March 9, 2026
Hex appeal, hot takes
Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse
Gorgeous hex island maps wow fans as 'AI vs not AI' banter erupts
TLDR: A dev built seeded medieval island maps from 4,100 hex tiles using a puzzle-like method; there’s a live demo and open code. Comments gush over the visuals, spar over “AI” vs classic procedural tricks, and compare it to Hytale’s editor and fantasy-map styles, signaling big interest in world‑gen tools.
A solo dev dropped a jaw‑dropping map toy that builds medieval islands like a puzzle, and the internet lost it. Think Carcassonne but on a computer: tiles with matching edges click together to form rivers, roads, and coasts. You can try the live demo and poke the code yourself. The thread opened with pure adoration — “Gorgeous,” “real engineering skills” — but then came the spicy joke: one commenter yelled “Stop playing your AI garbage,” and another shot back that this is not AI, it’s old‑school procedural magic. Cue a mini‑debate about buzzwords vs. craft, with folks fiercely defending the art of classic algorithms.
Beyond the meme skirmish, the collab energy was real. One fan begged for a mashup with the fantasy‑map vibe of Here Dragons Abound, while another pointed to Hytale’s new world‑building editor that lets anyone design biomes, lighting up a “democratized tools vs. artisan code” discussion. Meanwhile, casual readers appreciated the plain‑English explainer: hex tiles have six edges (more rules than squares), so the dev split the world into smaller chunks to avoid dead ends. Verdict: the community is dazzled, a little territorial about what counts as “AI,” and very ready to remix this into even bigger worlds.
Key Points
- •The project procedurally generates medieval island maps from ~4,100 hex cells across 19 grids in about 20 seconds.
- •It uses the Wave Function Collapse algorithm, adapted to hex tiles with six-edge matching constraints.
- •There are 30 tile types with edge descriptors and weights; each has 6 rotations and 5 elevation levels, totaling 900 states per cell.
- •The WFC workflow includes selecting the lowest-entropy cell, collapsing to a valid state, and propagating constraints; maps are seeded and deterministic.
- •To handle large grids, the map is split into 19 hex subgrids solved independently with matching border constraints, supported by backtracking.