Worldgen is kind of disappointing including it's customization

[StarFeather]

I've been playing for a while and sadly I stand pretty firmly on this - the worldgen kind of sucks, ESPECIALLY if you want to travel long distances by land.
The terrain is just way too rough in way too many places. I wouldn't mind a kind of biome/landform that generated as those jutting pieces with 20-30 block deep holes between them if it was a rare occurance to spice things up, but from my experience it's as common if not more common than plains or gentler hilly terrain. It's just not fun to traverse in my opinion, on foot nor on elk, and it's not easily ridden around because it's surrounded by water, mountain ranges or just more of the jutting rocks.

Mountains are not great either, but I like to view them more as an obstacle to ride around rather than through unless I manage to find an interesting and not painful-looking lower passage I can take.

I'm not a fan of the floating pieces and the jutting rounded rock formations that look like the worldgen just repeated parts a few times upwards, but that's more aesthetics than anything else, I just ride around them like I would with normal mountains.

Changing worldgen options didn't really help me either. I tried vanilla and Plains and Valleys, Fields and Plateous, both of the mods combined as well. What I want to get is way more flat plains with occasional mountain here and there, but even when I lower the Upheaval Rate to 10%, the mountains are everywhere. Landform Scale setting is hit or miss because it lumps all the landforms together and changing it for under 100% gives me thinner valleys betweens those mountains that are everywhere which is worse. Changing it to 180% as I tried the most made plains bigger, but it feels like it makes mountains three times wider than them in turn. I just can't seem to fins a way to have giant rolling plains with thinner, rarer mountain ranges no matter what I do. It's all mountain, all the time.

I really hope the worldgen improves in nearer updates, even though in my opinion it should be tackled before adding story locations and transportation options or it makes those a moot point, tho that's mainly just my opinion. What I hope the most of is to see a realistic terrain generation mod similar to Terraforged I used in Minecraft, with similar amount of customization. That would make this game truly the cream of the crop for me since I loved almost all of it, just not the terrain.


That being said, I might just be making some mistakes with customizing worldgen. What settings do you all use and would you have screenshots as examples of results? I'd love to experiment, both with vanilla and the above mentioned mods!

EDIT: I tend to go for 384block tall worlds. I might not want mountains everywhere, but I like them tall when they are there! Don't know if that would affect anything else in worldgen.

Edited January 6, 2025 by StarFeather

[LadyWYT]

Hmmmmm, have you tried this mod? https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/13620

Based on the description, it seems like it would be the one most likely to achieve the kind of terrain generation you're looking for. You'll probably still want to turn down the upheaval rate, and potentially tweak the landform scale to something larger. On the latter, it'll mean much bigger mountains, but the the idea behind a change like that is to have a lot more plains in between those mountains.

Otherwise, I'm not sure that there's currently a way to generate huge plains with small strips of tall mountain to occasionally find. Big mountains might be an annoying obstacle, but if most all the land around them is flat they'll at least be easy enough to ride around, especially with the new mount system that 1.20 adds.

[StarFeather]

I think I tried that mod once in the past, but didn't fiddle with it too much. Looks like I have to give it a go again! Thank you for recommendation!

Overall, I can stomach mountains to ride around if there's enough plains and gentler hills between them. The jutting, swiss cheese tupe of terrain that's so common in vanilla is my biggest enemy lol

I wonder if it would be possible at all to generate cliff and mountain terrain that would have a chance of naturaly generated path leading alongside it (not necessarily path blocks on it, just a terrain shape), kind of like in this photo:

Now THAT would make it fun to encounter mountains, especially on higher world settings, if you could sometimes find a passageway like this leading you alongside the cliff. Never seen it done before though and I don't know anything about generating terrain or features, so not sure if that would be possible at all. I can keep dreaming lol

[Thorfinn]

Welcome to the forums, @StarFeather!

Are you seeking out the passes and valleys? I ask because they are pretty common in default mapgen. What usually causes the problems is if you really, really want to head in some particular direction. In the pic you posted, if your destination were across the lake and up over the mountain, instead of just following the road around the bend in the "wrong" direction, that would not be a whole lot of fun.

