The Colony — maps and 3D location views for Max Kidruk's New Dark Ages

Maps and 3D location visualizations for Max Kidruk's hard-SF novel Colony, first in the New Dark Ages cycle — an established Martian colony reconstructed from real planetary data.

All map Wall poster

A series of maps and 3D location visualizations for Colony, the first novel in Max Kidruk’s hard-SF cycle New Dark Ages (Bearded Tamarin, 2022). The cartography was produced for the book, with several images also released as posters.

The premise was to depict a world in which colonization has already happened. Rather than settlements under construction, the reader is placed inside an established system — cities with defined functions, connected by roads and high-speed rail and already operating as an interdependent network. Fedir Gontsa developed the settlement structures, their transport links, and their functional schemes, designing each city to read as something that had grown incrementally rather than all at once: residential modules sit beside industrial blocks, recording an uneven expansion over time.

In parallel, a typology of settlements took shape — from Newborn, effectively the capital of the colonies, down to smaller towns, outposts, mining stations, and numerous minor settlements at varying distances. This hierarchy grew more complex over time and, by the second volume, Collapse, had acquired more grounded, realistic characteristics that will see further development.

All map Cities plan

Each settlement also carries planning traditions brought from Earth by its colonizers. Kamianka, a Ukrainian settlement on Mars, is founded on the planning structure of Trypillian proto-cities — not legible directly, since the settlement has undergone its own transformations, but present in its underlying geometry. Newborn follows the traits of an American city, Neunstadt those of a German one. The references operate at the level of urban planning, carrying terrestrial traditions into a Martian setting.

The central difficulty was scale. Mars offers none of the familiar cues — no trees, no recognizable landscape features — that anchor a sense of size on Earth. To calibrate proportion, Fedir Gontsa worked from known terrestrial references: launch infrastructure, for instance, was sized against the launch complexes at Cape Canaveral. Cities were harder, since their density and built elements differ from anything terrestrial, so rover tracks — whose real distances are documented — were used to translate measured ground into a felt sense of territory. Even so, the layouts had to be resolved by modeling directly: stations were arranged across the surface and the distances between them measured out.

The terrain base was built from blended MOLA + HRSC elevation data. Because the available global DEM was relatively low in resolution, the relief was refined in Blender — hand-sculpted and given further detail through procedural noise, some of it generated with Geometry Nodes. The result is a layered composite: coarse DEM data as the foundation, with terrain detail reconstructed on top. For close-range areas, surface imagery was processed through a range of filters to reach a realistic finish. Color relationships for the terrain were derived from rover imagery — studied to understand how the relief actually reads — and used both to reach realistic tones and to correct artifacts present in the DEM data. Both the black-and-white map at the front of the book and the color version are composite constructions, combining GIS data with 3D models. A large part of the project was gathering publicly available data on Mars and studying the planet’s geographic projections; of the project’s 73 GB, some 50 GB is Mars data — imagery, radar scans, nomenclature, and related material.

The master plans are built on real Martian terrain. The colonies are invented, but the ground beneath them is not: the hill chains and steep-sloped plateaus around a settlement like Newborn, sited on Chryse Planitia, are the actual surface of Mars. Invented names were set among real Martian ones — the Xanthe ranges, Chryse Planitia, Galle crater — blurring the line between fiction and the actual map of the planet.

Road networks and site layouts were planned in QGIS using Martian projections, then carried into Blender, where the architecture was placed — pavilions, structures, habitation modules, and infrastructure elements. Moving continually between the GIS environment and the 3D editor proved demanding: georeferencing had to be preserved across each round trip, handled through GDAL, with renders finished in GIMP. Each map is a dense stack of layers — as many as a dozen DEM datasets processed in different ways, combined with color layers that simulate the planet’s surface.

At the scale required to represent the settlements, the maps could not do without architecture as such. A large set of standardized architectural elements was developed for the cities — numerous variants of modules and infrastructure components, along with the principal domes in which the novel’s events take place. Designed initially as part of the settlement planning, this architecture became a component of the colony visualizations in its own right, and may see further development beyond the books.

The visual style of the maps was a separate, deliberate decision, developed over a long period and requiring close attention to the details present in the book. It is this consistency that gives an invented story its footing in the plausible.

Work on the Colony maps ran for roughly six months. Through the second half of that period, rolling blackouts caused by Russian strikes on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure made both rendering and mapping difficult.

When the Murray Lab Global CTX Mosaic was released in 2023, the gain in data quality was pronounced enough that the terrain had to be rebuilt. The maps for Colony were reworked accordingly, at the same time as the cartography began for the second novel, Collapse — tying the two books into a single, evolving body of work.

The novel was named among the Ukrainian bestsellers of 2022 by the Ukrainian Book Institute. As of 15 April 2026, its print run had reached 78,000 copies.

Illustrations: Kateryna Sukhetska · Author: Max Kidruk · Publisher: Bearded Tamarin

Published 2022 · 928 pages · 15 × 23.5 cm · Ukrainian · ISBN 978-617-8509-15-6

The Colony is published in Ukrainian by Bearded Tamarin (Бородатий Тамарин), the publishing house founded by the Kidruk family in 2022. More on the series site.

All map Newborn Views