Using the Cartographer's Table.

I just tried to use the cartographer's table. 

Then I got some sandpaper and started rubbing vigorously on my eyeballs. 

One of these things was less painful than the other.

Back to the sandpaper...

(PS, my favourite part was when I saved a map whose terrain I liked, and when I tried reloading it, it just randomized a new map for me.  Fantastic feature)

Ya I like how when placing and removing mountains the clothmap constantly tells you there are invisible mountains everywhere, and how chasms require you to place the black smoke on the bottom as a separate prop that doesn't work half the time.  An undo key would be a GOD SEND!!!!

Guys, there are bugs in it.

Dangerlinto, it did not randomize your new map. If you exit the game, then go back into the game and load up the map, it will load up correctly. There appears to be a bug that when you save a map and then try to load it up right after, it loads up a random map, but the map you saved is still there. Just exit, reload, and load the map and bam, there.

As it is, it's totally unusable. 

I checked, and yes, it actually loads if you exit the game.  Nice feature.

Starting Locations seem to be totally uneditable.  Due to the awesome saving mechanism, I have some in the middle of the ocean which can't be removed by any means.

Tile modifications (which BTW, seems to be the way to add essence) only show up after reloading.   Which is great because of course that means exiting the game. I'm guessing a number of other modifications work this way.

After simply failing to do even those two simple things, I am going to take the short cut and say while I see some things do work (like I can place shards) that probably a whole lot of other things are bugged.

Seriously - there was no point in including this feature on release.  I feel Stardock owes me some time of my life back wasted trying to do anything with this tool

You don't need to add grain, materials or essence. They will be automatically placed when you start a new game on the map as long as there is land that is capable of being fertile. Essence will always be near stuff like shards, crystals, etc.

Don't save the map with random start locations checked because you may have strange starting locations. Place starting locations manually.

You might actually be able to delete starting locations with the delete tool (or is it erase tool)

Shards and resources will be placed automatically when making a new game.

I played around with it some more and you're right about the fertile land.  Seems crystal adds essence varying from the distance the area is away.  Wild grain and I suspect other wild food sources add to the grain level.  Claypits and forest add to the material number.  I put all these thing in close proximity to each other and got a crazy 7/5/2 tile where I started.  Placing random spawn areas worked fine for me, though only the first one properly displayed the Spawn icon, the others appeared when I reloaded the map.  My character would be randomly placed at one while the enemy put at the other three corners of the map just fine.  Saving the map can make two saves from what I notice.  One is without details and loads a random map, the other is the correct one.

Now if they'd only fix the bug that has my sovereign and random units dying at the start of combat, and the frame rate issues with large battles, I could play my large 8 sided murder in the middle map.

I have to agree, it took me an hour of messing around nefore i could figure out the most basic functions. 

I do have a major issue though - Say you want to craft the map exactly how you want it.  I thought just checking the no spawn button when saving would do it, however when i load the map for a new game - I still overwrites all my resources and such.  It also seems to randomize the starting points, even though i manually placed all of them. I could give about a dozen other features im not sure are working correctly, but this seems to be the most important issue atm.

If anyone knows why that might be happening I'd love for some expert feed back

The selection wand for stamps works about every 10th click, or not at all, would be very nice if they improved the selection wand.

Another thing i seem to not understand is that they have a tile modifier allowing attack/defense as well as essance adjustments and yet they seem to have no effect in the game.  Could be im not doing something right, or its an unusuable ability?  I tend to believe its me with these things since I assume developers and mod creaters are shap an actually know their stuff.