Hex Map Generator — a free fantasy hexmap maker

This is a free hex map maker for tabletop role-playing games — D&D and the rest of them — and for worldbuilding, and for anyone who wants an island that did not exist a moment ago. Open it in a browser, press the button, and it draws a new one: terrain across a hex grid, settlements placed where the land suits them, and roads routed between those settlements.

Every hexagon map here sits on a hexagonal grid of flat-topped hexes. Eight terrain types are generated — water, mountains, forest, grassland, hills, desert, swamp and brush — each with its own hand-drawn symbol rather than a flat fill. Rivers run down from the mountains to the sea, settlements come in three sizes, cities down to villages, and every map gets a name.

The generation is random: every press rolls a different island, and the map fills whatever screen it lands on, phone to widescreen. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored. The whole hexmap generator runs in your browser, needs no account, and costs nothing — a free online hex map maker that works anywhere a browser does. Press the button again for a different world.

The generator is MIT licensed and the source is on GitHub. Terrain is grown from a seed so coastlines stay plausible, settlements are scored against the land under them, and roads are then routed between settlements around whatever the terrain makes expensive to cross.

Read the code on GitHub →

Why a hex map generator at all goes back to Weewar, a browser strategy game from the mid-2000s that built its worlds on exactly this kind of grid. The long version, on my blog →