Land cover setting?

[Maelstrom]

Sooo, I haven't been able to play since 1.17 and excited to start up again (when my new computer is finished shortly).  From what I recall of the 1.18 world gen settings there are two settings that determined ocean size vs. land coverage.  Could some one give a simple explanation of how those two settings affect world gen?

[Streetwind]

There's probably some nuance, but the way I look at it is as follows -

Landcover is how much land there is compared to how much ocean there is. Defaults to 100%, meaning all land, no ocean. But note that even 0% doesn't mean "no land, all ocean". There's always some land remaining, just very little.

Landcover Scale is a modifier on this, and you can think of it more or less as "how much to zoom in on the noise field from which the world is generated". If your landcover setting produced a bunch of small islands in water, then raising the landcover scale makes you "zoom in" on these islands and turn them into continents.

You could also take a look at the 1.19 release candidate, because according to Tyron these settings got new mouseover descriptions to better explain them.

Note that these settings are not very intuitive to test out, especially when not deviating much from the defaults. You may start a world with 100% landcover, and then compare it to a world with the same seed and 80% landcover, and see no difference whatsoever. The reason for this is that oceans are generated by... sort of "inverting" the terrain in certain locations, and filling it in with saltwater. Where that happens depends on the seed. And you might just explore several square kilometers of world and see no ocean anywhere, just because the seed decided to not invert any of the chunks you looked at. You'd have to compare extremely large maps, like hundreds of square kilometers worth, to consistently see the differences from one setting to the next.

I'd also advise you to not go overboard with oceans, because it turns out that oceans... have no content. And where they appear, they actively override and suckify existing content. I once gleefully made a world with large continents surrounded by large oceans (something like 0% landcover, 300% scale), only to discover that every single translocator I stepped into put me in a dead end somewhere under the ocean floor. Finding the resonance archive was a mess and a half - the raft at the time was so slow that I spent over fourty minutes just holding W in order to get to it (one way), seeing nothing but a flat blue surface the entire time.

So yeah, don't be lured in by the fantasy of a "realistic" world. Because you'll get it. And then you'll hate it.

[Maelstrom]

Much appreciated sir! 

My gaming time is limited and I don't want to spend a significant amount of time to find out I don't like the setting I chose.  You're response has given me exactly what I was looking for! 

[Taraxa]

Can anybody recommend landcover/scale settings to hopefully land on an enjoyable island/archipelago world? I'm hoping to find something where I can get most of my bronze age resources on the first island but should venture out further if I want to do more in the game. Currently I'm trying 60/150 out but I'm too early in game to tell if this will do (I'm a new player, too)