realistic mountains?

[hstone32]

I guess this isn't so much a question about VS, but about all proceduraly generated wilderness exploration games.

why are the mountains always so tiny in these types of games? Maybe it's just that my irl house is right at the foot of a mountain that's more than 1.5k tall in topographic prominence elevation, but I always feel like the glacier-capped peaks in these types of games are barely more than hills.

genuinely curious about the reason why. Is it just hard to generate mountains with real-life proportions? Is it a deliberate design decision? Would it make world files too big? Or was there no thougt about the matter in the first place?

[Michael Gates]

It's basically that nobody actually wants to climb up there... like, you'll do it once, look around, say "yup that's a lotta ice" and never come back.  There aren't even any frogs. So adding more height to the map has very little utility while making everything take up more space in your computer memory.

[hstone32]

17 minutes ago, Michael Gates said:

It's basically that nobody actually wants to climb up there... like, you'll do it once, look around, say "yup that's a lotta ice" and never come back.

I guess I don't see it the same way. I don't view mountains as things to be climbed, but as obstacles that provide an interesting navigational challenge.

Say for an example, there is a mountain between you and a frequent destination. Do you keep taking the long way around, or do you put your latent expeditionist skills to work and carve a passage through?

except, with how mountains are now, all you need to get past a mountain is a stack of dirt blocks.

[LadyWYT]

You could try changing the scale of landforms, or otherwise tamper with the world height to see if it achieves something more realistic. Just scaling up the landform size will make the mountains bigger, but I'm not sure that will make them "realistic" like what you're talking about. Changing the world height is more likely to make them taller, and thus more realistic in that sense, however, changing world height may significantly impact performance and gameplay in general, as the game isn't really tuned for extreme heights. In other words, it's probably possible to achieve something a bit more realistic, but your mileage will vary and it'll take some fiddling with the settings.

1 hour ago, hstone32 said:

genuinely curious about the reason why. Is it just hard to generate mountains with real-life proportions? Is it a deliberate design decision? Would it make world files too big? Or was there no thougt about the matter in the first place?

The main issue I see regarding realistic generation of things like mountains, is view distance. What's the point of having such grand landscapes if the average player won't have the hardware to support a view distance required to appreciate it? I think the general idea behind the design choices is to have a landscape that is fairly realistic, but scaled down to be properly playable/enjoyable on a variety of hardware.

[DUCATISLO]

terra prety

[Broccoli Clock]

WorldGen mods are your go to here. The vanilla gen is nice, it's certainly more realistic than "the other block game", and has some very decent configuration, but for a greater sense of realism then you'll need mods.

I am currently using Terra Prety (primarily down to it working well with Better Ruins), but there is a raft of different ones.

Ideally the vanilla world gen will evolve so that things like large open plains, rivers and more realistic gradual foothills, will be included. Until then you have to give it a little help.

[Broccoli Clock]

16 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The main issue I see regarding realistic generation of things like mountains, is view distance. What's the point of having such grand landscapes if the average player won't have the hardware to support a view distance required to appreciate it? I think the general idea behind the design choices is to have a landscape that is fairly realistic, but scaled down to be properly playable/enjoyable on a variety of hardware.

Sorry, but I don't agree with that. The point of having grand landscape is so that the player can travel to and experience them. View distance is pretty irrelevant in that case. Just because I can't see 1000 blocks away doesn't mean the land 1000 blocks away should have no structure. I can easily cover 1000 blocks in game. 

 

[7embre]

Actually a lot of players were complaining when they were forced to travel to the story locations, which aren't that far if we take real measures — 10k blocks is like ten kilometers. It's for you to decide whether this is far or not, but I think it may apply to the giant mountain ranges as well — I think they're deliberately scaled down for the average player to experience every possible landform, and to also fit into your render distance. Making difficult terrain massive in it's scale would again force players to travel, which as we've seen with the addition of second chaper, players don't really enjoy.

Making good looking terrain is a hard task in and of itself, and imho it just feels better when you don't have to climb for a few real hours, but a few ingame hours instead, given that the days ingame are shorter as well. Personally I wouldn't enjoy the fact that going across the mountain range may take half a month in game's terms

And no, I'm not saying that big ass mountains are bad. I love them, I live near them IRL and am regularly going to enjoy the scenery. It's just that every possible mesure should be scaled in balance with one another, if we're talking about games. Will I enjoy bigger mountains in game? Hell yes. Will I enjoy if travelling gets more complicated overall, with less flat spaces to build? Probably not, but for sure I'm up for occasional climbing challenges in VS. And I think that the landform balance we currently have is good too.

