New maps are worse - I will give up changing maps!!!

[Cerehelm]

I compared some maps generated in version 1.20 and 1.21... and the change is for the worse. Among other things, the new map generation method destroys large lakes, replacing them with ponds and uneven terrain overgrown with bushes. I've never built a sailboat before because I had nowhere to use it. Now I wouldn't even have a reason to build a raft. I'm pasting an example of world seed 845174861 (the red dot is point 0-x-0. On the left - version 1.20, on the right - 1.21). Therefore, I ask you either to retract this change or to give the player the choice of whether they prefer the new map generation method or the old one. I don't understand why someone has such an aversion to water that they have to eliminating beautiful lakes.

[Katherine K]

I've found that I have to set land percent a bit down if I want to get a world that has viable sailing. That doesn't seem to have changed much from 1.20 to 1.21, but I haven't played enough with the latter to confirm it.

[Krougal]

Yeah, the default is way too low. Even the recent change Tyron made, 2.5% is miniscule, even if he made the scale larger (and I admit I do not fully understand the interaction between all the settings)

"Worldgen. These are personal preferences again here. I like to set the world width and length down to 51k and the equator distance to 25k. It is still plenty big enough to explore, but it won’t take real life days to see different climates. Also the amount of ocean is something I am still trying to find the sweet spot. I want actual oceans, but of course it is hard to see what you got without exploring extensively. I think I’ve got it at 70% landcover right now, of course the Earth has a helluva lot more water. I may wind up trying 30% next time." - Excerpt from Krougal's Unofficial Vintage Story for Dummies

A lot of my older worlds were with 30% landcover, but I was also using TerraPretty in many of them, which I am not even sure if it respects that setting or not (there are some it outright ignores). Those did give good large oceans and continents.

I feel the vanilla world gen is a lot better in 1.21 but like I've said in other places, I may have just gotten lucky. I'm also running a seed I have run many times before, but I have also seen many variations of it; both in settings, game versions, and world gen mods used. Pretty much every iteration of this seed has been at least what I consider decent, many have been exceptional.

Unfortunately, without doing a lot of exploration, it is impossible to know if your ocean setting was too little, too much or just right. Sometimes I do go into creative mode and crank the fly speed up to about 12x and go zoom around the map, but it is still very time consuming, and of course it takes some of the joy of exploration away from actual survival play.

[hstone32]

Huh. So that's what that slider does. Good to know. I guess if you slide it high enough, the lakes become large enough to join with oceans, and peninsulas get swallowed up. I'll keep that in mind if I ever want to do a pirate themed playthrough.

[Cerehelm]

 It's not about the slider. It's about the "land cover percentage" option—there's no slider there, you choose the suggested values. Yes, you can increase the amount of water on the planet this way. But I compared maps with the default settings—I included one example, but I've encountered this on other maps as well—the game in version 1.21 drains the terrain, replacing lakes with bushes That's why I wrote that this is a change for the worse.

[Thorfinn]

That's a consequence of landcover scale. The new setting of 400% makes landmasses 4x as big. IMO, they were maybe a bit small before, but not that much. I'd have guessed 125% or 150% for starters.

[Krougal]

5 hours ago, Cerehelm said:

 It's not about the slider. It's about the "land cover percentage" option—there's no slider there, you choose the suggested values. Yes, you can increase the amount of water on the planet this way. But I compared maps with the default settings—I included one example, but I've encountered this on other maps as well—the game in version 1.21 drains the terrain, replacing lakes with bushes That's why I wrote that this is a change for the worse.

 

14 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

That's a consequence of landcover scale. The new setting of 400% makes landmasses 4x as big. IMO, they were maybe a bit small before, but not that much. I'd have guessed 125% or 150% for starters.

Well the way I (think I) understand it, it's a combination of both.

So very rough guestimation, the world generation in essence slaps down a blob of clay. The landcover scale is how big that blob is. The landcover percentage determines whether or not that blob is water or land.

Small ponds don't count in this, as they are features and not base terrain.

Granted I don't have anything but anecdotal evidence to back any of this up.

Edited August 10, 2025 by Krougal

[Facethief]

17 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

That's a consequence of landcover scale. The new setting of 400% makes landmasses 4x as big. IMO, they were maybe a bit small before, but not that much. I'd have guessed 125% or 150% for starters.

I’m pretty sure the new setting is 500%.

[Krougal]

38 minutes ago, Facethief said:

I’m pretty sure the new setting is 500%.

It is. Oh, and Thorfinn has it backwards (because I remember Tyron talking about this recently)

Landcover percentage is whether it is going to slap down a piece of ocean or not.

Landcover scale is how big the oceans are.

Landform scale is how big a terrain feature is going to be (presumably on land after it has determined if it is ocean or land) so mountains, plains, lakes, etc.

 

[LadyWYT]

At a glance, I like the new terrain. It's somehow a bit less jarring than it was previously, and will likely be a lot more fun to travel across. However, I do think players will want to play around with the settings a bit in order to get the land/ocean ratio they prefer, as the default heavily favors a lot of land and little ocean.

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, Krougal said:

Well the way I (think I) understand it, it's a combination of both.

Yes. The scale determines the size of the landform, including oceans. The size of the blob of clay, as you put it. The land cover is approximately the percentage chance that blob will be "negative" clay, i.e., result in a terrain that is below sea level, so 2.5% ocean means the blob is almost always land, or more specifically, above sea level. The size and number of lakes is based on the Perlin noise. The flatter you make the map, the less depressions your land has that can possibly be filled with water, as well as the shallower those lakes are.

If you want lots of ocean, you need lots of generation that is below sea level, obviously. If you want lots of lakes, you want a lot of land above sea level and a high amount of Perlin variation.

[EDIT]

The problem with the latter is that because of complaints of how hard existing landforms were to traverse, the Perlin noise has been damped. Creating fewer lakes. You can kind of get back to the old lake coverage by increasing the uplift. Which gives you back the hard to traverse terrain.

Edited August 10, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Cerehelm]

Right now, we have a lot of land (I'm talking about the default settings). And there are depressions in the terrain. The problem is, they're not filled with water. There are also quite a few lakes, but only small ones. I've included one example (even a poorly rendered one, because the map scale isn't identical, and in reality, the lake left in version 1.21 is smaller if displayed at the same scale as the image in version 1.20).

But I've looked at dozens of subsequent maps in version 1.21—not once did it generate (near the starting point) the large lakes I often encountered on 1.20 maps. 

And I don't know why anyone complained about the difficulty of traversing overland in previous versions. I'll argue that traveling a long distance by raft across large lakes is easier and safer than trudging through rugged terrain covered in birch thickets infested with wolves and deep holes.

[Guimoute]

7 hours ago, Cerehelm said:

And I don't know why anyone complained about the difficulty of traversing overland in previous versions.

Because people at large aren't very good and do not like not being able to move in a straight line. For me, it's precisely what makes the charm of Vintage Story. I have to discover routes between locations of interest, improve them, plan my journey like it's Death Stranding.