Random Location Generator

By Marko Visic · Updated Oct 11, 2026

Generate a random place anywhere on Earth, on land, in a country or state, or near you, or pick a random town. Every point opens a full card: the country and region, nearest towns with distance and direction, elevation or ocean depth, local time and day or night, today’s sunrise and sunset, nearby Wikipedia, and links to open it in maps. Free, no sign-up.

What you get for every random place

Select any point and its card fills in from these sources. Everything but elevation and the Wikipedia search is bundled with the site, so it loads fast and works offline-first.

Random points done correctly — equal-area on the sphere

Most "random location generator" sites use the simplest possible math: pick a random latitude between -90° and +90°, pick a random longitude between -180° and +180°. Done. This is wrong.

Earth is a sphere, not a flat rectangle. The area of a 1° latitude × 1° longitude cell shrinks as you approach the poles, by a factor of cos(latitude). If you sample latitude uniformly, you generate points proportionally to lines of latitude — but each line at high latitude wraps a much smaller circumference than the equator. Result: random points pile up near the North and South Poles, with proportionally too few near the equator. Common online tools have this exact bug; a "random place on Earth" produced by a naive generator is about 2.9 times as likely per square kilometer at 70° N as at the Equator (1 / cos 70°).

The fix is to sample sin(latitude) uniformly, not latitude itself. The formula: lat = asin(2u − 1) × 180/π where u is uniform in [0, 1]. The asin compensates for the cos(lat) area element. The result is genuinely uniform by surface area on the sphere — and it is the math we use.

How to use the random location generator

A few steps. Defaults are sensible — most users only set the mode and tap Generate.

1. Pick a mode. Anywhere on the sphere returns a uniformly distributed random point on Earth — about 71% of which will land in the ocean. Land only re-rolls until the point falls on land. In a country or state lets you pick a country and, if you like, one of its states, provinces or regions. Near me draws points within a radius of where you are. Random town picks a real town, filterable by country, state and population.
2. Set how many points. The default is 1; the maximum is 100 per batch. For travel-planning style use cases (one random destination), 1 is right; for dataset seeding or geocaching challenges, 5–25 is typical; for stress-testing and analysis, go up to 100.
3. Optionally set a seed. A seed makes the result reproducible: the same seed + same settings always produce the same points. Useful for sharing ("here are the 5 random spots, seed = trip-2026"), for testing, or for repeatable runs in research and education. Leave the seed empty for true Math.random output.
4. Generate. Tap the green Generate button. Pins drop on the map, the coordinates list fills in, and the map auto-frames every pin. A single point opens its place card right away.
5. Select a point to open its place card. Tap any pin or any row in the coordinates list. The card shows the country and region, the nearest towns with distance and direction, elevation or ocean depth, the local time and whether it is day or night, today’s sunrise and sunset, a Wikipedia-nearby button, and links to open the point in Google Maps, Street View and OpenStreetMap. Details load only for the point you select, so a batch of 100 stays fast.
6. Re-roll, copy, or export. Tap "Re-roll" for another batch with the same settings (a fresh internal seed). Copy the whole list of coordinates in decimal or DMS, copy or share any single point by link, or export the batch as CSV or GeoJSON.

The modes — and when to use each

What people use this tool for

Six common jobs, and the card field or option that does the work in each.

How the tool actually works

1. Sphere sampling

Two uniform random numbers u, v ∈ [0, 1]. Latitude: lat = asin(2u − 1) × 180/π (range -90° to +90°, weighted equal-area). Longitude: lng = -180 + v × 360 (uniform). The math is one of the standard Marsaglia methods for sphere-uniform sampling.

2. Land-only filter (rejection sampling)

Generate a sphere-uniform point. Run a point-in-polygon test against all 241 country features in Natural Earth’s 1:50,000,000 cultural-vectors set. If the point falls inside a country polygon, accept it. If not (ocean / unmapped), retry up to 250 times. Empirically the first attempt succeeds ~29% of the time, so the average count of attempts for a single accepted point is about 3.4. Even at 100 batch size, total runtime is well under a second.

3. In-a-country sampling

Compute the bounding box of the country polygon (minimum and maximum lat/lng). Sample a point inside the bounding box using the same equal-area latitude transform within the latitude band. If the point falls inside the country polygon, accept; otherwise reject and retry up to 600 times. For most countries, 1–3 attempts succeed; for awkwardly shaped countries (Chile, Norway, Indonesia), 5–15 is typical.

