Extrasolar colony world

[Tiluchi]

Wow what a fantastic worldbuilding concept idea! Newly settled planets have always been an idea I've been fascinated with. Do you have any plans to sketch out the geography of the planet as a whole, or will you be focusing on this regional map? Though be warned, trying to put together a coherent planetary map is a dangerous rabbithole to go down, especially if you're focused on geography and climates...

I rather like your map style, though I think you made the right decision in transferring to doing it digitally- so much easier to undo mistakes! And with some practice you can really go back to the "hand-drawn" feel even when you're using Photoshop or Gimp.

I won't comment too much on the map itself for now as you'll be redrawing it, but just a note on the place names- not all place names translate well literally from one language to another. For instance, there's a city in Bolivia called Santa Cruz de la Sierra, which translates literally to "Holy Cross of the Hills"- a rather awkward name in English. Similarly, as a Spanish speaker, "Valle Ventoso" sounds a little... off, for reasons I can't explain. Like it's a name I'd maybe use for a suburban housing project, but not a village. On the other hand, "Vallegrande" (Big Valley) is a common place name in Spanish-speaking areas, if you want to stick with the same pattern. Oh, and it should be "Rocas Amarillas"

Overall great work! I'm excited to see where this goes.

[jshoer]

Thanks, Tiluchi! I appreciate the corrections - if you have any better ideas for names, I'm all ears. I was hoping to have names that sounded like they were describing distinctive features of the land.

Diamond, don't worry, I plan to keep going in the same direction...

[Tiluchi]

Hmm, place names... I can only help with Spanish, Portuguese and Tagalog, of which it seems your world will only include the first. Some quick perusal of toponyms in Spanish-speaking countries reveals some names that could be pretty easily adapted to a newly settled world. Divided by geographical feature, some ideas might be:

Río Verde (Green River)
Tres Ríos (Three Rivers)
Entre Ríos (Between Rivers)
Río Abajo (Lower River)
Salto Chico (Small Waterfall)
Quebrada Grande (Big Canyon)
Quebrada Negra (Black Canyon)
Pozo Negro (Black Pool)
Pozo Salado (Salty Pool)
Los Baños (literally "The Baths"- refers to an area with hot springs)
Aguascalientes (Hot Water)
Colinas (Hills)
Colinas Amarillas (Yellow Hills)
Barlovento (Windward)
Atalaya (Watchtower)
Atalaya del Sur (Southwatch)

Anyway, there's lots of possible variations on these, but there are examples of places with these names or similar ones all over the world, and they all sound kind of cool and are geography-related. Or if there are any other geographical features you're looking at naming things after, let me know and I'll try and think of examples

[jshoer]

Hmm, place names... I can only help with Spanish, Portuguese and Tagalog, of which it seems your world will only include the first.

Oh, cool! If you give me a fun Tagalog place name, I will totally find a spot for it!

[Azélor]

If you need help with names, I could help with French and Chinese. I don't speak Chinese well but I have some knowledge.

[jshoer]

Azelor, if you can come up with some more poetic or fun Chinese names than I got with Google Translate, I'm totally open to suggestions.

Here is a start on a digital version - I decided to play around with a more computerized style for the mountains before I go off drawing them all in perspective. What do you think?
What used to be "Valle Ventoso" is blank for whatever fun Tagalog word you suggest, Tiluchi.

Colony1.png

[acrosome]

If you google "Chinese Place Names" a number of good guides come up. Here is one, but I know that larger, more comprehensive ones are out there. Here are a few more roots, but again, I know there are better ones out there. I'm specifically thinking of one I found that gave you both pinyin and the older westernized system as spellings. I just can't find it at the moment.

EDIT-- Ah, here it is.

Otherwise I can help a little bit with Russian, but that's about it. Russian place names are seldom geographical, though. They tend to be eponymic, so old they really don't mean anything anymore, or just odd. Well, I guess Novosibirsk is geographical, and Vladivostok at least has the root for "east" in it. So maybe a few. But Velikiye Luki means "Great Onions", frex. Sokolniki means "falconers", because evidently they raised falcons there or something. I could make up stuff that is at least grammatically correct, though.

[Azélor]

These are good resources.
It's helpful if you just need a handful of names.

But if you need lots of names you can use this: http://www.mithrilandmages.com/utilities/CityNames.php
As written on the page, it uses real place names, no random ones.
I used this to complete my list of cities on my map since I had around 300 settlements to name.

There are a lot of cities and villages in China. The chances to have a name someone could recognize look very small.
Anyway, even if your city has the same name as a small village there are many cases of this on Earth.
Remember Springfield from the Simpsons, where is it? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield
Generic names are the norm, creative names are very rare. Except in a fantasy universe were we tend to pick cool names.

[jshoer]

Wasn't the reason that "The Simpsons" writers picked "Springfield" because there is a Springfield in every state?

So as of now, I wasn't planning to add any more towns - though I am up for changing the names that I generated with Google Translate. I'm totally reserving a Tagalog name spot. And I guess I need some physical features - I haven't done any of those yet! My only idea for a naming rule has been that I want the names to sound like the kinds of things that would organically evolve from describing the landscape, sort of like happens in the American West. But I realized that a colony ship to another world is not likely to have only English speakers on it! I figured Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi would be common. Happy to throw in some Russian or other languages, too, based on fun suggestions.

Anyway, here's the current state of the digital map - about caught up to where I had the physical map, thanks to an airplane flight and brushes with smoothing! The mountains you see are indicating ridgelines, but I will do something else for the mountain style. I don't think I really like the block shading attempt. I will also put some white blocks behind the labels.

Colony2.png

[Tiluchi]

Boy, well if the Tagalog place name is reserved, I guess I have to come through on that one! Some ideas depending on where it'll be located geographically:

Buhangin (beach)
Cagdagat (seaside)
Mahangin (windy- in case you want to continue on a similar trend!)
Mataas na Kahoy (Tall tree)
Cogón (grass)
Pangpang (cliff)
Tigbao
Tiris
Colambis
Abuyog
Buhatan

(not really sure what the last five mean, they're just cool place names from the Philippines)

Excited to see what comes of the map! Mountains drawn via ridgelines are one of my favorite styles.