Hi all!
As mentioned here I’ve started making some videos for the World Builder. I’m strongly assuming that a decent knowledge of world builder is going to be useful as we get closer to the release date of rental worlds. I’m planning to spend some time during the long weekend here in the US to provide a handful of videos that go over the basics of world builder to give folks the tools to dive in and start messing around to create some cool things! All videos (minus the first) are planned to be “bite sized” simple videos that take <5 minutes to watch.
This video series will not teach you everything about world builder. I’ve only started messing with it recently and there are older posts on these forums that go into the technical details on noise and whatnot that I couldn’t even begin to explain. Also @Oortnonymous has agreed to make a more detailed video when he has time that hopefully explains things that I’m clueless on (which is a lot 
).
That being said if you have some helpful knowledge to drop on this thread or corrections for anything I say PLEASE feel free to do so! I think the more collaboration on World Builder we have and the more shared knowledge the community has the more amazing the worlds we all could* see when rental worlds are released!
*again with the strong feeling that world builder will be involved even though this has not been confirmed
All feedback welcomed!
Episode 1: Introduction, explanation of node structure, and visualizations
Episode 2: Opening and examining pre-made nodes to see how it all works
Episode 3: Creating and saving custom prefabs
Episode 4: Decorations, placeTypes, constraint types, and you
Episode 5: Adding prefabs to a world and exploring the gatherRadius and minSize/maxSize relationship
Episode 6: Density and adding multiple prefabs to a biome
Episode 7: Substrates and first look at noise
Episode 8: Removing rivers from pre-built biomes
Episode 9: Playing with heightmap noise functions and turning them into substrate noises
Episode 9 Correction: I messed up some info at the end of episode nine. Question about the issue posed here.
Episode 9 reading/visual accompaniment on noise types can be found in this post.
Episode 10: A brief look at caves
Episode 11 (Planned): 3D islands
I won’t be doing a video on strata because it’s fairly complex and I feel like messing with it too much could get pretty cheaty (setting layers of different soils/sand so you know exactly where to set up farms, for example).
*Disclaimer: I split this out from the first post linked in order to have more control over the editing of the post so I had a central place to put links without having to create a new topic each time and to make it more easily searchable. Thanks!
Edit to add definitions of some of the parameters included in the nodes:
Biome Node Parameter Definitions and Tips
- Tip: biome visualization will only show one while things like altitude, humidity, etc. are held constant.
Biome Part Parameter Definitions
coming soon
Substrate Parameter Definitions
coming soon
Strata Parameter Definitions
coming soon
Decoration Parameter Definitions
- minSize/maxSize: Allows you to determine what range of sizes should be used for prefabs with multiple variants. More details on his this works described here.
- Density: How closely together instances spawn with other instances
- placeType: Used for spawning individual natural blocks on top of other blocks. Useful for spawning flowers primarily or individual blocks of gleam, dark glass, etc.
- Constraint Type: Used to indicate what placeTypes or instances spawn on. For example make it so that flowers only spawn on grass, never rock or so an oasis can only spawn on sand.
- Depth: How thick the ground beneath the instance needs to be to consider spawning it. So thin cave tops don’t spawn trees with thick root systems, for example.
- Clearance: How big the gap to terrain above the instance needs to be to consider spawning it. So your 20 block high trees don’t spawn on ground right below a rock outcropping 5 blocks off the ground and clip it, for example.
- minGradient/maxGradient: The amount of blocks moving up/down divided by the amount of blocks moving horizontally. 0 is perfectly flat land, 5 is very steep mountain. This allows you to restrict things to only spawn on hills, for example.
- minY/maxY: Where within the position of the world you want things to spawn. If you want an underwater forest for example, your trees need a lower min Y so they can spawn on ocean floor. If you only want a certain instance on a mountain, you’ll need a higher min Y.
-
Threshold: Lower = more frequent instance placements. Higher = less frequent instances placements.
-This works together with noise to provide a “mask” for where the instances will spawn on top of constraints. (per PM from Luca)
Instance Parameter Definitions
- itemSet: Used to select the inventory you’re using when building prefabs. Click and hover over the different options to determine which to use. Switching in world builder will switch your inventory in real time in the world builder client.
- gatherRadius: This slider defines how strict or fuzzy the selection of a variation is (a small radius means the size is very tightly matched against the variation, whilst a large radius means you get much more randomised selection of the variations, that is less strictly matched to the size requested by the decorations node). More details on how this works described here.
- rotateable: Indicates whether or not instances can be rotated on the Y-axis. Keeping this checked allows more “natural” instances like trees, rocks, plants, etc. to feel more natural with fewer prefab variants.
- Prefabs: clicking +prefab provides you with a new gleam block in the client. This is used to build variants for prefabs to keep things looking natural so your world isn’t populated with the same singular types of trees, rock formations, etc.
Palette Parameter Definitions
coming soon
WorldColor Parameter Definitions
coming soon
work.
.
When we build worlds on the server it is a lot faster.