World Generation Map Preview?

[Danek Jovax]

I've been manually testing several different map types on my own time and manually exploring them to see the results of my settings/changes, but then it occurred to me this question:

Is there a mod or an app that takes the world settings as-entered and generate some map preview that you can use to help make the results of my world settings come faster?

If so, please refer me!  Thanks!

--- DanekJovax of the Serpentide Isles

[Krougal]

I wish. Even better would be something like chunkbase.com has for Minecraft.

I know some people love the discovery, but I don't have days to invest into a world, only to find out I hate it.

It really makes me sour on the game.

[Danek Jovax]

My main goal for a utility like this is to at least preview a map and make sure the land forms are matching the target I'm shooting for.  Especially if I plan to play on that map, I don't want to spoil anything else for me and bias my judgement as to where anything else is located.

I may just roll up my proverbial sleeves and work on this mod myself if nothing else offers itself.

Edited December 6, 2024 by Danek Jovax

[Pr0Gr3Zz]

Hey man, any luck on this mod? I've been looking online for anything even remotely close to chunkbase for minecraft but I've found nothing. would love to see if there are any interesting ruins or landmarks on a game i have running too!

[Maelstrom]

Not much will be the same for identically generated worlds.  What I mean by that is create multiple worlds with the exact same seed and the exact same world gen settings and you'll still have random placement of things, like ore deposits and ruins.

[Zane Mordien]

The ruins are pretty well set since 1.19.

[Dilan Rona]

Not where the Better ruins mod (or other mods where they place structures) are concerned. Also Vintage story doesnt generate maps the same way that minecraft does with fixed seeds, and fixed biomes. Even if the seed is exactly the same, using different settings in the world generation page will yield dramatically different results.

Also comared to minecraft, the terrain generation of Vintage story is a lot more gradual, and a lot more natural, and you do not have the extremes that minecraft has with its biomes where you can literally see the edge of one biome, and the edge of another biome meeting together.

For example, you have badlands on one side, a thin desert strip in the middle. Taiga to the upper right, and plains to the bottom right.

[Dilan Rona]

Or even more dramatic like in this case...

That abomination is a snowy plains next to a plains, and there is a distinct, clear seperation of biomes that Vintage story will never have.

Edited June 10, 2025 by Dilan Rona

[Zane Mordien]

7 hours ago, Dilan Rona said:

Not where the Better ruins mod (or other mods where they place structures) are concerned. 

Even the better ruins mods generates the same ruin in the same location as long as the terrain allows for that ruin. It used to be sort of random, but NiclAss fixed that sometime last year. 

[Dilan Rona]

I generated 3 maps, same seed, same settings. And the ruins are not where they were on the 1'st map. If they even generated.

[Dilan Rona]

Same problem appeared with Underground Mines - Progression, Underground Mines, and Better Traders. Any mod that adds their own structures doesnt generate the same ones that was there before.

Better Traders for example. On one map, it was a clockmaker. On a different map (same seed, same world generation settigns), the trader became a kitchen trader.

[Zane Mordien]

There must be some other mod you are running that causes it to be random for the ruins. With the Better Ruins mod it used to be random, but not anymore. I've generated the same map over and over today to check again and they are the same ruins every time and the mod creator has confirmed he wanted it this way. Unless that changed in 1.20.11. I thought it was random as well and I commented that it was random on someone's Youtube and NiclAss corrected me that it was no longer random. In vanilla it is the same vanilla ruin everytime as well. The traders are random and nothing to do with the seed the last time I checked. They appear to be RNG when you reveal them. 

[Maelstrom]

Ok, I sit corrected on the ruins.  Today I learned.  

I stand by my comment on ores still changing between worlds with identical seed/settings.

[Zane Mordien]

Yeah, I've never tried to find the same ore in the same place on different runs of the same seed.

[Thorfinn]

What would a map gen preview do that the various /wgen commands do not?

[Mark W]

@Thorfinn The obvious? It would let us visualize what these settings do. The explanations are vague, and the results time consuming to evaluate when you can't get 'the big picture'. I've been trying for ages to create a world that's a couple million blocks tall and wide, but with a single set of hemispheres. You'd think this would be easy, but it's not. It's a lot of guessing and checking. If I could simply input the values into a visualizer I could deduce what these config settings are actually doing and create worlds with climate distributions that I want, rather than experimenting blindly based on inaccurate and vague descriptions from this and other sites.

[Thorfinn]

Are we talking about the same thing, @Mark W?

Start a game, switch to creative, maybe stop time, type /wgen pregen 40000 or something else huge, then walk away. It will generate your worldmap without you having to do anything. Once it's done, you could fly around and check it out.

Or what you might possibly be asking for is much harder than it is for the other game, because here, the biome is determined by what the mapgen gets, which is necessarily chunk-based, rather than the other way around. You could probably redo the mapgen so that it generates regions, but does not do the chunks, then use filler as stand-in for what that region would generate, but that would not tell you the climates involved. It kind of needs to go through that whole thing of generating elevations and rainfall and decoration before it can tell you the climate. You could have it skip the ruins and caverns steps, I suppose, but that is not usually much of the mapgen.

Edited July 29, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Mark W]

The technical difficulty not withstanding, the point seems to elude you. We want a convenient way to preview maps and make small adjustments that don't require an hour or more of our life to review and test iteratively. Telling us how you can't fathom not spending inordinate amounts of time testing in game with console inputs isn't constructive man.

I'd like to be able to paste my world config into a tool, have it do some type of proportional sampling and display for me a rough idea of what generated. I'd like to do that over spending hours of my life learning syntax to esoteric commands and manually reviewing iterative changes to config settings, and judging from the number of posts I find here and on reddit about this, the majority agree.

Edited July 29, 2025 by Mark W

[Thorfinn]

I agree that might be a nice thing to have. Any idea how it could be done, apart from magic?

[jaggedcan9ne]

Sounds like the only way to really have what you want is to use something based on what the game engines uses, plus taking your mods into account. Maybe in game viewer, or something accessed from the main menu that can give you a rough idea of what it might look like? Since its world gen settings PLUS seed number, only way to get an accurate picture is to just piggy back off the engine.

Curious myself and found this thread. Be nice to see an ariel view of what I've generated so far, almost like viewing the 2b2t map and all of its changes.

[Aksyl]

I forget the name of the tool, but Minecraft had a third party editor for a while that'd just hook in and run wgen and nothing else, and it'd pull from the mods you had installed to load the assets. I think it was MCEdit(https://www.mcedit.net/ this looks the way I remember)? Basically, it was just borrowing the wgen built into minecraft without the game running.