Sable Island
Welcome to Sable Island! This island is located in the northern Atlantic ocean, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. It’s roughly 40km long and only slightly more than 1km wide. It’s covered in sand dunes, grass and some freshwater ponds and the only buildings are scientific stations used by the island’s staff. The name of the island comes from the french for "sand".
The island you see in this map has been created by hand in the editor since the real life island[www.google.it] doesn’t fit in the map area, and the heightmaps I downloaded were of very low quality. Also, Sable Island goes from east to west, so I’ve rotated it 45° because, well, the diagonal of a square is longer than its sides. I’ve marked with sand where north and south are supposed to be.
So while the map is not a 1:1 recreation, it is heavily inspired by photos and what is visible in Maps, therefore many things you’ll find on the island most likely have a real life counterpart roughly in the same spot, especially for the places away from the main tiles (these have been altered slightly to leave a bit of space for your city).
All the buildable area of the island within the 25 tiles can be unlocked with just 7 tiles, and every tile should have a decent amount of space. This way you won’t have to buy a tile only to unlock a small piece of land that gets in the way.
Bonus song for this map: The Treehouse At The End Of The World by Abney Park
Bonus feral horsey of Sable Island.[www.google.com]
Lighthouses: 2
Trees: 1
Well, actually there are 1869 trees, but that’s because the game counts grass as a tree. In real life, the island has just one small scots pine[en.wikipedia.org]. I don’t know where on the island this is located, so I’ve placed it in the start square. I used the vanilla generic pine, although in real life it’s more like a small bush[www.google.com].
The map has a single highway and rail connection. Because there are no actual roads on the island, this small network runs along it underground and has a simple exit in the start square. This is only in place if you’d like to play a normal vanilla game.
You could also ignore highway and rail and use harbours instead. The map has two ship routes, one for each side. Because the island is very thin, and an harbour connects only to the closest shipping route, I made sure both routes were at the right distance from the coast to allow you to place harbours correctly everywhere in the 25 tiles.
In addition, there is also a plane connection.
The island doesn’t have many resources. I have used the oil texture to detail dunes, and the only usable patch of that is under the lagoons. Because most of the island is covered in oil, there is no ore (the two resources clash with each other). There is also no fertile land nor forestry because, like I said, nothing grows on the islands except for grass (and the fertile texture clashes with sand, that has been heavily used for detailing).
In the screenshots I have used the vanilla "Cold" LUT, with my Pescanoce Theme. Also, I suggest you activate the grass sprites (using mods like Hide It or Theme Mixer), I think it makes the ground look better and is not as demanding as covering everything in actual grass.
