Built by one.
Made for many.

It started with a bad map

I’ve been playing Farming Simulator since FS13. The built-in maps never felt right — generic landscapes, fictional fields, places that meant nothing. I wanted to play in a location that actually matters. A landscape I recognize. A valley I could draw from memory.

The problem was that no tool existed to make that happen automatically. Anyone who wanted a custom map had to do it entirely by hand — tracing terrain pixel by pixel in the Giants Editor, spending days sourcing satellite imagery, painstakingly converting coordinates manually. A single map could consume 50 hours or more of slow, tedious work.

So I decided to build the solution myself.

Maps4FS

With minimal modding experience, I taught myself geospatial data formats, DTM systems, and coordinate projection — including a few detours down wrong paths that took months to untangle. The result was Maps4FS: a tool that could generate a Farming Simulator map from real-world geographic data automatically.

The name and the concept both trace back to Maps4CIM — a project by Klamann that did the same thing for Cities in Motion. It proved the idea was sound and gave me a template to follow. Without it, Maps4FS probably wouldn’t exist.

I posted a YouTube video, launched a Telegram bot, and waited. The silence didn’t last long.

That personal motivation turned out to be universal. Thousands of players had been waiting for exactly this — they just had no idea it was possible. People used Maps4FS to build maps of their hometown farms, their favorite valleys, places they’d visited once and never forgot. The core insight held: the barrier to map creation wasn’t desire, it was accessibility.

And I didn’t build all of it alone. Along the way, a lot of people from the community stepped up — contributing code, testing edge cases, translating, reporting bugs, sharing ideas, and spreading the word. Maps4FS grew because of them as much as because of me. I’m genuinely grateful for every person who put time into it.

The limit of the black box

Maps4FS worked — and it worked well. But it had a fundamental problem baked in from the start. It was a black box: feed it coordinates, get a map back. Fast, effective, and completely opaque.

Users couldn’t see what was happening inside. Couldn’t adjust mid-process. Couldn’t experiment with different data sources or understand why a particular terrain came out wrong. Every adjustment meant re-running the whole pipeline from scratch.

As the tool grew — more data providers, more configuration options — maintaining that black box became unsustainable. Every new feature was harder to add. Every edge case harder to debug. The approach that made Maps4FS quick to build was becoming the thing that limited what it could ever be.

A different idea

That ceiling is why MapToPlay exists.

MapToPlay is not an incremental improvement. It’s a rethink from the ground up — a fully interactive platform where the entire process is visible and controllable. Real-world data comes in, you shape it in a live editor, and the output is exported with full control at every step. No black box. No guessing. No re-running the whole pipeline to tweak one setting.

And it goes beyond Farming Simulator. Maps4FS was built for one game. MapToPlay is designed as a unified platform: the same real-world data, the same editing workflow, exporting to different games and formats. The geography of the real world — captured once — becomes the foundation for maps in any game that supports them.

Still in progress. Built with care.

MapToPlay is still being built. There’s no team, no investors, no roadmap designed by committee. Just me, the same question I started with, and a clearer idea of how to answer it properly this time.

If you want to follow the journey, share an idea, or just say hello — join the community on Discord or reach out at contact@maptoplay.com.