That's really the reason I advise avoiding the map as much as possible. There's usually an easy road through, though it might require a roundabout path. In the case of your graphic, just go the far side of the mountains dead ahead, and you often have a clear path. If not, often the range right beyond that.

Edited January 6, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Kevin Eric Snell]

I was mostly.... mostly satisfied with Landform Scale 200%. Still too many hills, but the plains are nice. Then, while following the trail that the treasure hunter trader sent me on, I encountered the most evil landscape I could've possibly envisioned. A large swath of crazy steep hills and gaps, only a few blocks wide but somewhere around 50 to 80 blocks deep, so almost every step is either a death drop or an impassable cliff face, like an accordion. How something like that could possibly generate with huge 200% land scale is beyond me.

[LadyWYT]

39 minutes ago, Kevin Eric Snell said:

I was mostly.... mostly satisfied with Landform Scale 200%. Still too many hills, but the plains are nice. Then, while following the trail that the treasure hunter trader sent me on, I encountered the most evil landscape I could've possibly envisioned. A large swath of crazy steep hills and gaps, only a few blocks wide but somewhere around 50 to 80 blocks deep, so almost every step is either a death drop or an impassable cliff face, like an accordion. How something like that could possibly generate with huge 200% land scale is beyond me.

I'm guessing it's due to a swath of hills counting as a specific landform, so instead of a relatively small patch of very hilly terrain it decided to generate a much larger area of hills and cliffs.

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

That's really the reason I advise avoiding the map as much as possible. There's usually an easy road through, though it might require a roundabout path.

I'm not so sure it's a fault of the map, so much as it is a weak point in our modern sense of navigation. Thanks to how far technology has come, we're able to bore tunnels through mountains, bridge rivers, and pretty much carve a highway through almost any kind of terrain. As a result, we can travel in a fairly straight line from one place to another, though there are some exceptions.

Back in medieval times though(setting of Vintage Story), things like mountains, dense forests, and large bodies of water would pose a significant travel hindrance, and in many cases be impassable. At that point, it's not so much the distance that one must travel, as it is the effort spent just getting from one point to another. Better to skirt obstacles and take advantage of easier terrain, even if it meant more miles overall, than to burn a lot of time and energy trying to pick your way through rough terrain.

[StarFeather]

I did just find this mod here: https://mods.vintagestory.at/landformoverhaul
It's supposedly working with rc-8 so I'll be trying it out when I'll have time. It looks like it should mostly do exactly what I wished for, or at least close to it! Reccomended world height is one step lower than what I tend to go for but I will see how it'll behave with higher mountains too and settings different than recommended by the author.

[Maelstrom]

On 1/5/2025 at 6:26 PM, StarFeather said:

I wonder if it would be possible at all to generate cliff and mountain terrain that would have a chance of naturaly generated path leading alongside it (not necessarily path blocks on it, just a terrain shape), kind of like in this photo:

Now THAT would make it fun to encounter mountains, especially on higher world settings, if you could sometimes find a passageway like this leading you alongside the cliff. Never seen it done before though and I don't know anything about generating terrain or features, so not sure if that would be possible at all. I can keep dreaming lol

That road way is anything but natural.  There is a ton of cut and fill that goes into making even that two lane road possible.  The mountainside at the farther curve was cut through for the roadway.  The roadway at the bottom of the picture has a bunch of fill beneath it which continues past the tree on the left of the road.

[Lodeclaw]

On 1/5/2025 at 5:51 PM, StarFeather said:

I tend to go for 384block tall worlds.

The way the world height works is as you increase height the generator will just stretch the features vertically to fill the space. This results in a more chaotic world with a lot of rugged terrain features. Because of this landform mods need to somewhat tailored for the height you want. I personally have mostly used WorldgenFix which is specifically for very tall worlds.. I liked it so much I made my own fork with reduced water. There are lots of really great landform mods as you've likely already discovered.