thanks. well i actually redid the whole map from scratch and got it working. i now face several problems.

how do you smoothe the edges where land meets sea? my edges are really sharp in the game and look unnatural.

another issue is that the map seems just a pixel off. by this i mean rivers/cliffs dont look exactly in the same place as on the original map. how exactly do you go about resizing and adding to the vanilla map? what process do you use to get everything aligned exactly? i just expanded the image to the right size and pasted to old map into a corner of the new map, but like i said, the edges dont exactly match up between the files.
i would post images of this, but i dunno how to do it...
ill try to figure it out myself, but any tips would be cool.