Is the world generation too vast and spread out?

[AIpine]

World Generation, landform scale, maps, diversity


I play with the standard 550ish or an even longer viewdistance and I would really prefer If i was able to see more landmarks and different landforms on the horizon.
Having to travel far to see a change in scenery is sapping some of my joy of exploring. A more compact, faster changing map is more interesting to me. Even with the smaller polar distance settings it's a massive undertaking to travel to a latitude that's different enough in temp.
Also, I like the immersion of having to remember landmarks to navigate and finding your way even without a map. That's why I turned the map of and later installed a cartography mod with a compass and maps I can't use straight away.
But with the vanilla worldgen this into a real survival challenge.

As a new player I'm still figuring out how to modify the game to my preferences but I really don't like default map generation
Vintage Story is going for a much different worldfeel than TOBG but I can't imagine I'm in the minority for wanting a more arcade-y and less realistically scaled world generation as a preset of options.

What's your take on this?

Edited Sunday at 12:20 PM by AIpine

[Broccoli Clock]

Quite the opposite for me, the fact the world is huge is the pull, and if I had to guess I think you probably are in "a minority" who want an arcadey and less realistic world. Those sorts of player found their home in Minecraft.

The world gen is pretty damned configurable, either directly or via mods, so it shouldn't be hard to find/generate the sort of terrain/size you want.

[Rezerkity and stuff]

I think it'd be nice if there was a world gen option for biome 'size' so to speak. But overall I like that things are spread out, it makes travel worth it, and it makes building forward bases and pathways worth it. The distance between resources adds purpose to the things you do in the game, as opposed to just being convenient and easy to get done. I do always turn story distance down to 25% though, because a multiple day hike for something that'll probably kill me isn't very fun.

[dakko]

Using the customization option for "Patchy" climate will give a diversity of biomes.

[williams_482]

There'a also a mod called Farseer which renders distant terrain features as low res blue shapes off on the horizon. It's pretty realistic, and quite effective for giving you grand vistas and a peek at distant mountains. 

It't not yet updated for 1.22, but once it is I strongly recommend giving it a go. 

[MKMoose]

4 hours ago, AIpine said:

I think this screenshot is a good example of where a terrain feature in the game just doesn't make any sense. It's too large and too repetitive, and doesn't even have a good real-life analogue. I genuinely don't know what this is supposed to represent, and the closest I can think of is either a marsh or prairie potholes, but it's just not even close to anything, mainly due to excessive vertical terrain variation and way too small scale. I would take a completely flat grassland with a lake in the middle over whatever this is, and it would at least be easier to traverse.

 

4 hours ago, AIpine said:

I play with the standard 550ish or an even longer viewdistance and I would really prefer If i was able to see more landmarks and different landforms on the horizon.
Having to travel far to see a change in scenery is sapping some of my joy of exploring. A more compact, faster changing map is more interesting to me. Even with the smaller polar distance settings it's a massive undertaking to travel to a latitude that's different enough in temp.
Also, I like the immersion of having to remember landmarks to navigate and finding your way even without a map. That's why I turned the map of and later installed a cartography mod with a compass and maps I can't use straight away.
But with the vanilla worldgen this into a real survival challenge.

My thought is to an extent the opposite - many areas of the VS world feel too small to me. While I wouldn't want to necessarily call for plain realism here because improper application of it can easily end up unfun, the VS world is already really, really small-scale compared to the real world, while also missing many details from the real world which would arguably help it greatly, including more natural altitude variation and large-scale highlands and mountains.

This could also alleviate some of your issues regarding navigation despite increasing the scale of some elements of the world, because instead of navigating based on distinct, smaller landmarks, you could still navigate along large landforms, even those that stretch across a dozen kilometers or more. Just as a quick example, "travel until you see a mountain range and continue through the montane plains while keeping a swamp to your right".

While I don't think making any of these even close to to-scale is a good idea, I think there is a lot of real places to be inspired from, instead of making "realistic" devolve into "boring". I also don't want realistic scale, but I think everybody can agree that realistic features would naturally improve the game a lot.

 

Of course, in the case of mountains, we probably wouldn't want any massive ranges like these Alps (on the left/top), but something more like these mountains in the Southern Carpathians (right/bottom) could make a lot more sense than anything we currently have in the game. Both images taken from Google Maps, about 50 km or so in height. The Southern Carpathian ones in that image are roughly 1400 m in height from the base at 600 m, so even scaling those down 20x to easily fit within the default height limit would leave you with a ~2 km long range - normally you won't get even close to that in-game, and you're more likely to find a massive potato, 250 m in diameter, in the middle of flatlands.