[Vratislav]

There is one more good reason why so scaled down landscape is fitting to the game, and it is because of scaling down the time. If the day-night cycle takes 40 minutes, it is scaled from the reality 36times (not to speak about further scaling by the yearly cycle). So the landscape should be also scaled to reasonably to have realistic feeling time passing time when traveling. It should not take half a day to climb that 1 km high (1000 blocks high) mountain that is "realistically" generated mere 2 km (so 2000 blocks) behind the base!  

Actually the landscape height differences is about 128 blocks from the sea level to ice spikes (on default), this should be comparable with like 4000 metres in the real landscape (let's say Alps in Europe). So the "climate" of the landscape is scaled down about 30 times, that is quite comparable with the daily cycle speed. 

Also, the perception of scaling down is not so drastical. For realistically percieved landscape, the absolute elevation is not as important as local differences and the steepness of slopes under the mountain ridges. Bottoms of valleys under mountains are not as low as the ocean. For example Innsbruck, surrounded by 2,5 km high Alp ridges, is located in 600 meters, so local height differences are about 3/4 of the absolute height. The centre of Sklarzska Poreba, located in 650 meters under the 1,5 km high Krkonose, reduces the local height difference even more and no one will talk me out that the Krkonose ridge is impressive (see pic). You get feel of pretty impressive mountains with local height differences under 500 meters, if the slopes are rocky. Aslo, if distance is scaled down more, hills become more impressive despite lower elevation.

So, if someone has beefy computer, he can bump both the world height and view distance to 512 and he will get local height differences up to about 300 blocks, that is already scaled about 1:10 to the Alps and on the edge of the perception of mountains in real scale. 

This is 1 km high mountain ridge, observed from the opposite ridge that is about 500 m above valley. The distance to the ridge about 6-8 km. Do we really need to have such landscapes 1:1?
 

[Vratislav]

2 hours ago, Vratislav said:

the absolute elevation is not as important as local differences and the steepness of slopes under the mountain ridges. Bottoms of valleys under mountains are not as low as the ocean.

I'll extend this, because it also says it is correct to keep rivers (at least the main ones) on the ocean level and to "fake" the flow by designating the flow speed, as it is in the mod. Only minor streams should run down from slopes. It will allow bigger local height differences so it decreases requirements to the overall world height, and also makes world generation easier. 

 

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

Sorry, but I don't agree with that. The point of having grand landscape is so that the player can travel to and experience them. View distance is pretty irrelevant in that case. Just because I can't see 1000 blocks away doesn't mean the land 1000 blocks away should have no structure. I can easily cover 1000 blocks in game. 

 

Yeah but my point on the view distance is that if the player can't actually see those grand mountains off in the distance, then they're going to be missing the experience. Sure, they could tell by the incline that they are climbing up a mountain, or traveling up a shallower incline to high plains or something. But if all they see at the top is pretty much the same general land features they saw at the bottom, due to not having an extremely high view distance, then what was the point?

It's like going to the Grand Canyon and hanging out at the visitor's center(or a different poor vantage point); yes, the canyon itself is nearby, but if you don't have good vision of the actual scale of the size of it, it's not really going to be all that impressive. In the case of view distance, lower view distances are essentially a permanent poor vantage point, and work better with terrain scaled down to be properly appreciated with lower distances. Yes, the view distance can be turned up to 1000+ blocks, which is a more appropriate scale for grander landscape, but it requires very beefy hardware to run the game like that...and most players don't have top-of-the-line hardware.

Edit: I'll also note some experience from the other block game regarding this concept as well. The Caves & Cliffs update added much grander mountains, yes, but at one point I also tried out a mod that made the landscape much more realistic, on a much grander scale. It did the job very well, but there wasn't enough view distance available to run the game smoothly enough to be playable(even with mods) and still appreciate the landscape. So I could tell that I was standing on the crest of what was probably an epic mountain range(Ozark style lumpy mountains), yet couldn't see any of it, which was very frustrating.

