Help with lakes (World Builder)

[sikerow]

I need lakes but idk how to make em spawn or how they work when i take the lake thingi and attack it i see no lakes i add noise see no lakes help me plz

[Thorbjorn42gbf]

This is actually fair as it is about a completely new subject.

@sikerow last time i played around with lakes (which is some time ago I admit) they had an extremely low spawn rate so your lakes probably spawn they are just not very visible.

[Predatoxic]

cough

Worldbuilder

So I’ve been messing around in worldbuilder for the last few days, and I have some comments to make about it. I really like how complex it is, but at the same time it kinda daunts me. Not complaining, just too many choices makes me sad. Is there any way to make rivers? I’ve been messing around and haven’t found anything like that How do I make lakes work. I added a lakes node and have tried pretty much every combination of settings and 3D noise nodes I could think of, but no…

Please use the search option!
(and please use some commas and stuff. It’s very hard to read the stuff you write)

[james]

Lakes are kind of hard to create with the World Builder. There is an argument that they’re actually a little defective, ie not fit for purpose. I think we’re intending to rework / tweak them a bit.

In essence you need to create a 3D noise function that when it intersects the height map can find some little hollows to fill with water. The challenge is that it can only result in small lakes. So if you’re trying to create large lakes it’s doesn’t work. It’s more of a puddle feature at the moment.

[Thorbjorn42gbf]

Also their spawn rate is freakishly low whatever you do.

[james]

I think this is a result of the noise function range and the intersection I describe. Tweaking the noise function should increase the spawn rate (not easy) but they’ll still be puddles.

[nevir]

Creating a lake biome works decently well (for example, the oases on Kovah). Have the lakes restrict on high frequency noise, and increase the resolution of biomes in general. (it’s hard to tune, though, due to the biome restrictions not being absolute thresholds)

It starts being a real challenge when you only want them to occur in certain other biomes. Ideally, we’d have sub-biomes - wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

[nevir]

@Thorbjorn42gbf

Also their spawn rate is freakishly low whatever you do.

A trick to combat that is to combine high frequency noise with a low frequency one (probably perlin); with some patience, you can get infrequently occurring and very spread out noise pockets (lakes). Sometimes you end up getting clusters of them, but it’s not too bad

[james]

Every time we discuss the World Builder I realise that the community knows more than the devs! Bravo!

[sikerow]

Haha so true