 

Flat areas are a bit more difficult to improve, because a lot of them are inherently large, expansive and samey like this savanna in Tanzania (left/top), but I think there's still a lot we could do with some mosaics and other ways to break up the landscape like in this other savanna in Angola (middle) with mixed woodlands, grasslands, shrubbery and barren riverbanks in varied proportions, or these deserts of Saudi Arabia (right/bottom) eroded by wind and water. All three images about 10 km in height.

  

 

Overall, I think there's a lot that could be improved about world generation while remaining "inspired by the natural processes of the real world", as the VS home page puts it, with logical regionality, large-scale features like drainage basins and tectonics, improved noise algorithms, climate condition and world parameter interaction, smoother layer transitions, smoother slopes, vegetation mosaics and paths, and a whole lot of stuff like that. World generation is a serious undertaking that a person could feasibly spend their life perfecting, so I wouldn't expect the devs to just keep working on it forever, but I think there's few things that would benefit the game more in the long term.

Edited Sunday at 05:01 PM by MKMoose

[Lollard]

I'll agree that this hilly wetland you see so frequently is the terrain generation's biggest flaw, it could be phased out entirely and the game would be better off for it.

[dakko]

4 hours ago, Lollard said:

I'll agree that this hilly wetland you see so frequently is the terrain generation's biggest flaw, it could be phased out entirely and the game would be better off for it.

I'm curious, because I have not experienced this type of terrain but you see it frequently. Do you tend to change any particular worldgen settings during customization? (until recently I've been using default settings)

[Guy Kibler]

Some aspects of it are too spread out, some aspects are too compact. Those hilly wetlands Lollard mentioned are good example of something too compact. Actual wetlands (I live in Maryland which is known for its marshes and wetlands) are typically much flatter, so having hills of that size makes it feel squished together. I've also had the experience where they can make up a significant amount of terrain (without changing worldgen settings).

Currently I play with a few worldgen mods, but I'd love to play the game without them, or either way have it improve significantly. I always set land cover to between 40% and 70%, regardless of mods. It feels super excessive at 97.5%. Since rivers are presumably coming in a future update, I'd imagine (and hope) that'd be an overall world generation update. The worldgen by default right now just seems too variable, especially in heigh in areas that should be flatter.

Edited Sunday at 11:06 PM by Guy Kibler

[LadyWYT]

Personally, I think in some cases the land features aren't nearly big enough, mainly for areas like plains and plateaus. Once in a while, I want to feel like I'm in Kansas, or certain parts of Texas, and a plateau feels pretty underwhelming when it only covers a couple hundred blocks or so. Mountains feel okay to me(though they could stand to have a peakier variant), since a videogame mountain is pretty underwhelming if you can't climb to the top and actually survey the land surrounding.

10 hours ago, AIpine said:

I play with the standard 550ish or an even longer viewdistance and I would really prefer If i was able to see more landmarks and different landforms on the horizon.
Having to travel far to see a change in scenery is sapping some of my joy of exploring. A more compact, faster changing map is more interesting to me. Even with the smaller polar distance settings it's a massive undertaking to travel to a latitude that's different enough in temp.

Have you tried lowering the Landform Scale setting, or perhaps changing Climate Distribution to Patchy rather than the default Realistic? Lowering the landform scale should mean that land features are smaller, with more being able to fit within an area, while changing the climate distribution to patchy will yield a biome style more similar to Minecraft.

[Lollard]

28 minutes ago, dakko said:

I'm curious, because I have not experienced this type of terrain but you see it frequently. Do you tend to change any particular worldgen settings during customization? (until recently I've been using default settings)

Really? On default unmodded worldgen I saw it quite often. Maybe it wasn't that frequent, but stuck out for being so unpleasant.

[dakko]

3 hours ago, Lollard said:

Really? On default unmodded worldgen I saw it quite often. Maybe it wasn't that frequent, but stuck out for being so unpleasant.

Now that I think about it, I probably travel less than most players. Maybe that's the difference.

[Tabbot95]

needs DF-esque cavern controls for things like "average cave density";

 

Spoiler

 

things that hurt worldgen more are those things that are tech-tree related and 'missing' as alternates/substitutes. (Lye/soap as a substitute for lime is one such thing)..

 

In addition there are some issues I have with general long navigation, the big journey by elk feels very very clunky, though part of this is that singleplayer isn't the focus of balance for the first chapter of the story.

