Here are some of the generator features I was working on recently and the ones I plan to work on in the near future. But firstly, I'd like to thank you all for your amazing support! This is awesome and it makes working on this project much more fun!

Already live online:

Sandbox Persistence/Anchoring/Permalinking

Sandbox anchoring stores a sandbox in its own unique URL so it can be revisited and shared. This feature was made available thanks to our new Patreon supporters who now help me pay for the extra storage.

ZIP file download

To make it easier for you to save a sandbox, you can now download it as a ZIP file using a button in the sidebar. This feature utilizes a bit more server time. Here again, thank you! Patreon supporters.

Optimized images

I've moved away from using PNG images and started using WEBP images. This reduced the total size of any generated sandbox page by a factor of ×7 (from about ~14Mb to ~2Mb). It should make the pages more responsive in some tablets or phones.

Duplicates avoidance

Due to the sheer size of the content, duplicate region names, faction names or other names did eventually pop out here and there. I've added an experimental duplicates avoidance feature that should help get rid of these in most cases.

Coming soon:

Players handouts

The players handout will include a copy of the hex map and some well known details about the realm and the players settlement of origin. There's a prototype bundled in the zip file, but it requires more work to be usable.

Random wilderness encounters

I'm also working on adding additional random encounters tables to various places, either to complement or replace the current pre-rolled encounters.

Things to follow:

On-demand generation with parameters

I already have the core of this working, but it will require more computing resources from the server so I would need to wait before making this generally available. This feature will also allow content creators to experiment with their own full version of the sandbox generation model.

Printing-friendly output

One of the first things some of us tried to do is print the generated page, only to find out it has somewhere between 600-665 pages. I'm going to dedicate some time in the near future to produce a print optimized version.

Some early experiments are looking very promising :)

That's it for now. I'll catch up with you again soon.

Enjoy the crawl!

Ithai