Map Drawing 🗺️

11 min readUpdated 2026-09-20

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Dungeon maps for your game, the village in your novel, a travel plan, even your floor plan — draw a tiled grid map right on the mind map canvas. Inspired by Etrian Odyssey's map drawing and the board games Cartographers and Railroad Ink. 😎

← Back to mind map basics: Mind Map

Turning it on and off 🎬

In the mind map toolbar, press the Map draw button right next to the drawing button. The m key toggles it too.
To leave, press the button again, hit Esc, or right-click an empty spot.
The map coexists with cards and arrows on the same canvas — feel free to place note cards on top of your map.

The map toolbar is a thin vertical rail on the left, just like the drawing toolbar: six tools (terrain · wall · path · stamp · move · eraser), your current pick, and ⚙.
The swatch button under the tools shows what is selected (a colour for terrain, a preview for stamps). Tap it and that tool's palette opens to the right of the rail; pick one and it closes right away.
⚙ holds theme, cell size and the map name & compass; ✕ at the top leaves map mode. On a phone the rail hugs the left edge, so it barely covers anything.
Drag the ⠿ handle at the top to move the rail wherever you like (fixed on phones).

Four styles — same map, different outfits 🎨

Press ⚙ in the toolbar to pick the mood. Switching themes never touches your data (only the look changes).

Parchment 📜: cream paper with hand-drawn, wobbly tiles. Perfect for fantasy world and village maps (Cartographers vibes).
Grid paper 📘: navy graph paper with a crisp grid. The classic dungeon/labyrinth look (Etrian Odyssey vibes). Icons sit on bright tile chips so they stay readable on the dark background.
Marker board 🖍️: whiteboard and markers. Great for road/rail planning and diagram-style maps (Railroad Ink vibes).
RPG illustration 🌿: a soft, pixel-free game-art look. Instead of fencing each terrain with an outline, meadow, forest, hill, sand and shoreline flow into one another through curves and blended mid-tones, with no grid and no dark borders. Forest canopies overlap for depth, hills become low overlapping ridges, desert and snow become long drifting dunes, and marshes get pools and reed clumps. Best suited to wide outdoor maps.
You can pick a style from the generator panel as well as from ⚙ (names and swatches in two columns). Parchment is the default, and older versions of the app show an unknown style as parchment.
Whichever theme you pick, the map sits on a soft drop shadow, like a sheet of paper laid on a desk (on screen only — an exported image is the sheet, so no shadow is drawn there).

Painting terrain 🌊

Brush: pick from 20 terrains — grass, water, forest, hills, desert, farmland, dungeon floor, lava and more — and drag to paint. Brush sizes 1·2·3 (cells).
Hills are gently rolling country. The painted area is plainly visible, and sparse rounded contour marks on top say "hills". (Sharp mountains are no longer a terrain — they are a stamp you place exactly where you want one.)
There are also swamp, wasteland, blighted land and sanctuary 🌫️ — swamp gets standing water and reeds, wasteland gets finely cracked dry earth, blighted land is violet with glowing veins of poison (the only violet in the palette, so it's easy to spot), and sanctuary is pale gold with a soft halo. Handy for cursed marshes, ruined flats and holy ground.
There are also an urban district and a mountain range 🏙️⛰️ — the urban district is a grey-violet ground packed with building blocks of every size, good for painting a whole inhabited area larger than a village, while the mountain range draws ridges that carry on across cells, so the wider you paint the more it reads as a real range. (Want a single peak? The mountain stamp is still there — terrain is the "rough ground", a stamp is "the landmark right here".)
Fill (paint bucket): recolor a connected region at once.
Cell too big or small? Switch the cell size (20/40) under ⚙.

