Edge of the map

Ascora's fifth geography is for the state everything else skips. A survey covers what it has actually surveyed: solid where the data is complete, thinning toward the frontier, gone past it.

The empty state is the same map

Drag Known to zero. The ground does not get replaced by an illustration of emptiness, it simply runs out — the last tiles drop away and the tile count reaches nought. Drag it back and the same survey fills in from the centre outward.

That is the argument the whole relief set has been making. A score history with no data still draws a horizon, an account with no balance still shows one sonar return, a system with no alerts still has weather. Here the map with no data is still the map. One generator, one visual language, from nothing through to complete.

Dissolving without a random seed

Tiles drop out on an ordered threshold — a Bayer 4×4 matrix — rather than a random one. Each cell has a fixed place in the dither, so a given coverage always dissolves in exactly the same pattern, on the server and in the browser and between two renders of the same screen.

Random dropout would look nearly identical in a screenshot and mean nothing at all, and it would rearrange itself on every render, which turns a frontier into a flicker.

The thresholds sit strictly inside 0 and 1, offset by half a step. Without that offset the brightest cell in the matrix survives at zero coverage and the empty state keeps one stubborn tile.

Coverage plateaus before it falls

radialCoverage is solid out to a plateau and dissolves only across a band at the rim. A coverage that ramps all the way from the centre dithers the middle of the map as heavily as its edge, and the whole survey reads as threadbare rather than as solid ground that runs out. Only the frontier should look uncertain, because only the frontier is.

Ground also stands taller where it is better surveyed, so the map sinks as it runs out. The reading is doubled: tiles thin and the terrain drops at the same time.

Void is fog with nothing behind it

The frontier needs to stop without a border, and fog does that — ground dissolves toward the page background rather than meeting a hard edge, so an empty state reads as unmapped rather than as a cropped screenshot.

fog: { color: 'bg', near: 30, far: 260 }

Install

shadcn add @gesso/relief-edge