Biome distribution in the world builder

Modding
1

(ideas for whenever you guys next put some work into the world builder)

For the most part, I find the world builder pretty intuitive - but defining biome distributions is incredibly frustrating :frowning: (itā€™s really hard to build an accurate mental model of it)

Currently, it seems like the constraints we define (over altitude, humidity, etc) are weighted between all the biomes in the world. It makes sense (canā€™t have a spot w/o a biome!), but also makes things incredibly difficult to set up.

If I tweak one biomeā€™s constraints slightly, other biomes can change dramatically as a result. Or even more confusing, I can decrease the distance between min/max values for a particular constraint - and the biomeā€™s surface area increases rather than decreases.

I think we need something more deterministic:

  • Make the min/max constraints hard constraints. E.g. if I set a biome to 0.5-1.0 altitude, I should never see it when the noise function is out of that range.
  • Introduce a ā€œdefaultā€ biome (so that there are no holes in the world)
  • Add the ability to define arbitrary constraint types (Iā€™m not sure the 4 existing ones are enough for more complicated worlds)
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2

I like the idea of a default biome. This would be a great place to store fallback configurations for substrate, strate, decorations, etc.

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