pixels of the base image” (for example, 10 km). The scale bar in the corner then tracks true distances as you zoom.

Pan and zoom with your mouse or trackpad. Click the compass in the corner to turn the map (north, then east, south, west) for art that is not drawn north-up, and your pins turn with it. The full-screen button gives the canvas the whole window. A distance ruler, a rotating compass, and a scale bar are things World Anvil does not give you.

Coordinate grid

Imagined worlds can carry their own coordinates. Open Coordinate grid in the Display panel and choose Add a coordinate grid to lay an invented system over the map: set where the origin sits (the value at the left and top edges), how many units the map spans across and down, an optional rotation, and a unit name like “leagues”. Once it is on, a readout in the corner shows the coordinate under your cursor as you move, and a small go to field recenters the map on any coordinate you type. Readers get the same readout on your public map, so “meet me at 1240, 890 leagues” lands somewhere real. The grid travels with a world export and comes back on import. Remove it any time to switch the readout off.

Find things on a crowded map

Every pin shows its name on the canvas, so you can read the map at a glance. When pins crowd together they merge into a numbered cluster instead of a wall of markers. Zoom in, or click the cluster, and it spreads back into individual labeled pins as they find room. Names that would overlap step aside so the ones you can see stay readable. Region pins (the ones with a drawn shape) are never clustered, so borders and zones always read clearly.

Nest maps from world to city

A pin can open another map instead of an entry. Link a pin to a child map and clicking it drills down: world to region, region to city, city to a single building. A breadcrumb across the top traces the chain back up, so a reader never gets lost, and you can climb back to the parent map in one click. The tool guards against loops, so a map can never accidentally become its own ancestor.

Secrets and timeline reveals

Worldbuilding has spoilers, and your map respects them.

• Mark a map or an individual pin as Secret and it disappears from your public world page entirely. You still see it (and a Secret badge) as the owner; readers never do, and a secret pin never leaks the name of the entry it links.
• Give a pin a reveal point (a timeline position, set on the pin) and it stays hidden until your story reaches that moment. Flip the Timeline reveal toggle in the Display panel to preview the map the way a reader meets it before those reveals land: cities that have not been founded yet, kingdoms that have not fallen yet, simply are not there. It is a fog of war that ties your map to the Time Weaver.

Themes

Each map carries its own canvas theme (parchment, blueprint, and the rest of the worldbuilding palette), set in the Display panel. The theme colors the canvas, the compass, the ruler, and the default pin color, so a map reads as a deliberate object rather than a screenshot.

On the public world page

Maps you keep in the bible and leave public appear as a Maps tab on your world’s public page, each as a card. Opening one gives readers a read-only canvas: they can pan, zoom, measure with the ruler, follow a pin to an entry, and drill into nested maps, but nothing is editable and every secret stays hidden. An entry that is pinned on a map also shows a Pinned on link in its own backlinks, so a reader who lands on a city’s page can hop straight to the map it sits on.

In the editor

You do not have to leave your draft to work on a map. The Maps panel in the editor’s tools rail lists every map in the linked world with its pin and layer counts. Click one and the full editor opens in a panel over your manuscript: drop pins, draw regions, edit settings, link entries, everything the standalone tool does. Close it and you are back in your scene where you left off. Drafting a place you have mapped is a glance away.

Import and export

Maps travel with your world. A full world export (and your whole-account export) includes every map with its layers, pins, and a georeferenced overlay’s control points inline, coordinates and all. Re-importing that JSON into Inkbreaker rebuilds the maps exactly, reconnecting each pin to all of its linked entries and each nested map to its parent.

If you are bringing a world in from elsewhere, pin positions come across even when the other tool stores them differently. Inkbreaker keeps positions as a fraction of the map (0 to 1) so they stay put at any zoom, and the importer converts foreign coordinates for you: World Anvil-style pixel coordinates are divided by the base image’s width and height, and latitude / longitude pins are placed against the map’s geographic bounds when the export includes them. The original numbers are preserved alongside the converted ones, so nothing is lost. Very large base images are served at a sized variant so a world map does not download a hundred megapixels to show a thumbnail.

Tips

• Link pins to entries as you place them. A pin that just says “Tower” is a label; a pin that links your Tower entry is a doorway into everything you know about it.
• Use layers for “the same place, a different truth”: the map as the empire draws it versus the map as the rebels draw it.
• Set the scale early. A ruler with no scale measures pixels, which no character has ever walked.