[Pascaloubicou]

I would love to have 1 to 1 scale world generation for biomes and stuff. Look good to me ! 

[AIpine]

On 4/26/2026 at 6:58 PM, MKMoose said:

I think this screenshot is a good example of where a terrain feature in the game just doesn't make any sense. It's too large and too repetitive, and doesn't even have a good real-life analogue. I genuinely don't know what this is supposed to represent, and the closest I can think of is either a marsh or prairie potholes, but it's just not even close to anything, mainly due to excessive vertical terrain variation and way too small scale. I would take a completely flat grassland with a lake in the middle over whatever this is, and it would at least be easier to traverse.

Here is another cherry picked screenshot I took

On 4/26/2026 at 6:58 PM, MKMoose said:

while also missing many details from the real world which would arguably help it greatly, including more natural altitude variation and large-scale highlands and mountains.

It would certainly help if most of the landscape wasn't about the same height with a few mountains that stick up like thumbs.
I read up on world height and how going higher than sea level quickly drops the temperature to a point that a max height world is not even warm enough for warm fauna and flora at the equators. The temperature calculation would have to be changed

On the other hand I do wonder if more verticality is even a good idea in a game where you have to jump for every elevation change

[Broccoli Clock]

18 hours ago, Pascaloubicou said:

I would love to have 1 to 1 scale world generation for biomes and stuff. Look good to me ! 

If we consider a 1x1x1 cube in the game to be 1 metre in size, and the default map generation is 1 million blocks width and height, that makes the length of the equator (in miles) roughly 620. When VS talks about width, to me that is the equatorial circumference, not the equatorial diameter.

For reference, Earth's equator is just under 25,000 miles. For a direct 1:1 ratio, you'd need to set the world gen width from 1 million to closer to 40 million. The highest the game will allow you to go with vanilla settings is 8 million, making the largest equator just under 5000 miles.

For a celestial reference, our Moon, which is the largest satellite in the solar system, comes in at ~11000 miles The smallest planet, Mercury, has an equatorial circumference of ~9500 miles, while the largest dwarf planet is ~4500 miles and that's Pluto.

In short if you set the world to be the largest possible vanilla size you'll be playing on a world approximately matching Pluto. A fun fact is that the largest country in the World, Russia, can be considered approximately the same "surface size" as Pluto, so you could say the largest possible VS map, in vanilla, is the same size as Russia.

All the figures have been provided before my morning coffee, so there is a chance of a typo in all that, but it seems about right.

On 4/26/2026 at 5:58 PM, MKMoose said:

I think this screenshot is a good example of where a terrain feature in the game just doesn't make any sense. It's too large and too repetitive, and doesn't even have a good real-life analogue.

I missed this comment the first time round, but yeah... that isn't the case. Scotland's North West is one of the oldest land masses on the planet, it's not just neolithic landscape it's Archean. There are literally miles upon miles of loose bogland (peat moors) that is a direct analogue to the screen shot. As can be seen here..

Edited Tuesday at 07:30 AM by Broccoli Clock

[MKMoose]

2 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

I missed this comment the first time round, but yeah... that isn't the case. Scotland's North West is one of the oldest land masses on the planet, it's not just neolithic landscape it's Archean. There are literally miles upon miles of loose bogland (peat moors) that is a direct analogue to the screen shot. As can be seen here..

And for reference:

On 4/26/2026 at 2:17 PM, AIpine said:

The water distribution is actually kind of close, but I don't see how a supposed bog can be reasonably considered a bog if it doesn't have peat and moss, arguably the single most important defining characteristic of bogs, despite peat being already in the game. Even disregarding moss, vegetation doesn't match a bog at all. The local vertical terrain variation is way too high for a bog as well.

I've seen places in the game that were at least flat, which made them resemble swamps or marches pretty well, but this ain't a bog.

Even if we disregard soil and vegetation, then the point about overblown vertical variation remains.

 

I've looked into it a bit more. Feel free to have a look at Mima mounds and patterned ground. Both are kind of right, but not really, for similar reasons - incorrect small-scale vertical terrain variation and mismatched vegetation, among others.

[Broccoli Clock]

20 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

And for reference:

The water distribution is actually kind of close, but I don't see how a supposed bog can be reasonably considered a bog if it doesn't have peat and moss, arguably the single most important defining characteristic of bogs, despite peat being already in the game. Even disregarding moss, vegetation doesn't match a bog at all. The local vertical terrain variation is way too high for a bog as well.

