One of the things I don’t write about often here is my obssession with world building — creating fantasy worlds and obssessively filling in the details. One of the favorite software products I use is ProFantasy’s excellent Fractal Terrains Pro which was recently upgraded to include a number of long asked-for features.
Fractal Terrains is designed to make it easy to create realistic pseudo-Earth like planets. The old version was pretty cool, but the new version takes it a step further. The software now allows users to export maps in several new formats (hey, everyone should have a 6 way sinusoidal projection of their fantasy world!).
It also finally does river networks and allows for simulating planetary bombardment from extra-terrestrial objects (think craters).
And, of course, everything can be exported so that it can be used in ProFantasy’s line of mapping tools centered around Campaign Cartographer Pro.