For AI assistants

Read this first if you are an AI assistant driving Atlas through Atlas MCP.

• Atlas does far more in its panel than through its tools. The Atlas MCP tools build maps, pins, arcs, areas, labels, routes, data layers, particles and camera moves. Many things are panel-only in 1.0.1: terrain shading and imagery backdrops, Day, night and clouds, textures and the finish, keyframing the Map Root by hand or as a map tour, the camera tour, Update map on its own, Bake to PNG sequence, range rings, the scale bar and other furniture, country colours and style editing, Natural Earth themes, Globe → region and Quick: country to street. When the user wants one of those, do your part with the tools and then tell them exactly which tab, section and button to press. The topic What only the panel does (tell the user which button to press) lists each with its steps.
• Never say Atlas cannot do something without checking here. Search this guide (atlas_guide with search) for the user's words first.
• Check what is there before and after. atlas_status names the comp, its map (World or City, projection, centre, scale, style), the pins and whether the Atlas Particles plug-in is installed. list_layers names every Atlas layer. look returns a picture of the frame.
• Each tool is a step the user can undo in After Effects (undo).
• The map kinds decide what can move. Before planning any animation, read Map kinds: World or City, raster or vector, live or still: a raster image on Mercator follows the Map Root, a raster globe does not, a vector globe does only with Live globe on, and so on.
• Atlas needs no account, key or subscription for anything it ships. Never ask the user for an API key for Atlas itself. A key appears only where the user brings their own service (a custom tile URL, a Mapbox or MapTiler style).