Dungeon Alchemist

Make no mistake, this tool is not lying when claiming early access. Everything you see in the previews are meticulously chosen vertical slices of custom placed objects with a great degree of effort. If you are looking for a tool that will save you time over something like Dungeon Draft or even pen and paper, this is currently not it. It may be in the future, so I would not write it off entirely. In an effort to be constructive, the following is desperately needed (in order of priority): - Performance: This game runs poorly on minimum settings on a 5900x/6750xt/64gb combination. There is no planet on which the listed system requirements represent an even remotely good experience. - Proper roofing: The fact that The Sims 2 has this beat is concerning. To be specific; overhangs are critical. Without them every house is a shoebox. - Further reworks to whatever algorithm places objects. I have not once generated a room that makes a modicum of sense. Even the most care free player will question the room with a single bucket in the middle, or the fact that the door to the tavern has exactly 50cm of clearance before colliding with the tavern table. - Reworked lighting: DA makes it a challenge to have maps which do not look flat. How? The entire game is rendered in 3d. Furthermore, why does the orthographic projection also remove shadows? That exacerbates the issue (the orthographic projection is brilliant in general, and the best part of this software). Having (begrudgingly) followed the Discord for some time, it seems some of this is being worked on. Again though, if you are a GM looking to save time, this isn't it. The problem of realistically and procedurally furnishing a room strikes me as exceptionally difficult, especially programmatically. Some deep learning AI may do it, but where you'll find datasets on skeletal tomb furnishing is beyond me. I respect the effort. This would be hard enough to do on a 2d canvas. The developers attempting this in full 3d is a brave undertaking. I wish them luck.

Dungeon master here. I used this for about 10 hours for making some quick indoor maps, which was fine for what I needed back then (though, there's a reason I stopped using this for indoors maps). Then, my other 120+ hours were all about outdoor maps, using just the brush/elevation options, lights and setting objects, which is funny because that's like only 20% of what this program has to offer, but still what makes the best maps for me, and it became a staple of my DM style. So, the reason I stopped using this for making indoor maps is because the way this program sets walls is still pretty restrictive and rhythmic. Can't use it to make walls go diagonally or in different intervals agains the grid, which causes the result to be too obvious and too exact compared to how whimsical it can be with the terrain elevation/brush and light tools alone. Either way, 100% worth it for making outdoor maps. You can do incredibly beautiful stuff with it. Hopefully in the future this indoor aspect also becomes more free. EDIT: I am aware of free standing walls as objects, but it doesn't solve my problem, as their height and size is fixed to a proportion you can't modify, so in the end it's still too rigid for what I want.

Overpriced and under...good. It's not TERRIBLE, but it's no holy grail of rpg random battlemaps. The AI evenly spaces the same object in orderly rows through a room -- 4 desks in 3 rows of a library, or 4 tables in 3 rows of a pub, or 4 pillars in... you get the point. It adds columns of the same repeated objects and calls it a day No cool random patches of Difficult Terrain, or Hazardous Terrain, or spike pit traps, or uneven ground, or inclined surfaces, or anything especially interesting for you or your players to discover thought up by a brilliant AI Not unless you add those things yourself. Manually. And if you do that, just use one the multiple alternatives that cost a third the price, have more features, and bring a less clunky interface. The only thing this offers over it's competitors is the AI, and the AI aint great This app is a cute toy, but nothing more. If they ever pull their heads out and fix the absurd $50 price tag to the 15 or 20 of their (better) competition, maybe give it a try. Other than that, buy Dungeondraft or google free random generators like "dungen" or "donjon"

Two basic things right of the bat are needed. Rotate map ability and also placing building at different levels.

I've made hundreds of maps in the over 600 hours that I've used Dungeon Alchemist. The end-use-case is for a 12' battlemap projected down, via Arkenforge, onto a 14' long, hundred-year table in a D&D social club that hosts ttrpg games seven days a week. With publishing quality output in mind, no other application comes close to the visual fidelity, speed, and ease of use of DA. I simply could not do my job--creating maps for professional DMs, myself included--at this level, without DA.

Product is a fantastic 2D mapmaker, but a lack of 3D export means that this is not a true 3D map-making tool. The Dungeon Alchemist sales-pitch is that this product is an "easy mode" for Dungeon Masters that want to present Foundry VTT/other VTT-compatible tools to their players. Creating automatic lighting and walls for Foundry is impressive, but the tool falls flat where it matters. You tell me I'm going to get a 3D map-maker, then I should get a 3D map-maker. This is, instead, a 2D map-maker with a 3D interface. If this product ever receives true 3D map-making functionality then it will be worth a positive review. Until then it offloads a significant percentage of the labor to the end-user that it should not.

I DM for a small group online via Foundry VTT. I've paid for several programs at this point to help me make maps. Some of them are pretty great, but this one takes the cake. Not only does it export to Foundry pretty flawlessly, but making maps is actually rather fun! This app never meant to be "playable" its for map making only! It supports Foundry, Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, image only, and video maps (the assets slightly move, such as leaves blowing, bugs, water, etc) and printable maps. In my personal experience apps that let you make maps and play within them don't have a good balance between the two functions. If the map making is good - the game play is bad/buggy or it doesn't even support the systems you wanna play on -- if the game playing is good, the map making is too simplistic and limited. It's best to have a separate tool for both, finding the ones you like best. It took me maybe 30 minutes to learn most of the tools. When I got stuck trying to do something I just had to do a little more digging to find a tool that did it. It's easy to create rooms, draw paths, add lights, re-roll rooms for a different variety, add custom objects, add new ones from Steam Workshop. Only thing I wish was slightly easier was drawing walls - outside of a room. You can make rooms that will draw the walls automatically, and you can draw walls inside the room - but you cannot draw walls on terrain outside a room. I like to make mazes, and this would be helpful! For now, at least I think so, I must place wall pieces individually if they are outside a room. UPDATE: Above still mostly applies, but through keyboard shortcuts while drawing walls (Holding Shift and placing) makes placing walls outside of rooms much easier. But also, you can make the whole map a room, then change the floor texture to an outside texture... thus making the appearance of an outside area/maze. I discovered these techniques thanks to their weekly online streams and me simply asking about it! So kudos to the streamers of this app! Other than that, this app is an amazing tool for DMs, especially VTT DM's. It has plenty of variety at the moment, but in the future I really hope for more, and perhaps even different styles of art, or rendering styles (such as maybe a "drawn/cartoon" filter, right now we just have 3 rending angles for depth, and a black and white filter if needed for easy printing - nice). It would also be cool if there was a "world map" mode, to make zoomed-out or regional maps!

It's fun to use. But if you're a proper online DM. Who want's a tool that cuts his prep time instead of adding to it. It's not it. It's clunky, rough on the edges, looks terrible in classic 2d (top down). The stuff presented in the trailers and screenshoots is cheery-picked and also required a lot of work. I'm not a fan.