Trade Routes

Roads tell a story that pins alone can’t: how goods move, where armies march, which cities are a week apart and which are a season. A trade route in MythTapestry is a curve that threads through a series of places — the Appian Way from Rome to Brundisium, a shipping lane hopping down the coast, a caravan track across the desert.

Note

Trade routes are part of the world’s economy features. If you don’t see the route tools, enable the trade-route type for your world in its settings — see World Settings. Worlds set up with an economy during onboarding already have them.

Building a route

A route is a trade-route entity plus an ordered list of the places it passes through (its waypoints). You can build the whole thing on the map:

1. In edit mode, choose Build Route (T).
2. Pick an existing trade route to extend, or create a new one right there by naming it and choosing its kind (land, sea, river, caravan, and so on).
3. Click the places the route runs through, in order — each click adds the next waypoint.

The route draws as a smooth curve flowing through those places in sequence, styled to its kind (sea and river lanes dashed, roads solid). Each waypoint has to be a place the map can find a spot for — the same resolution characters use — so build your route through pinned locations or location-linked regions.

Reading a route

Open a route to see its details:

• Its kind — land, sea, river, caravan, and the rest.
• Its travel time, if you’ve set one — “12 days” end to end.
• Its total distance, measured along the curve through every waypoint.
• Its waypoints in order, which you can reorder or trim.

Distances are computed from where the waypoints actually sit on your image, so a route that detours through three cities is correctly longer than the straight hop between its endpoints.

Tip

You don’t have to draw routes by hand: importing an Azgaar map brings in its whole road and sea-lane network as ready-made routes, with real distances along each leg taken from the map’s own scale.

Reordering and trimming

Click a route and its Properties panel lets you move a waypoint earlier or later in the sequence, or remove one entirely. The curve and the distances redraw to match. As with every map edit, Ctrl+Z undoes and Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes, so reshaping a route is safe to fiddle with.

Bending a route

A road rarely runs straight between two towns. In edit mode, open a route and choose Shape route to bend it by hand.

Click a point to select it, then Alt-drag out of it to pull out a pair of handles — drag those to curve the road. Handles stay mirrored for a flowing bend; double-click a point to break it into a sharp turn instead.

To steer the road somewhere no town sits — around a mountain, along a coast — click the + on a stretch of road to drop a shape point. Shape points are pure trajectory: they bend the line without claiming anywhere is a place. They show as small hollow dots, and you can drag them freely or shift-click to remove one.

Town waypoints stay put while you shape: a town sits where its pin or region puts it, so you move it by moving the pin, not the road. You can still pull its handles to curve the road as it arrives and leaves.

Shaping is remembered per map — bending a route on your province map leaves the same route untouched on the continent map, where the framing is different.

Everything undoes with Ctrl+Z (redo with Ctrl+Shift+Z), and travellers in transit follow the road exactly as you drew it.

When a waypoint disappears

Delete a town that a route ran through and the road keeps its shape — the bend survives as a shape point, so nothing moves unexpectedly. The route just no longer claims to pass through anywhere there.

Recorded distances are measured from the route’s start, so:

• A town in the middle went — the starting point still stands, so the route offers to recalculate from the drawn path whenever you want its numbers to match the winding road.
• The first or last town went — the measuring point itself is gone, so your distances are left exactly as you set them and nothing is recalculated. Add a new end waypoint when you want them measured again.

Routes and journeys

Trade routes do more than decorate the map. When a character travels between two places that both sit on the same route, MythTapestry can draw their journey following the road rather than cutting straight across country. A caravan from Rome to Brundisium curves down the Appian Way as you scrub through the days of the trip. That behaviour lives in Maps Over Time.

Next steps

• Maps Over Time — watch travellers move along your routes.
• Placing Locations & Regions — the waypoints routes connect.
• World Settings — turn on economy features if the route tools are missing.