WIP - Mto

[Axiem]

Hey everyone! I've been working on a conworld, Mto, for a while, and have finally decided to start getting into some of the mapping sorts of things, and I finally decided to stop lurking so much here and actually post something.

Mto itself is slightly smaller than Earth (97% by radius), with a slightly shorter day (98%) and a slightly longer year (104%).

Ultimately my goals with mapping are to:
- End up with a reasonably topographic map of the world
- Figure out a climate map
- Figure out the various nations and map their current political borders

From there I can work out other things (like crops), but the maps come first.

I realize there's a "sample size of one" problem with all sorts of "is this plausible/realistic" questions. Ultimately, what I'm interested in is whether or not something is distinctly implausible, so it can be changed.

What I have so far is building up the major plates and their interactions, and a very rough sort-of sketch of landforms. By no means are any of these final coastlines; instead, it's just rough ideas of where land is going to be and roughly what it's shaped like. While I know some topography sorts of things in my mind, I don't have them particularly marked yet.

I also am not going into deep depths on all of the plates; I'm just handling the major ones for now.

You can find the whole suite of maps up here. Here is also just the basic equirectangular map with plates numbered:



The subduction zones are between 7 and 8, and then everything running into 10. The arrows are not correlated with velocities or anything, I just can't draw arrows well in GPlates.

While I'm open to any and all feedback (I would love it, in fact), I'm currently most interested in if there's anything glaringly unrealistic or wrong about my plates, their movements/interactions, and the rough landmasses that are resulting.

I'm also looking ahead and thinking about climate; I have ideas of what sorts of climate the various places will have, but I can't help but wonder if I'll end up with any surprises.

Once I more-or-less finalize the plates and general landforms, I'm going to move into actually working on more reasonably mapping the landforms and starting to add topography. But I'd rather make sure I'm not going down a wrong path this early before delving into that more time-consuming matter.

I'm also a bit paralyzed with deciding whether I want to start doing topography in raster or vector, but I'm sure I can make a decision there.

As noted, I'd love to get some feedback on the plates and landforms for now, and probably advice on how to do topography and such later. I hope to be able to move into those soon and start sharing them.

[Jean-Abdel]

There are a few things you must pay attention to when building a realistic map with plate tectonics: are plates' mouvements ok relative to each other, taking in account where are the oceanic ridges ? Does continents originally coming from the same plate match (like Africa and South America)? I advise to use several arrows for plates rotation, which usually happens when the ridge don't spread at the same rate everywhere. Here, it seems like the second is ok but I'm not sure if there's a ridge between 7 and 9 or 1 and 2...
Otherwise your map is very interesting and hope to see more soon!

[Axiem]

7 and 9 are diverging from each other, so should end up with a ridge though it's not as clear as if they were moving directly away from each other.

1 and 2 is more interesting because they're both effectively converging as they move up the globe and have less space to work with. Farther south it's more complicated, and I'm not really entirely sure what's going on there, but there may be microplates that make up the difference in there.

Those are good things for me to think about, for sure.