Placing a continent: what real geography teaches about procedural maps
Another entry from the same developer, IdleCultivation, covers how the world map of the game Myriad Immortal Sect was generated, and I found it a handy checklist for anyone drawing a fantasy map by hand, too.
The main lesson is that features should follow processes rather than random points. Placing mountains one by one gave peaks "distributed like static", so the author rebuilt the relief around ridges: each summit now belongs to a range and shares its neighbours' geology. Before the fix, one ridge mixed granite, sandstone, snowcap and volcanic rock across four adjacent tiles.
Other fixes follow the same logic. Forests looked like parkland because the trees had a narrow size range; adding a few very large trees and plenty of undergrowth fixed that. Biomes should blend through transition zones instead of meeting at hard lines, which otherwise make regions feel like administrative districts. Herbs should match the climate, so the ground hints at what grows there.
Settlements need reasons to exist as well. The largest city was ringed by untouched forest, which no real city has, and the map had only 27 named places and two short paths near the starting sect. Roads matter because players follow them. And places should look like their names: about a quarter of the wilderness was empty, with hidden realms and mineral sites drawn as ordinary forest under a floating label.
The funniest detail is that the author's validator sampled terrain only every four tiles; tightening it revealed 250 placement errors. It is a good reminder that our checks share our blind spots.
Source: DEV Community
The main lesson is that features should follow processes rather than random points. Placing mountains one by one gave peaks "distributed like static", so the author rebuilt the relief around ridges: each summit now belongs to a range and shares its neighbours' geology. Before the fix, one ridge mixed granite, sandstone, snowcap and volcanic rock across four adjacent tiles.
Other fixes follow the same logic. Forests looked like parkland because the trees had a narrow size range; adding a few very large trees and plenty of undergrowth fixed that. Biomes should blend through transition zones instead of meeting at hard lines, which otherwise make regions feel like administrative districts. Herbs should match the climate, so the ground hints at what grows there.
Settlements need reasons to exist as well. The largest city was ringed by untouched forest, which no real city has, and the map had only 27 named places and two short paths near the starting sect. Roads matter because players follow them. And places should look like their names: about a quarter of the wilderness was empty, with hidden realms and mineral sites drawn as ordinary forest under a floating label.
The funniest detail is that the author's validator sampled terrain only every four tiles; tightening it revealed 250 placement errors. It is a good reminder that our checks share our blind spots.
Source: DEV Community
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