Taking into consideration that it's a game, and not real life, I think we can consider it the analogue. That image I showed isn't all peat either, it's patches of peat and mostly it's below the surface so you wouldn't see most of it.

Ultimately my push back wasn't that there was an exact copy, but that there isn't a "good real life analogue", because the image posted in the OP reminded me very much of my youth tramping across such landscapes. It matches the undulating surface (there's very little actual flat peat bog, it just looks flat from a distance), and the pockets of water.

 

Edited Tuesday at 10:49 AM by Broccoli Clock

[MKMoose]

6 minutes ago, Broccoli Clock said:

That image I showed isn't all peat either, it's patches of peat and mostly it's below the surface so you wouldn't see most of it.

While I don't know about that specific place, bogs typically have very close to 100% peat coverage. Both under and above the water.

[Broccoli Clock]

2 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

While I don't know about that specific place..

..and I've visited it, and similar landscapes, for years. So when I say there is a similarity you're just going to have to accept it.

Also the idea that a bog has to have close to 100% peat coverage is a bold statement. There is no single definition that suggests that as the criteria. In fact the peat bogs in the North of Scotland are categorised into 3 main types; blanket, raised, and quaking. None of them are even close to 100% peat coverage. It's actually the depth that counts more than the spread. 

If you want more information about UK peat bogs, not to be confused with fenlands, then you could do worse than these people..

https://www.iucn-uk-peatlandprogramme.org/

.they even have a PDF detailing how they are formed.. 

https://www.iucn-uk-peatlandprogramme.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/Briefing 1 Peat Bog Ecosystems Key Definitions - 2014.pdf

 

All that said, the game is a game, and we have to suspend belief a little otherwise we'd all go mad. Are the biomes in the game a perfect representation of real life? No, not at all, but are they decent approximations? For the temperate stuff, yeah, it's pretty close. I've travelled across parts of the Sahara too. Does VSs desert biome match that? For the most part no, not at all, and in fact where people would be expecting me to say "dunes" the vast majority of a desert is loose sand and small stones, rather than large majestic dunes. It's more akin to walking on builders rubble.

[Broccoli Clock]

As I mentioned travelling parts of the Sahara, I have to give this anecdote. I met a German lad, honestly can't remember his name this was 20 odd years ago, at the Cascades d'Ouzoud. I got chatting and it turned out he and his friend were planning going from Morocco to Egypt, across the Sahara. It's a dangerous route, crossing both Algeria and Libya, you really need to luck out on who you meet on the way.

Anyway, the reason for mentioning this isn't just because they were going to do this trip, but the vehicle they were going to use, it was this (well not this exact one, but an identical model, this image was taken from a website)..

Yes, a bright red, 1970's Munich fire engine. The lad looked at me, smiled and said, "They always say Germans have no sense of humour, but I'm taking a fire engine across the desert, that's fucking comedy".

Honestly, I have no idea if they made it, I was heading south to the border, so never got a chance to accompany them (I didn't have the visas or the cash for bribes either!).

Edited yesterday at 06:27 AM by Broccoli Clock

[MKMoose]

6 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

Also the idea that a bog has to have close to 100% peat coverage is a bold statement. There is no single definition that suggests that as the criteria. In fact the peat bogs in the North of Scotland are categorised into 3 main types; blanket, raised, and quaking. None of them are even close to 100% peat coverage. It's actually the depth that counts more than the spread. 

Near 100% peat coverage is a matter of observation more than definition, and applies to raised, valley and blanket bogs roughly equally. The layer just on the surface is acrotelm, a transitional peat layer which could be considered somewhat separate from peat, but it is certainly not regular soil. A typical bog is a mosaic of drier hummocks usually at most ~1 m above water level, and wetter hollows. Peat is found both under the water, and above water in the hummocks, because the peat is the bog. This is just a natural consequence of how the bog forms, because once the system is ombrotrophic (receives water nutrients from precipitation only, or as close to it as possible, which is the primary factor that tends to differentiate bogs from fens), it means that the system is hydrologically disconnected from the soil, so practically the entire surface has to be peat or peat-forming material. As far as I can tell, the only cases where the peat coverage is more patchy will occur near the edges of bogs (especially blanket bogs), where it generally transitions through the lagg, into fens and regular upland soil.

Regardless, I think that the least that we should be able to agree on is that any significant peat in the first place would be ideal for that in-game landscape to actually be reasonably considered a bog. The current way that peat generates in completely random deposits is functional enough for gameplay, but has practically nothing realistic about it.

