Concept · About 7 minutes
Names, layers and exporting maps
Three tools form one workflow: name the geography, decide what the map shows, then render an image worth sharing. None of them changes the simulation.
The one-minute explanation
Your nation’s map is also a document. Place names let you label the geography the generator left anonymous—seas, ranges, plains. Layers decide which networks are drawn. Screenshot & Export turns the result into an image file, at a resolution and with a set of features you choose independently of what is on screen.
Place names
Open the Place Names panel to start annotating; names become editable only while that panel is open, which keeps them from being dragged by accident during normal play.
Adding a name places an empty label that you then rename—there is no dialog first. Each name carries one of three styles, which is how a reader tells geography apart at a glance:
Blue and italic, for seas, gulfs, lakes and straits. This is the style a new label starts with.
Brown and upright, for ranges, massifs and highlands.
Green-grey and upright, for plains, basins, regions and other land features.
A selected name exposes handles for rotation, letter spacing and size—the three controls that let a label follow a coastline or stretch across a mountain range the way an atlas would set it. Labels are drawn as an overlay that scales with zoom, down to a minimum readable size, so a name spanning a whole sea does not become unreadable when you zoom out.
Place names are saved with the game, and the map turns their visibility on automatically when a save containing them is loaded.
Layers
The Layers menu holds six switches. Four are the transport modes—road, rail, air and water—all visible by default. Two are off by default:
- Metropolitan draws each metro’s footprint: the union of its members’ influence circles. Useful for planning where cities will merge; see Settlements, transport service and metros. It is unavailable while viewing history.
- Route names draws the names of routes along their lines. This one switch remembers your preference between sessions; the other five reset to their defaults.
Layers are a viewing choice, not a simulation control. A hidden mode keeps running.
Where the map key lives
The legend for every symbol, colour and line style is in the in-game Help panel, not in the Layers menu. On this site the same content is spread across four reference pages, which together are the map key:
- Settlement symbols and population sizes
- Capital, provincial capital and city labels
- Transport lines and map styles
- Terrain and vegetation colours
Analysis overlays
Two overlays sit apart from the layer switches because they recolour the map rather than adding to it. Service score tints each settlement by how well it is served; Saturation recolours links by traffic pressure and offers a Peak / Avg choice. Both can be on at once, and the legend grows to match. Their meaning is covered in Transport lines and map styles and Reading the economy dashboard.
Screenshot and export
Two different outputs share one menu.
Screenshot
A screenshot captures the current viewport exactly as displayed, with a checkbox for whether to include the interface. The checkbox starts on the sensible setting—if you have already hidden the UI, it defaults to keeping it hidden.
Map export
Export renders a fresh map at your chosen resolution rather than capturing the screen, so the result does not depend on your window size or zoom. You choose:
- A style. Modern transport atlas draws in the game’s own cartographic idiom; classic web map is the flatter, familiar road-map look. Your choice is remembered between sessions.
- A resolution of 2048, 4096 or 8192 pixels, with 4096 as the default.
- What appears. A minimum settlement population filter (10,000 by default) plus switches for mountains, province boundaries and names, place names, aviation, waterways, and each road and rail grade individually. A live counter shows how many settlements of the total will appear, so you can tune the population filter without guessing.
Filtering by grade is what makes exports legible: a national overview showing only expressways and high-speed rail reads clearly at a glance, while the same map with every local track becomes noise.
Exports taken while viewing history carry the year and month in the filename, so a series of maps stays in order.
Hide UI
Hide UI clears the interface from the screen for an unobstructed look at your nation, with Escape bringing it back. It does not pause the game.
A map worth sharing
- Name the geography first. A map with an unnamed sea and range reads as a game screenshot; one with them named reads as a country.
- Decide the story. A network map wants the modes on and the population filter high; a geography map wants place names, mountains and few settlements.
- Export rather than screenshot whenever the image matters—the resolution and grade filters exist for exactly that.
- Keep a series. Exporting the same view at intervals, or from the history view, turns a save into a visual record of how the nation grew.
Related reading
- Revisiting your nation’s past — exporting maps of earlier months.
- Publishing your nation to ntgg.me — sharing the nation itself rather than an image.
- Transport lines and map styles — what every line and colour means.