Most of Bestia’s world is generated automatically, but very little of it starts explored. That gap is the point: charting new territory is how players uncover unique resources, stumble on new items, and piece together the stories behind how those items came to be. Over time the entire world is meant to be mapped collectively by the playerbase, and anyone can check that collective progress by viewing the shared world map online.

A charted map isn’t just a picture of the world — it unlocks concrete gameplay:

1. Most spells can only be targeted at locations inside an already-charted area.
2. AI-assisted movement for a controlled Bestia only works within charted territory.
3. Public world events are only announced on, and synced across, the maps players own.
4. Mineral prospecting with the Mining skill only works inside charted areas.

A few ground rules govern how maps work:

• Every player can create their own world map in-game.
• Players with the Cartography skill can merge several maps into one, combining everyone’s explored area.
• At high skill levels, a cartographer can craft magical maps that go further still — sharing custom markers with friends, or surfacing known resource locations directly on the map.

Copying someone else’s map is technically possible, but without training in Cartography it’s extremely difficult and most likely to fail.

To generate the visuals of the player map, Bestia uses the algorithm described in Terrain Map Generation and its reference implementation on GitHub.

Cartography link

New ground is charted at a theodolite, a sighting scope on a tripod. A master places a Theodolite Kit on open ground like a workbench. Each theodolite belongs to the master who placed it and runs one survey at a time.

1. Stand next to your own idle theodolite and use Cartography. Pick how wide to survey. Each try spends one Empty Paper and one Ink.
2. A needle game opens. The needle swings across a half circle, and you stop it inside a green arc, once in each of three rounds. A miss in any round fails the survey; the paper and ink are gone, and you may try again at once.
3. A won game starts 10 minutes of work at the theodolite. The work only goes on while you, or one of your own bestias, stand at it. Leave a bestia there and walk away if you like.
4. When the work is done, use the theodolite to collect the chart: a disc of the chosen size around the theodolite.

There are three sizes. Each one has a base difficulty and needs a Cartography level:

The difficulty d then changes:

• For every km from land you have already charted, difficulty increases by 10.
• For every 1% of mana concentration at the theodolite, difficulty increases by 0.5.
• Every level of Cartography reduces difficulty by 10.

d sets the needle game. At d = 0 the needle takes 2.4 s for a full swing and the arc is 40° wide. At d = 120 and above it takes 0.7 s and the arc is 6° wide. Values in between scale evenly.

The companion app can start a survey at your theodolites and play the needle game too.

Explored World Map link

A map is an item. Each chart records the ground it covers as a grid of 64 m cells, and what a player sees on their map is everything covered by all the charts they carry. Charts come from surveying with Cartography, and every new master starts with a chart of the 5 km around their home. The explored area belongs to the chart, not to the player, so a chart that is traded, dropped or looted takes its ground with it.

The server draws a single base map of the whole world, and each player’s map is cut out of it:

1. Ground no chart covers is never sent, not even as an empty picture, so nothing about it reaches the client.
2. Ground that is fully charted is the same picture for everyone and can be cached for good.
3. At the edge of a chart, the map fades out over the last 160 m instead of stopping at a hard line.

What a Map Shows link

On charted ground a map shows the terrain, water, roads, settlements, ruins and landmarks, each labelled with its name. Close in, at the scale of a town’s streets, it also marks the services: the places where a player can actually get something done.

A few rules decide what appears:

• Only on charted ground. A shop one street past the edge of your charts stays hidden until you chart that street.
• Only what someone runs. A business appears once the town has someone who works there, so every marker is a place you can walk into and use. More trades will show up as more townsfolk take them on.
• The world as it is now. A map is not a snapshot of the day it was charted. If a building is knocked down or a ward stone is broken, it disappears from every map that covers it.
• Opening hours. Selecting a service shows its name, its settlement and its keeper’s hours, and a service that is closed is drawn dimmed. Selecting it a second time sets off towards it. A shop is open while its keeper is at work, and a keeper may arrive or leave up to half an hour off the hours shown.

Using the Map link

The explored world map is the same map in the game (M) and in the companion app, and it is worked the same way in both: one action asks what is there, and a card says what can be done about it. Nothing needs a second mouse button, so a phone works the map as well as a desk does.

The Card link

What a click or a tap opens. It names what is there - a town, a shop, an inn, one of your marks, one of your Bestias or open ground - with its grid reference and how far it is from the Bestia you are sending, and offers Go here, Add to route and, on open ground, Mark here.

A town’s card also lists every shop, market, inn, temple, guard post and ward stone it has that you have charted, each with its own Go - even at a zoom where none of them are drawn.

Grid References link

The world is cut into squares of 8 km, named like a chessboard: a letter for the column counted from the west, a number for the row counted from the south. A 128 km world runs from A1 in the south-west to P16.

Inside a square a place is given by equal halves of digits, east first and then north, and the more digits the finer the cell:

The first digit of each half is 0 to 7, since a square is 8 km across. H12 4137 is the same as H12 41 37.

The map shows the reference under the pointer, and the card shows the reference of whatever it is about. The search box takes a reference or the name of a place you have charted. For a GM, /mm takes one too - /mm H12 41 37, or a settlement’s name.

Marks, Routes and Preferences link

Your marks, your saved routes and how you like the map drawn - which kinds of service the legend hides, and whether the grid is shown - are kept on the server, in your notebook, one for each master. The game and the companion app read and write the same notebook, so a route saved in one shows up in the other at once, without reloading. A master keeps up to 200 marks and 32 routes.

Settings that belong to one device rather than to you - graphics, sound, the window - stay on that device.