Open Westeros

A community-built, Google Earth–style 3D atlas of the Known World. Spin the planet, dive into King's Landing, walk the walls of Winterfell — and help build the rest.

Live preview: open-westeros.vercel.app — public.

Manifesto

Westeros has been drawn a thousand times, but never mapped as a place you can fly through. Open Westeros is an attempt to do that together, in the open.

1. Open by default. The code is MIT-licensed. Every decision, tool and pipeline lives in this repo. Pull requests aren't just accepted — they are the plan.
2. Community built. No single person can model a continent. Each castle, city, road and river is a contribution. If you love a corner of the Seven Kingdoms (or Essos, or beyond the Wall), it is waiting for you.
3. Canon first, sources always. Sizes, distances and layouts follow the books and official maps first, then well-argued fan reconstructions. Every number in src/config.ts says where it came from. When canon is silent, we say so.
4. Honest scale. One planet (radius 6,915 km), one coordinate system, real metres. A castle is as big as the text implies — not as big as looks cool.
5. Reproducible, not redistributed. Copyrighted art (GRRM's maps, game assets, mods) is never committed. Instead we ship the tools that turn your own copies into the atlas, so anyone can rebuild it and nobody's work is taken.
6. Small, readable pieces. Prefer the simplest thing that works. A new site should be a config entry, one view module and one data pipeline — nothing more.
7. Credit the makers. Artists, modders, cartographers and wiki editors made this possible. Their names stay attached to what they made.

What exists today

• The globe — the Known World on a planet ~8% larger than Earth. The default vector map is drawn from polygons only: coastlines, rivers, lakes and the Westeros regions from the Known World SVG maps by Abjiklam, plus terrain (plains, forest, swamp, desert, hills, mountains, snow). The ground under a 3D place is the same vector map.
• King's Landing — a 3D city generated from the painted city map: ~20,000 houses, walls and gates, the Red Keep, the Great Sept, the Dragonpit, terrain, lore for every landmark.
• Winterfell — Shadiversity's book-accurate design (via the Skyrim port The True Winterfell SE), converted mesh by mesh and placed exactly.
• Place names — ~620 named places read off the maps (cities, castles, regions, seas, rivers, islands…), each with a symbol for its kind, coloured by kind and shown at sensible camera heights. The sidebar legend has a checkbox per kind, and every name is searchable and flies you there.
• Google Earth–style controls — search across all places, compass, tilt, zoom, scale bar, coordinates, a card on click for regions and landmarks.

Run it

npm install
npm run dev

The globe needs nothing but the vector data in src/. The 3D places need generated data in public/ (ignored by git). Build it from your own copies of the sources:

Source (not included)	Put it at	Then run
King's Landing painted map + heightmap	assets/sites/kingsLanding/	npm run analyze
The True Winterfell SE (Nexus Mods #94816), extracted	assets/sites/winterfell/mod/	npm run winterfell:collect (needs Skyrim SE) then npm run winterfell

Without the Winterfell data the app falls back to a procedural Winterfell; King's Landing needs its sources.

Vector data

The vector map is built from the SVG maps in assets/world/svg/ (Location_map_Known_world.svg and Locator_map_Dorne_in_Westeros.svg from the Known World series by Abjiklam, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — credit them wherever the map is shown): node tools/world/svg-vector.mjs writes src/vector-world.json (land, lakes, rivers, regions in plain lat/lon degrees, which is the project's canonical frame). Terrain polygons in src/terrain.json were classified from the political atlas by colour (tools/world/terrain-classify.mjs) and vectorised in QGIS (tools/world/terrain-vectorize.py). tools/world/align-canon.mjs registered the older raster frame to the SVG frame (CANON in tools/world/georef.mjs).

Places and alignment

tools/world/places.raw.txt lists every named place with its position on the painted map and/or the political atlas. npm run places places them by the consensus georeference (tools/world/georef.mjs) and regenerates src/world-data.ts. Add a place by adding a line.

Deploy

The preview is deployed from a machine that has the generated data — Git pushes do not deploy, because the data isn't in the repo:

npx vercel deploy --prod

.vercelignore uploads the code and the generated public/ data, never the raw sources in assets/. Deployment Protection (SSO) is turned off, so the site is public.

How it's built

src/
  config.ts            planet size and the 3D places — the single source of truth for scale
  geo.ts               lat/lon ↔ planet ↔ local site frames
  globe/               the planet: vector terrain and region layers, place names
  sites/               one folder per zoomable place (+ shared SiteScene, primitives)
  ui/                  compass, zoom, scale bar & coordinates
tools/
  world/               vector map and place data pipeline
  sites/<site>/        per-site data pipelines (image analysis, Skyrim ESM/NIF/BSA/DDS readers…)

Three.js + Vite + TypeScript, no framework. Each site is its own local scene in metres; zooming close to a 3D place on the globe hands the camera over seamlessly.

Add a place

1. Add it to SITES in src/config.ts and to tools/world/places.raw.txt (then npm run places): it is an ordinary place on the map.
2. Write a view in src/sites/<id>/ using createSiteScene (see Winterfell for the shortest example).
3. Register it in src/sites/index.ts.
4. If it needs data, add a pipeline under tools/sites/<id>/ — never commit the copyrighted inputs.

Ideas waiting for an owner: the Wall and Castle Black, Harrenhal, Casterly Rock, Oldtown and the Hightower, the Eyrie, Dragonstone, Braavos, the kingsroad between them all.

See CONTRIBUTING.md to get started.

License & credits

Code: MIT © Open Westeros contributors.

A Song of Ice and Fire and its maps © George R. R. Martin. Winterfell design © Shadiversity; Skyrim port by the authors of The True Winterfell SE; The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim assets © Bethesda Softworks. Lore summarised from A Wiki of Ice and Fire. Open Westeros is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.