Measurement, routes, and travel

The Measure Distance tool (requires the Distance measurement feature) measures multi-waypoint routes, not just single segments — and with travel packs, it turns distance into travel time.

Measuring a route

Each click (or tap) adds a waypoint; the route renders as a connected path on the map, with a live preview segment from the last waypoint to the cursor included in the running total. Every segment uses the map’s native distance semantics — per-cell distance, unit, diagonal rule on square grids, true hex distance on hex maps — and honors the cells/units/both display format.

While measuring, Backspace removes the last waypoint and Escape clears the route. An in-progress route persists with the map, so a half-measured hex crawl survives closing and reopening the view. Double-click the end cell (double-tap on touch) or press Enter to finish the route by saving it.

Saved routes

Finishing a measurement (or its Save as route button) converts it into a permanent, styled path on the map, with a name, color, width, and an optional distance label — labels stay hidden until you hover (or tap, on touch). While the measure tool is active, clicking a saved route opens a menu to edit its name and style, recategorize its terrain from the map, or delete it; saving, editing, and deleting all participate in undo history. A saved routes toggle in the Visibility controls shows or hides them all.

Travel packs

A travel pack is a named bundle of travel rules for an RPG system (say, D&D 5e overland travel). A pack can contain:

Custom units — name, abbreviation, and a conversion factor (a “league” defined in miles, a “hex” defined as six miles).
Terrain types — each with a speed multiplier (above 1 faster, below 1 slower), a color, and an optional tile tag. The color is pickable from a one-click strip of your own map palette, so a route’s segments match the paint they cross without copying hex codes around; the strip’s ellipsis expands to every palette color with labels, plus an Add color shortcut that creates a new global palette color, usable everywhere, on the spot. The tile tag names the tag a placed tile must carry to count as that terrain. Both are what automatic categorization matches against.
Travel modes — each with a speed as distance per time (24 miles per 8 hours; 3 hexes per day).
Per-day allowances — how much travel time counts as one day (8 hours/day forced march vs. 6 hours/day normal).

Packs are created and edited in the Travel Packs section of settings, individually enabled or disabled (only enabled packs surface in map UI), and exportable and importable as files. They’re also distributed as content packs for one-click install. Custom units from enabled packs are selectable as a map’s distance unit — globally or per map — so a hex-crawl map can display “hexes” everywhere.

Travel times

With an enabled pack, the measurement readout grows a Travel block: a live travel time for each of the map’s selected travel modes, updating with the route as you measure. Which modes appear — and which per-day allowance applies — is chosen per map from a collapsible selector in the readout itself, so a world map and a dungeon map keep different clutter; the day-length selector’s last option, “No day length,” turns day chunking off entirely. With an allowance selected, times render as whole days plus a remainder (say, “3 days + 2.5 h”). If a mode’s time base and the allowance don’t line up, the readout says so explicitly rather than showing a wrong number.

Per-segment terrain

With a pack enabled, each route segment can be assigned a terrain: click a segment and pick from a popup anchored right at the segment. Pick again to change it, or use the popup’s Clear button to unassign it. A segment’s effective speed is the travel mode’s speed times the terrain’s multiplier; unassigned segments travel at plain mode speed. Terrain assignments are preserved when the route is saved.

Automatic categorization

You rarely have to assign anything by hand. As each waypoint lands, Windrose reads the map underneath the new segment and categorizes it for you: a cell whose paint color matches a terrain’s color counts as a vote for that terrain, as does a cell holding a tile that carries the terrain’s tile tag (tiles win over paint on the same cell). The majority of the cells along the segment decides, and a segment that crosses nothing recognizable simply keeps the terrain it inherited. Only terrains that define a color or a tile tag can be matched — a pack whose terrains define neither behaves exactly as it did before.

Anything you pick by hand is left alone from then on: the automatic pass never overwrites a hand-picked segment. When you want a clean sweep — you repainted the region, or edited the pack’s colors — use Recategorize terrain: the wand button in the measurement readout re-samples the in-progress route, and the same item in a saved route’s right-click menu re-samples that route. That command is explicit, so it does overwrite hand-picked segments too.