World Gen is pretty bad, and looting is broken.

[Obison]

World gen is really pretty bad, and no amount of messing with the settings can fix some of the things I do not understand get generated at all. These screenshots are just one of the most annoying types of landforms that seem to be far to frequent. Especially at spawns. What is with this up and down, up and down everywhere for miles no matter what settings you change.

I love this game and everything about it, but the amount of times I have started a game, deleted it and tried again just to get away from garbage generation like this is obscene, and I still run into it all over even if I am lucky enough to not spawn in it.

Nothing in the Lore seems to justify such a messed up world. I havent even got into the floating pieces of land, or other wierd shit that generates. Whats up with this world generator?

I know we can use mods, but I would rather not if I dont have to and these seems like something that should be of main focus for any game. That the world generates " properly ". WIth Tera pretty you loose cliffs, exposed rock, galcier ice, and what i consider real mountains almost completely which imo isnt any better. Plains and Valleys will do some really broken generation far too often to bother. Im not finding anything that seems to actually generate a proper, well mixed up world. Its just one extreme to the other, with no decent middle ground.

Also can you put a simple two click option before joining a save. Like click on the save, and then a pop up window asks, do you want to join this save before it joins. Accidently clicking a save and then having to force quit get's annoying especially when your trying to find a decent seed spawn.

If im missing something or anyone has any other recomendations, please let me know.

Either way, for the Devs, please put some focus on fixing your world generator. Everyone I know that plays is annoyed by it, and it is a major part of the player experiance.

Also looting enemys is fubar, and something we have to deal with everyday, all day. Its super annoying, especially when under fire and trying to loot during storms before the corpse dissapears.

[LadyWYT]

12 minutes ago, Obison said:

World gen is really pretty bad, and no amount of messing with the settings can fix some of the things I do not understand get generated at all. These screenshots are just one of the most annoying types of landforms that seem to be far to frequent. Especially at spawns. What is with this up and down, up and down everywhere for miles no matter what settings you change.

I love this game and everything about it, but the amount of times I have started a game, deleted it and tried again just to get away from garbage generation like this is obscene, and I still run into it all over even if I am lucky enough to not spawn in it.

Have you tried turning down the upheaval rate and/or turning up the landform scale? The upheaval rate is what governs how rough the terrain is, so turning it down will smooth things out significantly, though at the expense of losing more proper mountain terrain the further down you crank it. Landform scale affects how much area things like mountains, plains, and lakes cover, so the higher you set that value the larger the particular landform will be. Of course, while it can make the flat spaces a lot bigger, it also means that when you encounter difficult terrain(like mountains) it will cover a wider area as well.

16 minutes ago, Obison said:

Also can you put a simple two click option before joining a save. Like click on the save, and then a pop up window asks, do you want to join this save before it joins. Accidently clicking a save and then having to force quit get's annoying especially when your trying to find a decent seed spawn.

I do like this idea, and I suspect we'll see it implemented someday.

17 minutes ago, Obison said:

Either way, for the Devs, please put some focus on fixing your world generator. Everyone I know that plays is annoyed by it, and it is a major part of the player experiance.

Personally I'm satisfied with what we have available regarding terrain generation. However, I also expect it to go through a few more changes before the game reaches a "finished" state.

18 minutes ago, Obison said:

Also looting enemys is fubar, and something we have to deal with everyday, all day. Its super annoying, especially when under fire and trying to loot during storms before the corpse dissapears.

Given some of the recent patch notes, this seems to be something the devs are working to fix.

[Obison]

Upheaval in the screenshots is set to 0, and I have messed with all other settings to every extreme. The particular land generation in the screenshots seems to be unavoidible and very frequent to varying degrees. Though i have got lucky and not spawned in it a few times, I still run into this odd up and down repeated terrain eventually. Its just very odd generation to me and maybe one of the most annoying terrains to deal with. I like the mountains and cliffs and most all of it, its just really this particular land generation and the odd floating chunks I find either annoying, out of place or odd..

Otherwise, this is my fav game right now and i cant stop playing it. Love it. I just hope this type of terrain can become a focus on those working on world generation, and it can be removed as it really make no sense to have it at all. Its just an annoyance, isnt realistic at all, and nothing in the lore says the world should be this messed up in spots.

[LadyWYT]

14 minutes ago, Obison said:

nothing in the lore says the world should be this messed up in spots.

