[Mod] River / mountain range mapgen [0.7.1] [watershed]

[paramat]

^ Magma vent, sandstone strata, solid coal and gravel seams, precious ores more rare within their seams

[paramat]

I tested the difficulty of finding coal exposed in mountain walls, it took about 1 hour of flying, so perhaps roughly 10 hours exploring time, seems about right to me this forces the player to travel, see some scenery and perhaps find a good place to settle. Another good place to look for coal is inside the volcanos, in the wall of the magma vent. So the advice is head for the mountain ridges where there are many cliffs and a few volcanos to see ores in.

[Mikerhinos]

Didn't try the lua editing yet, but coal is really fine now, I found a seam flying around like 5mn in a fissure near to surface so it's great because for me coal is the most important ore : to find almost any ore we need to mine, but without light it's impossible to go deep, so we need coal to craft torches, and when we find ores, we need it too so we can melt it.
Only thing I had on the today gen (still 0.3.7, just another world) was that I spawned in a stone mountain, so no tool=no way to escape, had to come back in creative mode and dig up and fly about 30 nodes to find fresh air lol, but it's the only time I had that issue so it's not a problem.
The mod should be integrated in default mapgens, it's really a good point for the game IMHO.

[LazyJ]

Wow... I too find myself just flying around, amazed by the scenery being generated before me, and an hour or more slips by before I know it.

Here are a few suggestions that came to mind while I explored the gorgeous terrain.


Biome Transitions

Would it be possible to have tundra biomes surround taiga and snowy plains biomes to better transition into grasslands and forests?

At present there are biomes of deep winter right next to spring-like grasslands.



Mid-Water

One of the many things I'm thrilled with about "Watershed" is it's focus on landscape aesthetics. The turquoise"freshwater" is an example of that. I found that freshwater doesn't mix with regular water (they are two different nodes). At times I would come across rivers where one bend was freshwater while the adjoining bends were regular water. The visual effect looked really out of place.

An idea came to mind. What about creating a third water type whose purpose is to blend freshwater when it come in contact with regular water? A middle water?

Perhaps by using ABMs for watershed:freshwater and watershed:freshwaterflow with default:water_source and default:water_flowing specified as neighbors to replace the neighboring freshwater or default water, whichever, with a midwater_source/flowing that is a color somewhere between freshwater's turquoise and regular water's blue.

Also, I noticed that freshwater isn't renewable like default water is.



Mist Instead of Clouds

The static watershed:cloud(s) seem a bit too rigid. High-mountain mists came to mind. Perhaps making the cloud texture a flat, horizontal, single-side textured node that waves (waving = 1) and uses the group property "leafdecay=3" to cause individual mist nodes to randomly disappear while another ABM would put them back by seeking a mist node in each eight horizontal positions around the empty air space. If a special "seed" mist node is found then the ABM will place more, regular, ws_clouds around it.



Limit Snowdrift to Only Snow Biomes

Is it possible to have "Snowdrift" create snowfall only in taiga and snowy plain biomes? I'd like to have snowfall in my long-term worlds but it looks really out of place when the snowfall occurs in an areas no where near a snow biome of any decent size and only deposits a few random patches of snow.



Ok, there's my 2-cents and a plug-nickel's worth. As is "Watershed" is an amazing mod.

Thanks, paramat, for adding another gem to Minetest. ;)

[paramat]

Oops, i forgot to change the spawning function when i removed the cliffs, this causes bizarre spawn locations, fix coming soon.

[paramat]

See this biome site that inspired my biome system http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/world_biomes.htm if anything taiga is the transition from tundra to temperate biomes.
Priority now is testing and settling the primary surface shape / elevation map, then i want to add many more biomes (although i don't own Minecraft i love watching the multiplayer videos, and have been inspired by Biomes A Plenty. I intend to use another large scale noise to slowly switch through several biomes in each of the 9 temp/humidity sectors, so you can have multiple temperate forests ... i could also move to a 16 sector system.

Mid water could be done easily by just making all water at y = 2 mid coloured, might try it since it's so easy. Renewable river water spreads it's sources and makes a mess of the inclined shape of the rivers.

