Tier 1+ 🌱 Glasmond Post: A map made in Google Sheets (Patreon)

Hey you cutie pies! Glasmond/Rose writing here!

For today I thought some of you - especially map lovers and role-players - might be interested in this map I made.

At first glance it might seem a little strange, but it's actually done in Google spreadsheets and can be change and edited very easily and by several people at the same time, all over the world.

I got this idea because the Solar Hill (a fake ns4w farming sim) community was looking for a way of adding houses to their map(s), but without bothering one and the same person again and again for the changes. 

It's by far not as pretty as one of the two original maps (last pictures, made by nunyabus1n3s & EverLeafEnby), but a very good solution for quick editing and community purpose. My map is an amalgam of those two original ones, by the way.

This whole thing was an incredible and fun learning process. Since I never have done anything like this before it started off a little basic, still with grid and no images. 

Then I figured out I could use emojis! 

This upgraded everything massively, but not every emoji works in every browser (as you can see above), and the emojis themselves also can vary depending on what is used (you can see an example here). So instead of using normal emojis, I went to emojipedia and picked my favorite emoji of all of them, copied the url and inserted a new picture in the grid with the url. In this process I learned that you could also insert pictures outside the grid and added some mountains and clouds for aesthetics. I also found out that you could "draw" on the sheet outside the grid, which was super cool, too.

You could make notes on the map with right click, too - so sweet! This way people could find out more about the locations and for example street names.

Quickly, I ran out of emojis and look for more specific ones, like a specific colored flower or fences - so I jumped over to flaticons and got everything I needed over there. You can see all of my personally added graphics in pic 7, sorted in a way so that other users can simply copy and past them to their own little spaces on the map.

Another idea followed: If I make just a roof I could put that outside the grind on a brown tile, and then a symbol, fitting to the character who owns the house, can be posted on top of it, instead of just a house symbol. People would have an easier time then finding each other. When it worked like a charm I felt myself bathing in endorphins, haha.

Slowly, other people of the community started to not only add their houses, but also the surroundings around them, like little fields or favorite fishing spots or beehives and so on, also opening hours to their shops. It filled me with SO much joy seeing that!!! It really felt like we were building a world together.

The only downside was that due to all the hundreds of added images the map can take a good while to load. So if you plan to do something like that yourself, please take this into consideration.

I later found out that some DMs already used an alike technique in sheets to build their dungeons! I felt a little dumb for not knowing, but it was also a great achievement to find it out all by myself. People like (the super cool) BodieH use formatting instead of copying (meaning that when you type "W" the tile will get automatically blue) and there are even people who build ABSOLUTELY IMPRESSIVE automatic character sheets in Google Sheets. Wow!

Here's another example I found:

To finish it off and make it look more like a tourist map I added some advertisments on the side.

▶️ If you want to explore the map for yourself you can do so here.

▶️ And if you want to experiment a little yourself, upload stuff and delete and whatnot, I made this playmat for you. When you click on "FAQ" you'll find out more about constructing.

I hope this was interesting for you! Have you ever made maps in Google Sheets? And if so, would you like to share?

Have a beautiful weekend!

🌹 Rose

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