Beginner Mixing Terrain

By FD2

If you want to have an all grass or dirt map, you can just select one terrain and keep it for the whole map. But, that being boring, you can use one of the World Builder tools to help get more exciting and dynamic terrain.

Placing Initial Terrain

Choose one set of terrain you want as your base. To browse the terrains under the menu, go to Texture Sizing -> Map Cliff Textures. A dialog box should appear. Once you’ve selected the terrain you want, click Apply To Tiles.... Once you do that, check the Apply button on ‘Between These Slopes‘. Make the top value equal to zero, and the bottom value equal to 89. This way, it will cover all the terrain. When you’re done, click OK. Depending on your terrain, it will probably look pretty ugly. But this is what the rest of the guide is for.

Mixing Your Terrain

Once you’re done with that, load up the terrain selector again, and click a terrain similar to the one you’ve picked. Most of the terrains are in sets, i.e the DrtHarad or SnowEttenmoors set. You can tell by the first name of the set before the numbers describing it. You’ll probably want to pick a terrain in the same set. Once you pick your terrain, go to Apply To Tiles... but this time check Randomly, at this approxtimate saturation. Now, the next slide box is up to you to decide. The check box is the percent of existing terrain the new terrain will cover. For example, if you set the slider to 25, 25% of all your existing terrain will be placed into your new terrain. The process is randomized, and it’s not a specific pattern (i.e, every 4 tiles, one will be the new terrain). I recommend using the 25% value, because you’ll want to mix your terrain 4 times or more to get a randomzied terrain look. Once you’ve set the value, click OK and you should see the terrain change. You can repeat this process as many times as you want for as many terrains as you want.

Now, you’ll notice other slider that I haven’t talked about yet is Between these heights. Let’s say you placed a mountain in the terrain builder. And you want the top to be snowcapped, but doing the above method would get the whole map snowcapped. Select a minimum height you want to be snowcapped with the slider, and then hit OK. Any mountains you’ve made will now be topeed with the terrain you selected! You can also use this opposite, if you want a valley to be dark, for example.

You can also randomize terrain on mountains. All you have to do is set the bottom slider and the top slider, and repeat the instructions.