Edited October 11, 2025 by LadyWYT

[Broccoli Clock]

17 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Yeah but my point on the view distance is that if the player can't actually see those grand mountains off in the distance, then they're going to be missing the experience. Sure, they could tell by the incline that they are climbing up a mountain, or traveling up a shallower incline to high plains or something. But if all they see at the top is pretty much the same general land features they saw at the bottom, due to not having an extremely high view distance, then what was the point?

Not to be awkward but I really don't understand the point you are making. It comes across as "make your game as bad as possible because some people are running on 10 year old kit". Having landscape that you can't see is how the game works already, it's how "that other block game" works, it's how almost every single open world game works.

I also feel you might be underestimating the mindset of those who run the game on low-tier PC, these people know their kit is poor and will accept that they won't be able to run the game at max, nor will they get large view distances, rendering quality, etc. I did, when I had a shitbox.

Either way, and maybe I'm just reading it wrong, but I cannot see how this as a reason why there is not more realistic geography where you have slow sloping foothills, running up to a mountain that is outside of your view. Which I believe was the original topic.There's also the developer rule of thumb which is to future proof your product while offering a scaling level of support to people not matching the requirements. In time those at the "top range" will only increase, while those at the other end will decrease. 

[Facethief]

3 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

Not to be awkward but I really don't understand the point you are making. It comes across as "make your game as bad as possible because some people are running on 10 year old kit". Having landscape that you can't see is how the game works already, it's how "that other block game" works, it's how almost every single open world game works.

I also feel you might be underestimating the mindset of those who run the game on low-tier PC, these people know their kit is poor and will accept that they won't be able to run the game at max, nor will they get large view distances, rendering quality, etc. I did, when I had a shitbox.

Either way, and maybe I'm just reading it wrong, but I cannot see how this as a reason why there is not more realistic geography where you have slow sloping foothills, running up to a mountain that is outside of your view. Which I believe was the original topic.There's also the developer rule of thumb which is to future proof your product while offering a scaling level of support to people not matching the requirements. In time those at the "top range" will only increase, while those at the other end will decrease. 

I think @LadyWYT’s point is that if the mountains were scaled larger and in a more realistic way, they’d just look like a solid wall if you’re close enough to see them, unless you have a large enough view distance.

HOWEVER!

I think implementing a system such as the one in https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/22371 would make it possible to actually see the mountains at a distance where the slope is visible and it *feels* like a mountain from afar. While I haven’t played this mod, I’ve played a similar and slightly less optimized mod on Java TOBG, which is a horrible and slow-running mess (only when it comes to optimization, though; no hate for the other game), I can attest that it runs about the same as adding 4 or so chunks of view radius, so as a baked-in feature for this game, which runs leagues better than Java TOBG, this would run great on most computers.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Facethief said:

I think @LadyWYT’s point is that if the mountains were scaled larger and in a more realistic way, they’d just look like a solid wall if you’re close enough to see them, unless you have a large enough view distance.

Pretty much. To get a "realistic" mountain, the view distance world height would probably need to be around 1000 blocks or so, which is going to impact performance significantly. Most players will want to be able to climb to the tops of said mountains and actually enjoy the view. While it's fine to have ultra-high quality options for high-end pcs, I don't think it's a good idea to balance the entire game's aesthetic around the most top-of-the-line pcs. At that point, the average player is going to see gorgeous gameplay in the teasers, only to be disappointed when their experience isn't what's advertised(or they don't buy it in the first place due to hardware requirements). The overall experience needs to be consistent over a variety of hardware.

 

1 hour ago, Facethief said:

HOWEVER!

I think implementing a system such as the one in https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/22371 would make it possible to actually see the mountains at a distance where the slope is visible and it *feels* like a mountain from afar. While I haven’t played this mod, I’ve played a similar and slightly less optimized mod on Java TOBG, which is a horrible and slow-running mess (only when it comes to optimization, though; no hate for the other game), I can attest that it runs about the same as adding 4 or so chunks of view radius, so as a baked-in feature for this game, which runs leagues better than Java TOBG, this would run great on most computers.

Yeah this has crossed my mind too. This kind of optimization would make increasing view distance/world height defaults much more feasible, but I don't think the concept is quite developed enough yet. Not that it isn't worth the time to develop, but I do think there are more important priorities.

[Vratislav]

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The overall experience needs to be consistent over a variety of hardware.

This is important. Although potato owners acknowledge the fact they have weak computer, it does not mean they are not affected. If the low view distance will make landscape unenjoyable for them, many may leave the game and if there becomes a word that the game has playable landscape only on strong iron, it would also affect its sales.

