I am trying to achieve something specific in world generation and woud like assistance

[DramaticEffect]

What I am specifically trying for is a Nile like world. Hot, arid, desert, with a broad river as a source of fertility and water.

Rivers you can only get via mods right now, and I have chosen RiverGen. By tweaking the config I could get a wide river with few forks, to my liking.

The problem I am running into seems to be vanilla, and something RiverGen does not cover.

Either I make the world hot and arid in the world gen settings, and I get my river with low fertility soil and few trees around it and desert beyond.

Or I make the world hot and humid, and I get my river with medium to high fertility soil and dense trees, but there is no desert beyond it, just more jungle. It does not seems RiverGen config covers my use case, so I'm asking here if anyone knows a setting/mod/config variable that could help me out here.

[Mushroomancer]

Unfortunately from what I can tell Rivers with the river mods that exist now don't really create their own micro-ecosystems along their banks, and just kind of cut through the biomes they generate in. It would be very nice to see floodplains and riverbanks and estuaries/deltas, but I think with the current biome-scale and world generation, it would take rather extensive modding to accomplish.

That is to say, I just don't know if it's possible with the available tools to get this desired result.

[Novadegree]

I don't know of a way to get it to naturally generate the way you want, but you could try World Painter or Moat Bombs to make a river. 

[LadyWYT]

The Watersheds mod might help, but I don't know how nicely it will play with RiverGen.

[Zaph42nd]

Rivers + Watersheds is my recommendation, pairs well with some other world-gen mods (world of fortune is my current favorite, some love conquest and terra pretty but never loved them myself) since vanilla world-gen doesn't necessarily play nicely with either (that's to say, rivers feel a little too narrow and short). I'd also recommend dialing in river's config, you can easily disable rapids (which I do) and adjust width/length, but super wide rivers still open the door to some weird world-gen interactions (watersheds also can do that too if you put its values too high). Rivergen can work too (adjusting config settings for width and length) but I find it doesn't play nicely with world-gen mods or watersheds

[DramaticEffect]

Alright, will try that, thank you

[DramaticEffect]

Some initial tries didn't yield satisfactory results.

Combining Rivers with Watersheds resulted in the loss of the wide rivers I consistently got with just Rivers, at least so far. Fertility looked better even on dry settings. Will continue to try around a little more, but good river generation seems to require good hardware, which I lack.

It's apparently a pretty complicated problem: https://alcatrazescapee.com/rivers/

[Vratislav]

7 hours ago, Zaph42nd said:

Rivers + Watersheds is my recommendation

I have combined Rivers, Watersheds and Conquest Landform Overhaul some time ago, with quite satisfying result - wide valley with streams mostly inside of the valley, and plains above rock ridge, mostly without watersheds. In dry climate, it may work for the purpose, as Watersheds have setting to generate more trees along, that may cover the fact that Rivers do not. 

I made some changes in mods settings:

- world height was 384.

Conquest Landform Overhaul was used mostly because Terra Pretty was incompatibile with Rivers that time (and probably still is), CLO worked just fine for my not much increased world height.

In Rivers:
- Increased minimum for angle for rivers (from 10 to 15 deg.) and variation from 35 to 45 deg.
- Increased height riverDepth to 0.025, "topFactor" to 5 and HeighBoost from 8 to 12 . This made sides of the riverbed gentler. Also narrow rivers close to their springs, that mostly look like ravines, are slightly more natural.
- Increased maxValleyWidth from 75 to 150. 
- Increrased Octaves to 3 and Gain to 0.4 to have rivers more curvy and their riversides more scattered. The default is rather bland here.

In Watersheds rivers compatibility setup:
- Increased "RiverDrainFadeOffset": 40.0 to match "RiverDrainFadeRadius", otherwise watersheds were broken just at the mouth to the river.
- increased "MinRiverWidthForStreamDrain" from 10 to 15.0 to keep narrow rivers from being fed by watersheds (it probably does not much good)

In Watersheds itself:
- Disabled uplift of inner parts of continents (to prevent unnatural canyons of classical rivers)
- Decreased a bit chances on meandered or braided streams.
- Most probably kept lenght parameters in default as watersheds shall mostly complement rivers. Used "MaxStreamLength" was 11.
 

Edited Tuesday at 09:39 PM by Vratislav