I'd argue it's been implied that the world was heavily messed up in the initial cataclysm, and then rearranged further in some of the temporal storms that followed, as those have been noted to have been a lot stronger than the ones the player currently faces. For at least one important story location, the structure's exact position is specifically stated to be unknown by a particular NPC, as the world has shifted.

18 minutes ago, Obison said:

Upheaval in the screenshots is set to 0, and I have messed with all other settings to every extreme. The particular land generation in the screenshots seems to be unavoidible and very frequent to varying degrees. Though i have got lucky and not spawned in it a few times, I still run into this odd up and down repeated terrain eventually. Its just very odd generation to me and maybe one of the most annoying terrains to deal with. I like the mountains and cliffs and most all of it, its just really this particular land generation and the odd floating chunks I find either annoying, out of place or odd..

Gotcha. Floating islands aren't realistic, though I find them neat to look at and would chalk it up to be a side effect of the temporal forces exerting themselves on the world. As for the other bits, that's what I would call marshes, sand hills, or canyons/mesas. Certainly not as big as what you'd find in real life, but that kind of terrain does exist in certain parts of the world. As for navigating those areas in the game, I usually either find an easier path around, or sink in the time and resources to build a proper road through the terrain so future travels go more smoothly.

[Obison]

 

7 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I'd argue it's been implied that the world was heavily messed up in the initial cataclysm, and then rearranged further in some of the temporal storms that followed, as those have been noted to have been a lot stronger than the ones the player currently faces. For at least one important story location, the structure's exact position is specifically stated to be unknown by a particular NPC, as the world has shifted.

Gotcha. Floating islands aren't realistic, though I find them neat to look at and would chalk it up to be a side effect of the temporal forces exerting themselves on the world. As for the other bits, that's what I would call marshes, sand hills, or canyons/mesas. Certainly not as big as what you'd find in real life, but that kind of terrain does exist in certain parts of the world. As for navigating those areas in the game, I usually either find an easier path around, or sink in the time and resources to build a proper road through the terrain so future travels go more smoothly.

As far as I know, the lore states the world is back to its original state with only the rifts, storms and remenants of monsters that remain as a connection to what happened before,or perhaps in the future.

 

To be honest, as someone who grew up near these types of land forms you mention, these are nothing like sand hills, canyons or mesas Ive ever seen. This is a rediculously extreme over repeated, up and down that makes no sense especially with water in between. Im sure you can probably find something "like" this in the real world but it would be extremely rare. You said it yourself there so annoying you avoid them completely or have to spend a ton of time digging through them. Making it kind of pointless for them to exist at all. Myself and everyone i know that plays finds them super annoying and we all have tried to generate spawns far from them and tried worldgen mods to get away from this type of thing. If you look into worldgen mods, its pretty clear they are all made with the sole idea to get away from this type of land generation, and most people in the comments arent looking for just flat land, but to again, get away from this type of unrealistic, odd, and really only annoying generated chunks.

[Obison]

My newest try at a new seed. Lets be honest. this is messed up and the worldgen needs some work. Again, love the game, love the world, but this worldgen needs some work, and thats why im here in the suggestion portion of the forums. Ive been generating worlds, playing with settings, and flying around for the past 4 hours now. Majority of seed spawns have been terrible no matter the settings. It shouldnt be this way.

Edited May 4, 2025 by Obison

[V1ncent]

As far as my thoughts, the terrain looks mostly fine on the world map. but feels bizzare considering the scale: islands in water become small bumps in ponds, canyons look like cracks, and hills appear as spikes.

I have been using terrain mods like terra prety, rivers and continental world to modify the worldgen so far. The results are fine. 

Edited May 8, 2025 by V1ncent

[ifoz]

5 hours ago, Obison said:

As far as I know, the lore states the world is back to its original state with only the rifts, storms and remenants of monsters that remain as a connection to what happened before,or perhaps in the future.

The terrain itself is still shifted. Said important story NPC specifically mentions an important location that they knew before the world shifted, but do not know where it is now located.

[Maelstrom]

Hoooo boy.  Just wait until you get to the Resonance Archives.

[Zane Mordien]

I finally just started to mod the terrain generation. I got lucky my first couple worlds but after that it's been all mountains and jagged terrain on my seeds.

[Obison]

On 5/7/2025 at 1:17 PM, Maelstrom said:

Hoooo boy.  Just wait until you get to the Resonance Archives.