Drawing walls 🧱

Draw walls, fences, doors, and secret doors along tile edges — perfect for splitting rooms and corridors.
Walls follow the direction you drag. Drag sideways and you get only horizontal segments; drag down and only vertical ones — a wobbly hand never spawns stubs off to the side. For a room, draw four strokes or use Auto-wall below.
Auto-wall: wraps the outer boundary of your painted terrain with walls in one go (great for dungeon rooms). You can still erase and edit the walls afterwards.

Connecting roads, rails, and rivers 🛤️

A Railroad Ink-style track tool with five kinds: road, rail, river, footprints, dotted line.

Drag and the track follows your hand; tap to place a straight piece. Tap an existing piece to rotate it 90°!
The stacking order is fixed: river (bottom) → road → rail → dotted line → footprints (top). A rail always runs over a road.
Footprints 👣 and a dotted line ⋯ are drawn the same way. Footprints are marks stamped alternately left and right along the path — perfect for a trail or a route someone walked; the dotted line is an even row of dots, handy for borders and routes you have not settled on yet. Neither of them builds a bridge — they are markings, not civil engineering.
A road and a rail meeting in one cell does not create a station — most of the time that's just a level crossing. Want a station? Place the train station stamp 🚂 (where the stations are is yours to decide).
Run a road or a rail over water and it simply becomes a bridge 🌉 — there is no tool to pick.
Cross sea or shallows and a paper-coloured deck is laid down with abutments at both ends. Cross several cells and a pier appears at every seam between them, so a long bridge builds itself; cross a single cell and you get a short one. Cross a thin river at right angles and a little bridge lands right there.
A route that runs into the water and stops there stays a jetty, not a bridge (a bridge has to reach land on both sides). Erase the route and the bridge goes with it, and nothing extra is written to the file.
When a river reaches the sea it grows a mouth by itself 🌊 — instead of being cut off square it spreads out towards the water while the banks trail away. The same happens when it ends inside a water cell. There is no tool to pick and nothing extra is written to the file: like a bridge it is derived from "a river ending in water", so erase the river and the mouth goes with it, and maps you drew long ago get mouths the next time you open them.
When a route ends where the terrain changes, or in front of a wall, door or fence, it no longer stops in the middle of the cell — it runs all the way to that boundary (a jetty touching the water, a road ending at the city wall). With no boundary there it still stops at the centre: that's what "not connected yet" looks like.

Stamps 🏠

41 stamps: dungeon (entrance, dungeon mouth, stairs ↑↓, chest, trap, torch, magic, warp gate), nature & settlements (mountain, tree, camp, farm, inn, house, church, library, knights, tower, castle, ruins, city, train station, port, dam), signs & bases (arrow, ○, ×, !, ?, pin, ●, ◉, clover, base flag red/blue, enemy, battle, boss, skull).
Pin 📍, filled circle ● and double circle ◉: the pin points at one exact spot; ● and ◉ are the old cartographic settlement marks (a circle for a small place, a double circle for a bigger one). The meaning is yours to decide.
The train station 🚂 is a classic steam locomotive — puffing stack, big driving wheel, cowcatcher and all. Park it beside a rail drawn with the track tool.
Base flags 🚩: a big banner on a pole planted in the ground. Red and blue, so you can split two factions, or mark a home base or an objective — the meaning is yours. They read clearly apart from the tiny pennants on towers and castles.
The arrow rotates 90° each time you re-tap it (the ↻ badge in the palette marks rotatable stamps).
The secret weapon, note links 🔗: flip the "Attach note link" switch at the top of the palette and stamp away — a searchable list of your notes pops up so you can pick one. Once a link is attached, the note's title is written right under that cell — so the map alone tells you where each stamp leads. With map mode off, hovering that stamp turns the cursor into a pointer and previews the note, and clicking opens it (on phones and tablets a tap opens it straight away, no preview) — attach a lore note to every house and your map becomes a living table of contents.
Long titles are trimmed with …, and two linked stamps sitting side by side get trimmed shorter still so their labels never overlap. Exported images carry the labels exactly as you see them.
Stamps sit on no backing plate at all — they read as drawings laid straight onto the map. Instead, on dark ground (caves, lava, sea) they automatically get a light outline, so they stay crisp anywhere.

