>>7610845
one of the best questions I've seen in these threads. What I do with this type of question is to first go to how it was done in the early days, and go from there, this is the power of youtube and hobbyists you can find this stuff quite easily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIoUTrSWvEE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TitHhF0e79I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbwmXKwkgaw

and start taking notes, for example now I know what is really importarnt is a map good enough with landmarks (rivers, seas, mountains, etc) to get by (anaximander). Then the concept of latitude and longitude helps with the scaling and instead of drawing the whole world you focus in an area (like the Mediterranean.

you can version your work and add stuff or remove as you go, some islands become peninsulas, new islands, rivers are added, etc

add lore and merchant routes to make it more humane.

example of what I would do.

>>7610857
genuine german smut, bammes would be proud.

>>7610932
I see a lot of banding in the gradient then is probably dithering + color quantization, that black > purple > cyan gradient is common in quantization algorithms.