World generation

[Arasine]

Hi all, 

so the weakest part of the game in my opinion, is the world generation. No matter what I choose in the settings, it always seems to generate very little 'livable' land. Much of the environment is exceptionally broken and sharp tooth hills and mountains, with the block instability on (which I always use), this kind of terrain is essentially non-traversable in any reasonable time. 

Then there are the gaping pits, seemingly to the centre of the world, that are every 50 paces in more open areas. Often obscured by trees and vegetation. Again, with block instability on full, these can collapse when approached making even walking through a meadow a death trap! 

 Am I missing some generation setting ? I just want to generate a world where caves and the like are reasonably placed, and hills and mountains have at least the chance of making winding roads through them. 

Any world gen advice would be good, thanks. 

[Jacek Babiak]

I would also like to chime in on this topic, I'm a bit tired of the suddenly steep mountains, literally walls, there are few meadows or other large open spaces on a relatively flat surface.

[FlyingCatPhillips]

This reminds me of my game session last night! 

I was chopping a tree, in the woods listening to wolves howling in the background and seeing surface drifters walking around oddly not attacking???? And I got spooked, so when I felled the tree, I ran back to my base... Only too narrowly miss falling into a deep pit that I just happened to jump over. I don't have block instability on as this has been a problem for me. Just peacefully walking along in a nice meadow or plains like area and then you find yourself falling into a death pit full of drifters, wolves or bears! 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

I haven't ever found the world generation to be spectacularly problematic. But I will say that this may be more of a personal preference than anything. This is my current world spawn.

By contrast, this is where I have chosen to settle with my friend.

I'm quite fond of it and I'll be sad if I have to delete it for some odd reason.

[Maelstrom]

Sometimes spawn is just atrocious.  If it consistently sawtooth terrain, consider decreasing the uplift setting to a smaller number.  I run on default 30% and run into areas that have some real difficult terrain to navigate, but those areas tend to be pretty rare.

[Thorfinn]

I generally stick with the defaults. This creates massive landmarks that make orienteering easy, like you see with @traugdor's pics. Personally, I'd prefer a few more landmarks on the horizon than where he settled, but we see so little of his horizon there. Maybe off to the side or behind the POV is better.

[LadyWYT]

Turning down the Upheaval Rate should tone down the amount of rough terrain, and turning up Landform Scale should mean that the land features that do generate will be much larger; ie, plains will be bigger, but so will any mountains or hills that end up generating. There's also some different mods out there that tweak world generation, so you may try out one of those to see if the modded generation is more to your liking.

One thing I will note though, is that if you are playing with lore content enabled, certain locations need specific geographical features in order to spawn. Heavily modifying the terrain generation from the defaults may change the distances those locations usually spawn, though I haven't tested the theory to be certain.

[Kevin Eric Snell]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Turning down the Upheaval Rate should tone down the amount of rough terrain, and turning up Landform Scale should mean that the land features that do generate will be much larger; ie, plains will be bigger, but so will any mountains or hills that end up generating.

Setting landform scale to 200% generally gives me a world I like. There's still plenty of rough terrain, but the pockets of sanity are large enough to build in. I've never tried adjusting upheaval.

The maddening part is when a map generates, and every square inch of flat buildable land near the spawn point is temporally unstable.

[LadyWYT]

11 minutes ago, Kevin Eric Snell said:

The maddening part is when a map generates, and every square inch of flat buildable land near the spawn point is temporally unstable.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/8582

This mod may or may not help remedy that. I've not tried it out though, so I don't know how well it works.

[NastyFlytrap]

On 1/16/2025 at 5:02 AM, Arasine said:

Hi all, 

so the weakest part of the game in my opinion, is the world generation. No matter what I choose in the settings, it always seems to generate very little 'livable' land. Much of the environment is exceptionally broken and sharp tooth hills and mountains, with the block instability on (which I always use), this kind of terrain is essentially non-traversable in any reasonable time. 

Then there are the gaping pits, seemingly to the centre of the world, that are every 50 paces in more open areas. Often obscured by trees and vegetation. Again, with block instability on full, these can collapse when approached making even walking through a meadow a death trap! 

 Am I missing some generation setting ? I just want to generate a world where caves and the like are reasonably placed, and hills and mountains have at least the chance of making winding roads through them. 

Any world gen advice would be good, thanks. 

Nope. Its just like this.

 

Its imitating the generation of beta minecraft, like pre end dimension, that kinda era, and while its good at that, and as much as i love beta minecraft, i dont want that generation in vintage story. I want vintage story to have a really nice generation, with rivers going through caves, and magnificent sights like that, instead of something thats a 2D noisemap...

 

I dont like this world gen either and i wish they'd create their own