Moving things ✥

Pick the move tool and drag a cell that holds a stamp (or a memo) — a preview follows your finger and lands on the cell you drop it on.
If the destination already holds a stamp, the two swap places (nothing is destroyed — a ⇄ badge warns you before you let go).
A stamp and a memo sharing one cell travel together. Terrain, walls and paths never move (fix those with the brush and the eraser).
Dragging an empty cell does nothing at all.

Sticky memos 📌

Stamp a memo from the palette onto a cell to attach a short note (like Etrian's red sticky notes!).
With map mode off, hover (desktop) or tap (touch) the memo cell to read it in a speech bubble.

Map name & compass 🧭

Type a map name in ⚙ and it sits as a title in the top-left of the map (leave it blank and nothing is drawn). A long name shrinks and then ellipsizes so it never spills off the sheet.
The compass sits in the bottom-right and is on by default. Turn it off in ⚙ — the setting belongs to that map.
Both live inside the sheet margin, so they never cover what you drew, and both come along in PNG / SVG export.
The compass is a classic pen-and-ink 16-point rose — degree ring, beaded tips, centre rosette and all. The rings are faint guides; only the star is bold.
It is drawn in the theme's map frame (border) colour — warm brown on parchment, pale blue on grid paper, slate grey on the marker board — so it reads as one set with the map name and the neatline.
North is always up (this is a square-grid map, so the map itself never rotates) and you read north from the longest ray. On small cells the minor rays and ticks drop away to a simple 8-point rose.

Generate one for me 🎲

Press the wand button near the bottom of the rail to pick Natural terrain or Dungeon, plus a size (Small · Medium · Large). Press Generate and a whole map appears right in the middle of what you're looking at.
Natural terrain 🏝️: an island of sea, shallows, plains, forest, hills and desert. The coastline is different every time, and a few mountains land on the highest spots. Each map rolls its own climate, so some come out lush and some come out arid.
Dungeon 🏰: rooms and corridors, the outer walls, a door wherever a corridor meets a room, and the entrance and exit stairs — all in one go. Rooms are pale blue and corridors are yellow, so you can read it at a glance. (Chests and traps are deliberately left out — that part is yours to decide. Stamp them in wherever you like.)
Don't like it? Press “Another one.” You get a fresh map in the same place at the same size. Undo next to it takes you back to before you generated (⌘Z works too — just once).
Generate on top of something you already drew and that patch is laid out fresh; a message tells you how many cells were covered, and Undo restores them exactly. Roads, rivers and memos you placed yourself are left alone.
Once it's made, it's just an ordinary map — paint over it, add stamps, extend the roads. 💪

Eraser 🧽

The eraser lets you pick what to erase: everything · terrain only · walls only · tracks only · stamps only. Handy for redrawing routes without touching your terrain.
Don't feel like scrubbing cell by cell? Hit 🗑 Clear map at the bottom of the palette — it wipes terrain, walls, paths, stamps and memos in one go. It tells you how many items it will erase first, and your map name, theme and cell size stay as they are (clear the name from ⚙ if you want it gone too).
⌘Z (undo) works as always.

Saving and exporting 💾

The map is saved inside the canvas file (.canvas). Obsidian won't display it, but the data is fully preserved — round-tripping is safe.
Maps are included in PNG/SVG exports. The SVG is a true vector identical to the screen, so it stays crisp at any zoom.
The minimap in the bottom right shows your map too, so you never get lost on a big one.

Good to know! 💡

Only square grids are supported. Hex grids would need an entirely different wall/track grammar, so we deliberately left them out (the parchment theme's organic tiles cover the fantasy-map feel!).
Map-only documents frame perfectly with ⌘0 (fit view).
Map data is an ObsiKO extension — it's not part of Obsidian's standard Canvas format (safe to round-trip).

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