Branching Caves, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Hello Adepts/Experts! Do you like caves but hate mining equipment? Well look no further, because I kicked those grimy ol' miners out of these caves and burned all their cruddy barrels and handcarts just so you can have a little bit of peace and quiet! This twisting cave system is prepped and ready to be whatever you want it to be, whether it a cave bear's den or 20 cave bears' den as well as every number of cave bears in-between. 

I revisited this map and added glowing ore in the walls, you can find that version here!

1. My biggest struggle with this map was deciding just how mine-y to make it. As you can tell, I stepped back from what was probably a pretty excessive amount of tracks winding through the caves to an amount which you might consider slightly less than would be helpful to miners. I don't know anything about mining though and frankly I'm not willing to research it enough to be confident about it, so I decided that this is a somewhat small-scale mine- probably belonging to some small mining village. 

The layout of the caves themselves I made with a tunnel-centric design, though not so much that the propless version would look too unnatural. With mining equipment and tracks around this map has the feel that the caves were mined out over time, though without the equipment it just looks like a series of winding caves and tunnels. I think it kinda looks like something you'd find in Skyrim actually, one of my favorite games, which I enjoy. 

2. Once again I got to use my cave wall style which is so rarely seen: rock wall lines trailing off into the darkness. I went a little bit further with it this time by adding some more small details in the darkness such as a couple more horizontal contour details and a few hash marks here and there for texture. Without color I think it looks a little unusual, but with shading and my other various effects the eye skips over the parts that don't need attention (the areas inside the wall), which is honestly such a great time-saver that I don't have to worry about drawing. The only issue with the wall style is that it somewhat over-complicates the map and overwhelms the viewer with details. This might be a problem with cave maps in general, but I'm sure I could find away to reduce that in the future.

My only regret about this step is the mine track, which I should have spent some time on to make look more natural. I used the same pen stroke for it as everything else but the outline looks so much bolder on the track than elsewhere. I think I would bump it down a few points and focus on fluctuating the pen weight for a little less of a consistent outline as well. Well, at least it stands out as the center point of the map and isn't getting lost in the rest of this maps' details. 

3. The browns for this week's map turned out to be a huge pain in my ass, who would have thought? Literally everything is brown. 

Q: Why is the ground's brown different than the walls', aren't they the same stone? A: Yes, but no one wants to see that map where you have study it closely to figure out what is and isn't solid ground. This reads well with a glance at the very least. Q: Why is it so bright in there? Where are the light sources? And where did all the cast shadows go? A: This map with realistic lighting would be so dark and shadowy that only Drow would appreciate it. I gave up on realistic cave lighting long ago with my first cave map and never looked back- these days the best I can hope for for caves is that it's nice to look at and isn't massively confusing, which I think I accomplished here.