Those clouds are at every 80 vertical nodes and extend throughout the atmosphere and floatlands.

Good idea to make snowdrift compatible ...

[paramat]

Version 0.3.8
New acacialeaf, acaciatree, pinetree nodes. Bugix spawn function. Adjustable biome blend.
EDIT: Also thicker redstone layer in deserts, seaice thickens with lower temperature, papyrus is on riverbanks not beaches.

[paramat]

0.3.9
Added pinewood and acaciawood planks.
Top of beach sand now varies from sea level to y = 9, golden grasses added to high beach to create dunes.
Lavacooling abm slowly creates obsidian on water contact.
At last a new appletree thats not a box on a stick =P.

[paramat]

0.3.11
Icesheets / icebergs with fissures, varying depth/height, snowblock surface.
Fix for bug that created thin floating layes of surface nodes: initialise 'under' table.
Added all nodes to scanning of generated chuink below.

Terrain and biome noises tuned, more and larger floatlands.

Bugfix spawn function.
2 iron ore layers per vertical 512n, as it should be a little easier to find than the more precious copper, gold, mese, diamond.

Note that when startiing a new world its possible to be in an archipelago area with no rivers and you may need to travel 8000n to find higher land with rivers.

[paramat]

Version 0.3.12
Snowy berg if humid. Harmonic noise returns. Flatter lowlands. New node icydirt: tundra surface.

Chunk gen time up to roughly 5s non-luaJIT, certainly too long, but harmonic noise is one of my big ideas i can't leave it out of this.

[paramat]

0.3.12 with harmonic noise and new tundra surface node that distinguishes it from dry grassland.

EDIT
0.3.13
Y = 47 bugfix: add snowblocks in chunk above during overgen

[Mikerhinos]

Definitely can't get used to giant fissures and 200+ ores seams from time to time and no ores rest of time :s
And it seems that mods addings plants, trees etc...won't work, launched an indev mapgen yesterday and there was way more different plant species.

So I'm personnally moving to mapgen V7 worlds because landscapes looks almost as great as watershed, and with your biomes mod I can have the best of the 2 worlds lol : great landscapes, and "traditionnal" ores/plants generating.

[Jordach]

0.3.12 with harmonic noise and new tundra surface node that distinguishes it from dry grassland.

EDIT
0.3.13
Y = 47 bugfix: add snowblocks in chunk above during overgen

Inspired by a few of my own biomes then?

Some sort of frozen biome that's made of pure ice / snow blocks would be a nice change...

[LazyJ]

0.3.13 is looking great paramat! The new icebergs are "cool". ;-)

I'm making "Watershed" node textures to add to my favorite texture pack. "Icydirt" has me stumped as to what to make the texture look like.

Is "icydirt" more ice than dirt (semi-transparent vs opaque)?

If icydirt were warmed up, what would it become: muddy water or soggy dirt?

[paramat]

Mikerhinos, no problem, yes this mapgen doesn't have mod support, if a mod is looking for default:dirt_with_grass to add flora to you could exchange watershed:grass with default:dirt_with_grass. Ore seams can be made wider and easier to find with TSEAM, it's quite possible i haven't tuned them thoroughly enough and they're still too hard to find, and by default ores are harder to find than in minetest_game.

LazyJ, icydirt is a sloppy name i used for the 'active layer' of a tundra, which apparently is dryish frozen dirt with frost or thin snow (much more dirt than ice so not translucent) in winter and thaws to mud in the summer. Below the permafrost does what it says on the tin, permanently frozen dirt, again more dirt than ice.

[paramat]

Version 0.3.14

Light crafting crafts 8 lights at once.
River water at y = 2 is a blend colour between ocean blue and river turquiose (it was a good idea LazyJ).
The new terrain from 'watershedminimal' is used, flatter lowlands with wide beaches and dunes and flattish areas for building on, the river channel changes shape from highland ridge to lowlands. Flat lowlands are only found in the higher continent areas, not archipelago areas.
Mod grass has grassy sides for unbroken grass on low hills, looks much better.

