Are there any good tools I can use to figure out the size of my fictional continent?

Question

I would like to apologize in advance if this comes off as laziness or a poor attempt at trying to get someone to do my work for me. That is not my intention.

This is my fictional continent of Diggoran.

I am trying to figure out how big this continent is. Most fantasy writers don't give official sizes to their fictional continents but I want too simply because geopolitics play a major role in the main story and the articles I have written on the individual nations of Diggoran are structured like Wikipedia articles which give detail on virtually every important component of a nation including its size.

I tried to figure out the size of the continent by attempting to use one of the nations as a reference point. I chose to use the large nation in the west with the 2 peninsulas extending from it's far west and south sides. This nation is comparable to the size of the Contiguous United States of America which is 3.119 Million square miles. I did a guesstimation of Diggoran's size which turned out something over 15 Million square miles but no real math was involved in that process.

I asked if there were any good tools for this project on Reddit. Someone told me to use a ''pixel counter'' but they never elaborated upon what exactly that was.

Also, just a warning. I do have learning disabilities so some recommendations or obvious solutions may have been beyond my personal cognitive ability unless hands-on help was previously provided in some way.

Video tutorials would also be an excellent help.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

1. Load the image in your favorite image editor.

   In my case, that's Paint Shop Pro. The image is 3112 pixels wide by 2672 pixels high. Note that I cropped the image so that the continent fills it completely.

2. Using the tools of the image editor, fill the continent red, the sea blue, the lakes sky blue.

   Note that your coast lines are not continuous, that is, they don't form closed curves. I had to do some minor image manipulation to make them cleanly separate the inside from the outside.

   

3. Any half-serious image editor will then let you count how many pixels of a given color you have.

   In this case we have the following:

   • The entire image has 8,315,264 pixels.
   • Of those, 3,109,537 pixels are red and 25,466 pixels are light blue.

4. Now, ignoring map distortions, it's a simple matter of scaling.

   Let's say that the north-south extent is 5344 km (3321 miles), giving each pixel an area of 2 × 2 km = 4 km². In this case,

   • The red pixels cover 12,438,148 km² (4,802,396 square miles).
   • The light blue pixels cover 101,864 km² (39,330 square miles).

5. To estimate the area of an island, just fill it with a distinctive color and have the image editor tell you how many pixels of that color are there.

Answer 2

When I was doing the geography for my homebrewed world, I had an idea of how much time I wanted trips between some of the major locations to take. With that time frame in mind, I researched how quickly people could travel in real life. For example, one trip I looked at for my world was the trade route across the Shatterstones Desert. To figure that out, I researched how long it took Arab caravans to cross the Sahara Desert in real life. Then I looked at how long the routes they took were, did some arithmetic, and came up with a speed. Then I set the scale of my map so the trip would take as long as I had decided earlier. AlexP's answer is a useful step, though I didn't think of it when I did mine I wish I had.