That said, it's classified as a "bumpy marsh" in-game, as far as I can tell, which just oozes with realism, though at least in terms of soil and vegetation is a bit more agreeable than a bog. But the matter of peat aside, my primary issue with world generation itself has always been excessive small-scale vertical terrain variation, which in the case of that landform doesn't match neither a bog nor a marsh.

Edited Tuesday at 05:46 PM by MKMoose

[Thorfinn]

That lumpy marsh is very similar to places I've hunted in Wisconsin. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area, too. If anything,  the screenshot is less hilly than real life. Some of the ridgelines separating the finger lakes are quite a bit taller. Portaging can be a real pain.

I didn't spend a lot of time there, and it's been about 40 years, but it's also a lot like some places in Yukon and NW Territory, too. 

[LadyWYT]

I mean, the only bit of world gen I can think of that outright isn't realistic, is the floating islands. Those don't exist in real life, though they are pretty fun to find in the game, in my opinion. Every other biome/land feature? Sometimes I look at features and think "Wow, this looks really goofy and doesn't feel at all realistic"...and then remember that there are places like the Devil's Tower, Great Sand Dunes, Ayer's Rock/Uluru, the Grand Canyon, Gobi desert, Siberia, the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, Texas caprock country, etc. Basically, there are a lot of real life places that defy what might seem "normal", and what seems "normal" I think depends heavily on where one lives and what kind of media they interact with. 

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

my primary issue with world generation itself has always been excessive small-scale vertical terrain variation

Honestly, I think this is probably just the drawback of videogame worlds in general. Everything has to be scaled down at least somewhat, partly due to hardware limitations but also so that players don't feel that the world is empty or too big to explore in a satisfying manner. Likewise, a flat world with subtle land features isn't terribly interesting to explore either(there's a reason most people don't like driving across Kansas), and doesn't leave much room for hiding secrets and points of interest. In contrast, a world that has a lot of smaller-scale vertical terrain creates visual interest by having different "levels" of the world, as well as providing lots of nooks and crannies for the player to explore for secrets.

Now I'm not saying it can't be overdone, just that I'm not sure that that particular quality could be removed or toned down much more without the world starting to feel pretty bland.

[MKMoose]

11 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

That lumpy marsh is very similar to places I've hunted in Wisconsin. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area, too. If anything,  the screenshot is less hilly than real life. Some of the ridgelines separating the finger lakes are quite a bit taller. Portaging can be a real pain.

That's a good one, classified as a pretty unique ridge-and-swale system, but it's the exact same problem again - too high vertical variation and too steep slopes. The Great Lakes region has a lot of ridges that can occasionally go up to some 10 m in height, but the spacing between them tends to be in the hundreds of meters, producing slopes which don't generally tend to exceed ~10% (1 m rise over 10 m run), except maybe right at the edge of water. In other regions like string fens, while the spacing between ridges is smaller, their height is also very low, again producing < 10% slopes, and these shallow slopes are necessary for slow water runoff.

 

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Honestly, I think this is probably just the drawback of videogame worlds in general. Everything has to be scaled down at least somewhat, partly due to hardware limitations but also so that players don't feel that the world is empty or too big to explore in a satisfying manner. Likewise, a flat world with subtle land features isn't terribly interesting to explore either(there's a reason most people don't like driving across Kansas), and doesn't leave much room for hiding secrets and points of interest. In contrast, a world that has a lot of smaller-scale vertical terrain creates visual interest by having different "levels" of the world, as well as providing lots of nooks and crannies for the player to explore for secrets.

Now I'm not saying it can't be overdone, just that I'm not sure that that particular quality could be removed or toned down much more without the world starting to feel pretty bland.

I don't know if maybe I'm just not explaining what I'm saying sufficiently again, but I feel like I've said almost the same thing in my first post in this thread that you just said here. I completely agree with this.

My point about small-scale vertical variation focuses mainly on two factors:

• realism - slopes steeper than ~30-35%, equivalent to 1 m rise over ~3 m run, are the practical limit in most contexts where soil is the surface material, and many areas tend to fall under certain characteristic slopes, mainly due to angle of repose and erosion processes (exceptions include features like riverbanks or cliffs, and some regions like arid badlands),
• traversability - I think it's annoying and unsatisfying to constantly go up and down steep bumps and ridges, and, if I recall correctly, that has been one of the most common complaints about terrain - sure, endless flatlands would be pretty boring, but equally it's entirely possible to go overboard in the other direction, and I think many landforms including almost all mountains do go too far.

I could maybe try to whip up some examples with World Edit or in a terrain generator when I have the time.