[twoelk]

grumble...
installing new version
falling in love with new landscape
abandoning old worlds
moving to new world

top culprit for cluttering up my harddisc detected: paramat mods
:-P

[ak399g]

What if, instead of generating a "transition layer," you put in a function similar to lavacooling: When freshwater and saltwater touch, those touching blocks will (both) turn to mixwater (when mixwater is touching either of the two, nothing happens). This would allow the creation of artificial rivers, no?

[paramat]

That would make the mixwater 2 nodes wide, i prefer the large area created currently. However to be thorough the abm you descibe could be added to mix waters placed by players, but i consider this to be too rare an occurence to justify the abm processing spikes whenever water is near.

[celeron55]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBi-6TBgUv4

[Mikerhinos]

Watershed is really beautiful, will it be possible one day that we have a watershed mapgen instead of a lua mod ?

celeron55 : nice edit ! I like the part in the beginning when we fly up the mountain sync with the music :)

[paramat]

Thanks for doing this celeron55, i am very happy you like the mapgen!
(I really approve of your roadmap post, especially VAEs and psuedo-threaded lua mapgen)

Mikerhinos, Minetest's mapgen dev said he would like to see this ported to c++ core, i could do this myself but since i work from inspiration and obsession i seem to be busy with new lua projects. The c++ is not too difficult, but i would find it hard learning how to integrate a new mapgen into the core, especially as mine has unconventional ways of adding dirt and flora (all at once from the main mapgen loop instead of in stages and using schematics). Also i'm tired of watershed now from so much ('full time') work on it, i want to work on new stuff. Anyone else is free to port it if they want :)

[paramat]

Version 0.4.0
Updated to the new terrain/river/stream generation method from riverdev mod, which is simpler and faster, using only one 3D noise, generation time is roughly 4s.

[paramat]

New version, still 0.4.0
Removed a few grasses and shrubs from some biomes, for a cleaner voxel look.
Stone waterseals added around streams, so that if the water ever gets around to flowing, it doesn't create a massive underground flood.
Ores are becoming too easy to find, so i spaced out the seams to a scale of 512n.
At last fog is added in very humid valleys.

[paramat]

New version at github, still named 0.4.0, i tuned the new river system in riverdev mod and transferred the params.

[LazyJ]

I've really been enjoying the updates and seeing the progression as I fly through and try out different map seeds.

The flatter low-lands and beaches add to the landscape's variety.

I miss the flowers.

I noticed some of the floatlands are much lower. This is neat. I've seen a few small island's hovering within a few blocks of the normal ground. Some big enough to build a small lookout post or one-room house or floating garden or just a nice place to sit for awhile and take in the scenery. ;)

I like water falls and sometimes I see clusters of small floatlands that would be perfect for ponds that are linked by waterfalls.

Thanks for all the work you do on "Watershed", paramat. ;)

[paramat]

Bug: i just realised the spawn player function has again not been updated, fix coming soon.

Lazy J, i removed grasses and flowers from dry grassland and grassland, perhaps they will return but rarer, however flowers are still in the appletree forest biome.

[DanteLives]

I keep being spawned underground. Is this a bug or something I'm doing wrong?

[paramat]

That's fixed in the latest version. I keep forgetting to update the spawn player function when changing the mapgen.

[paramat]

New commit at github, still called v0.4.0.
Luxore ABM removed. There was an ABM on 'luxoreoff' which tried to update lighting by replacing it with an identical 'luxoreon' node, but this 'placing' made some of the luxore nodes drop by 1 node.
'Terblen' exponent returns, making lowlands flatter and creating more contrast with exponentially rising mountain ridges.
Bugfix: 'xlscale' variation had been disabled for testing, this is now active to create large areas of adjacent continents and archipelagos.
Grasses and flowers recently removed from forest and grassland biomes return.

When i wrote riverdev mod i came up with a new set of mapgen parameters that i transferred into watershed, at the time i thought they were better parameters but now i realise i had lost the classic watershed terrain that was carefully developed and tuned, so with this commit it's back to what i had before on April 22, but of course with streams added.

One riverdev parameter that i am continuing to use is a high persistence of 0.67 for the 3D terrain noise, this creates crazier terrain and more floaty stuff at the ridges.