The cave map generator draws a natural cave system on a five-foot grid, in the black-hatched plan style of classic adventure maps. Passages wind and split, chambers open out, pillars of rock stand in the middle of the floor, and a way in leads from the edge of the sheet. Five to seven areas are picked out and dressed for what they are, from a still pool or a fungus grove to an old camp, and the farthest one from the entrance is where something lives. Every area is numbered and keyed under the map.
How the cave is grown
Dungeons are built; caves aren't, and a cave map drawn like a dungeon with rounded corners never quite convinces. So this one is grown. The sheet starts as random noise, half rock and half open, and a simple rule runs over it several times: a patch of ground surrounded mostly by rock becomes rock, and one surrounded mostly by open ground opens up. After a few rounds the noise settles into the shapes water and time leave behind: wide chambers, narrow squeezes, dead ends and loops.
Only the largest connected cave is kept, so every part of the map can be reached from the entrance, and a passage is cut from the cave out to the edge of the sheet as the way in. The outline is traced and rounded off, which is why the walls read as worn stone instead of a staircase of squares.
Areas worth the walk
Points of interest are chosen to be far apart from each other, measured through the passages rather than in a straight line, so the party has to travel between them. The farthest from the entrance is always the lair: a trampled nest ringed with bones. The others are drawn from a still pool, a fungus grove, a crystal grotto, a bone pile, an abandoned camp with its firepit and bedrolls, a bat roost, a forgotten shrine and a rockfall. Stalagmites and loose boulders line the walls everywhere else.
Using it at the table
Caves are good at one thing dungeons aren't: making players feel lost. There are no corridors at right angles and no doors to count, just passages that bend and split. Use the map as the lair of whatever's in area seven, as a smugglers' route under a coastal town, or as the place the party ends up after the floor of a dungeon gives way.
The grid is five feet per square, which suits D&D 5e, Pathfinder and most d20 games, so you can drop it straight onto a virtual tabletop and fight on it. The keyed areas double as a ready-made encounter list: decide what's in the pool and what's left at the camp, and the session is half planned.
Free SVG and PNG downloads
Both formats are free for your games, streams and published adventures. The PNG is a 1920-pixel render for a VTT or a second screen, and the Print button saves a black-and-white version for a home printer. The SVG is the original vector file: open it in Inkscape, Affinity or Figma to rename the areas, add a second entrance or draw in an underground river. Everything on the map is drawn by our own code, so there's no attribution to carry and no asset licence to read.
What it won't do
It draws one level of a natural cave. It doesn't draw built dungeons, mines with straight tunnels, or several levels stacked together, and it doesn't stock the cave with monsters. For built stone, roll a battle map; for several levels, roll several caves and join them with a shaft.
Name it, then fill it
The cave name generator writes the history of the place and draws this same map beside its result, with the generated name in the title. The dragon name generator can name whatever sleeps in the lair, and the battle map generator covers the dungeon the cave eventually breaks into.