Yep!
After a long time as promised the map!
I have to apologize for my long delay. I thought I could finish the map before the end of the school break, but that wasn't the case. The school eats up my time mercilessly, hence all my projects have been delayed.
First, the history of this map and why I created it.
The first idea of a map came to me at the beginning of 2019. I had a writer's block for my fanfiction, and in order to deal with it, I wanted, among other things, to create a map to be able to plan and organize places of action and march routes better.
I started with the sketch around April. I already had some ideas in my head how to connect some locations from the movies. This first sketch was about placing the areas of the Mysterious Beyond relatively to each other. In doing so, I took into account the march routes of the Gang through the movies and I also paid attention to possible clues on how the locations could be related to each other.
The second sketch became like a bird's eye view photography. I began with the first landscape features and specified the areas of the Mysterious Beyond. I tried to include as many factors as possible in order to be able to continue working as precisely as possible.
Then I started with the actual map.
The first thing I included was the Great Valley. It was almost continuously in the center of the map, from there I worked my way out.
I worked with several layers. I inserted sketches, colored areas, labeled features. That went very well in the beginning. I made the canvas larger and larger as I moved further away from the Great Valley. I reached a critical size at the moment that I drew the Great Water. At that time the canvas measured 16000 x 11000 pixels. This may seem wasteful, but I tried to keep the scale as good as possible. My orientation was: One dinosaur should be one pixel in size.
The problem: This immense screen size together with several layers brought my computer to its limits. And yet it's actually quite powerful! My 8 GB RAM caused the most problems. As soon as I opened the file, it was mostly in use.
I kept on working, but soon I had to delete the layers one after the other until I had only one. This made the process a little more difficult, but didn't really lengthen it.
By far the longest time it took to correctly place the landscape features and color the terrain. Everything should fit after all.
I think it's important not to see this map as a finished work. For me it's actually finished, I think one can work and understand it very well, but a real map needs more. Think of treasure maps or satellite images or maps in atlases. So this map is more about usefulness than beauty. But I didn't ignore the beauty factor, I think it's easier to decorate an existing map than to create it artistically from the beginning. That would follow next, but I can't tell if and when that will happen, because it's a pretty large step and I don't think my artistic skills suffice for such a design.
It is also important to note that this map may look cheap, but that does not mean a poor job. The most difficult part was finding and placing the locations. But they also had to fit together and they had to make sense and match the march routes of the Gang.
At the end, I renewed the description and translated it. I created the map in German language and translated it into English language. I hope I didn't make any mistakes.
The north is not at the upper end of the map. I oriented myself to the sun in the movies and tried to let the sun rise in the east accordingly.
I also inserted the crater from 10, but I had to cut the map to insert it, because the distance to the Great Valley is far too big. For the sake of simplicity, I have therefore displayed the crater separately, although it actually belongs on the map.
Otherwise, I have to mention that I left out some elements, especially from the series, because they were too inaccurate. Sometimes I wasn't able to find the exact position, so I preferred to leave it out.
The meaning of the colors is described in the map legend. Next to it is the compass.
I wanted to stay as Canon as possible. It should be said, however, that it is not possible to create a universal map of the Land Before Time universe. There are lots of possible ways. It seemed a bit like a Sudoku to me during the creation process: The locations are positioned relatively to each other, sometimes there is only one possible solution. But very often there was freedom. For example when drawing the march routes, which served me as a sketch and orientation for the placement of the valleys.
Some information about the map at the end:
The beginning is in the upper right corner. This is where the actions of the first movie take place.
The crater in 10 is basically at the bottom left, that means in the far north-west.
How do you think about the map? Does it make sense? Could I have put more effort into a certain place? Is something unclear, are there any questions?
Second SketchMapCraterLegendI recommend downloading the map, because the map may be too large in size for some browsers.
EDIT: corrected map:
Map 1.1