4. Pseudorandom number generation

With no seed: native Math.random() (different on every page-load). With a seed: we hash the seed string with the 53-bit cyrb53 hash, then feed the result into mulberry32 — a small, statistically robust 32-bit PRNG. Same seed + same settings = same points, every time. Different seeds produce statistically independent point sets.

5. The place card (loaded on selection)

Details load only for the point you select, never for a whole batch, so a run of 100 points stays fast. When you pick a point, the card calls our own place lookup — a compact build of Natural Earth admin-1, marine and landform polygons plus GeoNames towns, served from the site — to name the country and region, the sea for an ocean point, the landform, the continent, and the nearest towns by distance and direction. Elevation (or ocean depth) comes from AWS Terrain Tiles; the time zone from the same lookup the Time Zone Finder uses; day/night and today’s sunrise and sunset from Astronomy Engine. The Wikipedia-nearby search runs only when you tap its button.

6. Near me (points around you)

Pick an angular distance whose cosine is spread evenly from the center out to the chosen radius — this is what makes every ring of the circle get its fair share of area, instead of crowding the middle — and a uniform compass bearing, then step that far along the great circle from where you are. With “Land only” on, a point that falls on water is re-rolled until it lands on land. Your location stays in your browser; nothing about it is sent anywhere, and only a point you open is looked up for its details.

7. States, provinces and regions

To draw inside one first-level area fairly, each separate piece of the area is weighted by its true surface area; a piece is chosen in proportion to that weight, a point is drawn uniformly by area inside its bounding box, and it is kept only if it falls within the area’s actual shape (holes excluded). Because the point is drawn in the same shape the card reads from, a point drawn in Texas is labeled Texas.

8. Random town

Every town that matches your filters — country, state or province, and minimum population — is equally likely, and a batch never repeats one. The towns come from the free GeoNames dataset (CC BY 4.0), 171,161 populated places in all, so the picks cluster where towns are dense rather than spreading evenly across the map.

SimpleMapLab vs other random location generators

Honest comparison with the major free random location tools online. Each tool wins different scenarios.

The pole bias bug — why most random location tools are wrong

You can see the bug for yourself: take any generator that picks a latitude uniformly between -90° and +90°, generate a few thousand points, and plot them on a globe. They pile up in two visible blobs at the North and South Poles, with the equatorial belt looking suspiciously empty — the signature of sampling latitude instead of sin(latitude).

The math reason: if you pick latitude uniformly, the probability of being in the latitude band [70°, 80°] is the same as [0°, 10°] — namely 1/18. But polar latitude bands are weighted by cos(latitude), so the surface area of [70°, 80°] is dramatically smaller than [0°, 10°]. The same number of points are squeezed into much less area near the pole — much higher density.

Visually: a "random place on Earth" produced by a naive generator overrepresents high-latitude countries (Russia is the closest to the pole and the most over-counted) versus their actual surface area share. Antarctica is wildly overrepresented. The Pacific Ocean is underrepresented because most of it is near the equator.

Our fix is the asin(2u − 1) transformation. After this transformation, a random point is genuinely uniform over the sphere’s surface area — Russia comes up in proportion to its actual share, the equator gets its fair turn, and the South Pacific is honestly represented.

Which country comes up most often in "Land only" mode?

For a uniformly distributed point on land, the probability of any country is its share of the total land area. The biggest land areas (and their approximate land-area share):

• Russia — 17.1 million km² (≈11.4% of all land)
• Antarctica — 14.0 million km² (≈9.4%, but excluded from most "country" lookups since it is governed by treaty, not as a country)
• Canada — 9.98 million km² (≈6.7%)
• USA — 9.83 million km² (≈6.6%)
• China — 9.60 million km² (≈6.4%)
• Brazil — 8.51 million km² (≈5.7%)
• Australia — 7.69 million km² (≈5.1%)
• India — 3.29 million km² (≈2.2%)
• Argentina — 2.78 million km² (≈1.9%)
• Kazakhstan — 2.72 million km² (≈1.8%)

Generate 100 land-only points, and on average ~50 will fall in those top ten countries. The remaining ~50 are spread across the other 185 countries. Vatican City (0.49 km²) has a 0.0000003% chance per random pick — you would need to generate ~300 million points before one lands inside it.

Related tools and resources

For a single point picked by area or population: Find Cities in Radius and Find ZIP Codes in Radius. For the country at any GPS point: What Country Am I In?. For elevation at a random point: Elevation Finder. For time zone at a random point: Time Zone Finder. For drawing distance circles around a random pick: Map Radius Tool. For the antipode of a random point: Antipode Finder. For coloring a map with a random country pick: Color a Map.

Frequently asked questions

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