Random City Map Generator

Lay out a town that never existed -- a river, an angled street grid, blocks, a park and a square -- drawn fresh from a random seed and copyable as SVG.

What makes a drawn map read as a city?

Four things, and a grid alone is not one of them. A city plan needs water, because rivers and coasts are what most street layouts were arranged around; a grid that is slightly off true north, because almost none are aligned to it; blocks of varying size, since a uniform lattice reads as graph paper; and open ground -- a park, a square -- to break the repetition. Real city plans also carry their history in their geometry: a medieval core with a planned nineteenth-century extension around it is visible at a glance, long before you read a single street name.

About this generator

Every press lays out a new town: a river wanders across the card, a street grid is drawn at a slight angle to it, blocks fill the space between the streets but never the water, and a park and a central square land somewhere sensible. The town is named from two seeded word banks, and the seed printed in the corner rebuilds the whole plan exactly.

Every result here is drawn using crypto.getRandomValues() -- the Web Crypto API's cryptographically secure randomness -- instead of Math.random(), so it's genuinely unpredictable, not just statistically random. Learn more.

What people use it for

Give a tabletop campaign a town that looks lived-in, sketch a setting for a story, prompt worldbuilding, or use the plan as a base layer to draw over. Game and map designers use runs of these as a warm-up: draw ten, and the ones that feel like real places suggest what to add to the ones that don't.

How it works

Each press draws a 32-bit seed from the site's cryptographically secure randomness. The seed sets the river's course and width, the grid's spacing and angle, which blocks are built and which are left empty, and where the park and square sit. Blocks are tested against the river before being drawn, so nothing is ever built on the water, and the park is nudged away from it too.

Common questions

Are these real places?

No. Every plan is composed on the spot from a random seed, and the names come from two word banks of English place-name elements -- so a generated 'Ashford' is a coincidence of syllables, not a map of the real one.

Can I use one in a game or a book?

Yes. Copy it as SVG from the corner of the card and it scales to any size, ready to annotate with street names, districts, or whatever your setting needs.

Why is the grid never straight?

Because real ones almost never are. Street grids follow the river, the coast, an old road, or the surveyor's original baseline -- and a plan aligned exactly to the page reads as a diagram rather than a place.

Related Generators

Coat of Arms · Mandala · Maze · Game of Life · Langton's Ant · Fractal

All Pattern generators

Browse all generators