It may be partially addressed directly in the world generation if many settings of world "hefniness" (world height, landform scale, gravity and so on) were coupled together. There may be several presets for the worldgen "heftiness" similar to these for graphical settings, coupled with recommended view distance.

[Vratislav]

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

This kind of optimization would make increasing view distance/world height defaults much more feasible, but I don't think the concept is quite developed enough yet.

It does work well for lower settings as the requirements on the quality of the effect there are not as high as with high end setting. Also, the short view distance can be annoying even with actual landscapes, especially in multiplayer or in the late game, when your base (or developed area around) is so extensive that it is already not covered by one look. So, anything that helps, is... helpful.

Of course, there is lot of space for improvement, as the principle here is much simpler than in the TOBG mod.

Edited October 12, 2025 by Vratislav

[LadyWYT]

1 minute ago, Vratislav said:

This is important. Although potato owners acknowledge the fact they have weak computer, it does not mean they are not affected. If the low view distance will make landscape unenjoyable for them, many may leave the game and if there becomes a word that the game has playable landscape only on strong iron, it would also affect its sales.

It may be partially addressed directly in the world generation if many settings of world "hefniness" (world height, landform scale, gravity and so on) were coupled together. There may be several presets for the worldgen "heftiness" similar to these for graphical settings, coupled with recommended view distance.

It was an issue that World of Warcraft ran into with one of their expansions. For years the game had a solid reputation of running on most hardware, but Blizzard upgraded a lot of the graphics, which increased a lot of hardware requirements. The result was a massive uptick in complaints on the forums as many players logged in to figure out that the game was no longer working correctly--enough players for Blizzard to actively have to roll back some of their plans and implement a patch for the older hardware just for that expansion, so they didn't lose a ton of subs.

 

2 minutes ago, Vratislav said:

It does work well for lower settings as the requirements on the quality of the effect there are not as high as with high end setting. Also, the short view distance can be annoying even with actual landscapes, especially in multiplayer or in the late game, when your base (or developed area around) is so extensive that it is already not covered by one look. So, anything that helps, is... helpful.

Of course, there is lot of space for improvement, as the principle here is much simpler than in the TOBG mod.

This is true. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see it implemented, but I am skeptical about how easy it would actually be to implement. It seems like it would almost need to be its own special update, kind of like what 1.21 was regarding world gen, and 1.21 also had quite a lot of issues implementing those changes. Even Minecraft had a lot of problems when it came to increasing world height/depth; the terrain is a lot better than it used to be, but early in Caves & Cliffs one of the drawbacks to the new terrain is that most of the world seemed to be hills, with very few plains areas to build in.

[Broccoli Clock]

On 10/12/2025 at 1:46 PM, Facethief said:

I think @LadyWYT’s point is that if the mountains were scaled larger and in a more realistic way, they’d just look like a solid wall if you’re close enough to see them, unless you have a large enough view distance.

Which is the point I replied to, explaining why designing your game to pander to the lowest spec users is a bad idea.

On 10/12/2025 at 3:11 PM, LadyWYT said:

Pretty much. To get a "realistic" mountain, the view distance world height would probably need to be around 1000 blocks or so, which is going to impact performance significantly. Most players will want to be able to climb to the tops of said mountains and actually enjoy the view. While it's fine to have ultra-high quality options for high-end pcs, I don't think it's a good idea to balance the entire game's aesthetic around the most top-of-the-line pcs. At that point, the average player is going to see gorgeous gameplay in the teasers, only to be disappointed when their experience isn't what's advertised(or they don't buy it in the first place due to hardware requirements). The overall experience needs to be consistent over a variety of hardware.

I am torn, we've swapped replies all over the place on this forum and been friendly doing so, and I'm loathe to take this further. Let's just end with, "agree to disagree" on this, because I disagree pretty much completely with what you've written. Sorry.

[FairyKairi]

As one of the said "potato users" (at least graphics wise), while I like the idea of EPIC mountains, I would much rather be able to run the game smoothly.  I FINALLY left the other game due to my 2014 graphics card not having the system requirements to run it at more than 20 fps WITH performance-enhancing mods.  VS as it is now is MUCH MORE optimized.

EDIT:  I will also mention that I personally live in the real Ozarks Mountains... I have yet to see a game (that I can run) do them justice, lol.

Edited October 15, 2025 by FairyKairi