? Been there many times, I have well over 1000 hrs in this game, and many fresh starts, as well as obvious attempts to get some less annoying terrain generation.. I just figured it was time i gave some feedback about the biggest issues I have with it, since i love the game and want it to be better and be more popular.

Edited May 30, 2025 by Obison

[Thorfinn]

Personally, I haven't found tweaking settings makes "better" terrain. Other than landcover when I absolutely, positively feel the need to sail around aimlessly on a lifeless, boring sea world. Which, you might guess, is not often. It takes something much more involved, like what @Zane Mordien is talking about. Download the Plains and Valleys mod and look at it to get some idea of what it's going to take.

I do like the defaults though. I'm not trying to create something "realistic". Spreading out the land to make realistic grades would result in either massive amounts of travel and/or mostly flat lands. I've driven across Texas from El Paso to Brownsville. Back in the days of 55 MPH and the Rangers were pretty aggressively enforcing it. Mostly pretty bland, flat plains. Can't imagine the, what, 15 days it would take to walk it. Probably would put me off VS entirely. Heck, people get put off by a piddly half-day stroll to the Resonance Archive.

[lying_dice]

honestly i kind of like how bumpy terrain generation can be gives it Character the second and fourth pictures shared in the original post look quite good to me. i do agree that the first and fourth look a bit spikeyer than makes much sense and seem like a pain in the butt to traverse. I don't mind difficult terrain too much personaly but  If the world is supposed to be messed up and have shattered terrain it would be nice for difficulty of traversal to be more interesting or feel more like an intentionally designed challenge. Hopefully whatever the devs are doing to improve world gen makes things a bit more sensible without costing too much of the games charm

[kcroxtonjr]

Completely agree with pretty much everything said OP. I've also tried many, many different combinations of world gen options and theres simply no way to generate a world that doesn't have such chaotic features. In general things are just much too noisy, making it frustrating to navigate the world as well as spot things such as resources. I honestly can't think of another similar game that I've had such an issue with the world gen with.

Using the mod Farseer really exposes the problem as you are able to see a smooth representation of what the terrain looks like with a very far view distance, and in general it just looks like a bunch of spikes sticking up all over the place. I have no idea what the actual code is doing in this games world gen, but it feels like the majority of the generation is affected by very basic noise that just makes things overly rough and not very interesting.

The world doesn't need to be realisitic at all, it can be full of interesting and other worldly terrain shapes and features,  there just needs to be a better balance between rough terrain and not so rough terrain. A more gradual blend between things would help greatly as well.

Edited June 8, 2025 by kcroxtonjr

[Vratislav]

I have played with Plains and Valleys, of course several games in standard terrain generation, now I am trying Terra Pretty.

The result is, that standard worldgen looks unrealistically "bumpy", but also it brings something unique for this game. Like, I have asked "why these mountains look like three floor cake?," but at the end, it became part of the game feel. Also, I suppose that such kind of terrain generation brings more variability in small area, that is imho positive for early game. And what I must say, the bumpy terrain is more fun to traverse by elk than smooth plains of modded worldgen, when you learn to jump with it well. 

On the other side, the more realistic wordlgen set up using mods feels sometime unimpressive, even boring, and it may be not easy to find a location that is beautiful unless you travel thousands of blocks.  

Actually, I'd be interested in "something between", and I suppose that interesting results may be obtained by decreasing landform scale setting under 100% in modded worldgen (or at least not increasing it to huge numbers as this is usually recommended). But I haven't dedicated time to fiddle with these settings to my satisfaction. 

For the future, I assume that if rivers would be added, this would mean radical changes in landforms, thus making this discussion obsolete.

 

Edited June 11, 2025 by Vratislav

[Dilan Rona]

Tbh, some of those pics reminds me of this...

And as stated before, the game is far from complete, still in alpha, and Chapter 2 is still being worked on. With another 6 being planned. I am more than willing to work with what I have, and give the devs (who are doing a terrific and great job as it is) enough space to work on the game. They are fixing problems as it arises as well.

Edited June 12, 2025 by Dilan Rona

[Dilan Rona]

My biggest thorn in the side tbh is the forum, and how I need to use paint to paste, and then copy the image sometimes before I can paste the image on the forums, and not have it pasted as a link 70% of the time.

[Zane Mordien]

Has terrain generation got more jagged and chaotic since 1.19.1 to anyone else? My first two worlds had no mods and they had a couple nice areas near spawn that were somewhat flat and usable, but when I generate the same seeds now its different and more bumpy and useless terrain. 

