# Design references

External visual references collected for design/polish passes. Each image
gets a one-paragraph note here: what it is, why it was captured, and which
ticket/pass consumes it.

## rimworld-world-map-fluency.jpg

RimWorld world map (starting-site selection screen), captured by Jeroen
2026-07-23 during the T-1170 river-course batch as the **map-fluency
benchmark** for the Atlas polish pass (**T-1175**): *"the rimworld maps do
roads, rivers, coasts and biomes quite well"* — with the explicit caveat that
its hex substrate and globe projection are **not** us; the techniques
transfer, the tiling doesn't. Extracted techniques (full list on T-1175):
rivers as converging networks with subtle width variation and taper-to-source;
roads vs rivers disambiguated by color + straightness rather than width;
coasts as a shoreline gradient (beach band + near-shore water shading);
biome/relief **texture** — stipple density carrying hills/mountains/forest on
top of hue (maps onto T-1162's derived patchiness/relief fields: texture as
data, not decoration); and geographic labels (our T-1169) doing heavy
fluency lifting.