[-Glue-]

I'll once again recommend these settings:
Landcover: 80%
Landcover Scale: 125%
Landform Scale: 120%

From my experience the default settings make geological landforms way too small, I assume to make it look nice with low render distances. These settings sorta enlarge everything, so you get large open fields, rolling hills, large oceans and lakes, etc. You still get some areas that are ridiculously bumpy and hard to navigate, but it makes it a bit more manageable. It overall just feels more realistic and expansive. Its even better with higher render distances, and/or the Farseer mod.

Not sure how these settings will hold up once they change the world gen for oceans in the next update though.

[FlareUKCS]

Tyron mentioned a world tweak in the 21 preview build, so the devs are looking at worldgen but I am sure it isn't a simple fix as there could be a danger of making worldgen too samey, as in each and every world feels the same, but the team seems to be trying to find a nice balance.

• Tweak: Majorly reworked landforms to be more easily traversable. Warning: Will produce terrain smoothing between old chunks and new chunks

I tried some worldgen mods, like plains and valleys, and tera prety but the worlds tend to look good but lack vital resources, like getting miles of nice flat areas to build but no medium soil, or flat areas with medium soil and no wild plants (last one I tried had only Rye, nothing but Rye...each and every wild crop was bloody Rye. I think it may be due to the mods smoothing the bumps from the worldgen and taking off surface resources as a result, but that is a guess. It depends when the seeding is done versus the mod smoothing the terrain I would guess.

But the point of my post is that the team seem to be aware of worldgen aspects, and looking at fixes.

[Thorfinn]

On 6/7/2025 at 11:52 AM, lying_dice said:

i do agree that the first and fourth look a bit spikeyer than makes much sense

But the advantage of such terrain is how often you can find ores and minerals exposed in those formations. Maybe its more of a min-max view than a hardcore realist view, but I think the second and fourth are almost ideal. Simple to traverse, and lots of exposed strata. Plus, there's a higher elevation (i.e., cooler) farm available to those who allow source blocks to move, plus you are spoiled for options for windmills.

The first and third are fine, and nice to look at, but basically useless. 

[lying_dice]

52 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

But the advantage of such terrain is how often you can find ores and minerals exposed in those formations. Maybe its more of a min-max view than a hardcore realist view, but I think the second and fourth are almost ideal. Simple to traverse, and lots of exposed strata. Plus, there's a higher elevation (i.e., cooler) farm available to those who allow source blocks to move, plus you are spoiled for options for windmills.

The first and third are fine, and nice to look at, but basically useless. 

I meant to say first and third, idk how i got confused. Second and fourth are the ones with good exposed rock and traversability. The first and third look like a pain to move around (though i've seen much worse) and have little exposed rock.

imo surface ores are very rarely useful, i don't think i've seen anything other than quartz (probably divine punishment for playing with keep inventory). exposed rock is nice for easy prospecting though, and quite pretty besides.

[Michael Gates]

How do you walk over a mountain?

You go around, that's how. Sometimes you go around by a couple hundred miles, sometimes it takes a couple of decades and dozens of lives to find a decent route, some places you still come across the shattered wheels of wagons that took what "looked like" a good pass or the minivan some Germans used to try and push through an uninhabitable desert. (It took another few years before anybody actually found their bones.) We still hear about Hannibal crossing the Alps twenty-five hundred years later because holy beans he did WHAT?

Vintage Story is duplicating this real world effect, and the nature of voxel games is that it can't LOOK like the real world to do it. In the real world, no long slope is steeper than twenty-seven degrees; that's the natural slump angle. K2 is, on average, less steep than that. So is Everest. But in game, a twenty-seven degree angle is NOTHING, it barely slows you down from a run. It's like, two-and-up, three-and-up, two-and-up. To get the same level of hazard as, say, the Front Range of the Rockies (where I grew up), you need some cliffs, ten or fifteen blocks high, and you need a wall of those going a few hundreds of thousands of blocks.

Some terrain is to walk through. Some is to go around, and it can take a while to go all the way around.

[wildforester]

(I gotta admit the 2nd and 4th images starting this thread look like pretty nice terrain)

[Maelstrom]

On 6/21/2025 at 10:13 AM, Thorfinn said:

But the advantage of such terrain is how often you can find ores and minerals exposed in those formations.

Recently found a meteor in the cliff face before finding my first copper nugget.  

edit - @Thorfinn  Added screenshot here: 

 

Edited June 25, 2025 by Maelstrom