Canyon Biome mod

Much wow! Very like the mod :+1:
Add Cactus & harvestable bones :smile:

Forgive my dissent, because I love the mesas themselves, but I feel like the other bits need tweaking. It’s quite strange to encounter greenery and normal trees in an otherwise desert-ey biome; replacing the greenery with tan soil and acacia trees/cacti would be much more visually cohesive. Patches of Desert-ey soil atop the mesas in some areas would be nice too, because it’s infuriating to go from the top to the ground level and back again for food.

As it stands, it feels a bit too “100% mountains” to hold its own gameplay-wise. I feel like I’d love this if it were a part of the default Desert biome, honestly - broad plains broken up by encroaching mesas. Put these in the same proportion as Mountains in the default Forest biome and it’d be perfect.

Don’t take this for discouragement, however - I love what you’re doing! Keep up the good work!

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I think what you’re describing isn’t what the goal of this biome was.

I read canyon like Grand Canyon which is much more sporadic cliffs here and there and giant casyms between cliff-faces

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In all honesty, I have to agree with @LeadfootSlim here, I was definitely picturing this biome as being closer to a minecraft mesa biome-esque type of thing, but I can also understand the more grand canyon-esque view

but in minecraft mesa there are lots of unusable clay :wink: do you really want this :stuck_out_tongue:

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Not if you plan on building some big, colourful buildings :wink:

But yeah, Minecraft also has a “Mesa_M” and “Mesa_M_F” biome, both of which have patches of grass and trees; looking extremely similar to this layout. Although I think some colour changes in the grass (more tan or olive shades) would spruce things up a bit, I also like the idea that there’s some grassy sections; particularly around the ponds.

I think it would help if the oak trees were replaced with either juniper trees or some new scrub-brush tree though – the oak trees are just too forest-y for this setting, IMO. I’d love to see joshua trees, small groundcover cacti and spinnifex grass clumps… but all those things need models, and I’m sure Bruno is busy enough already lol. Besides that, modelling spinnifex in the Stonehearth style would be really difficult and annoying…

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Hey all!
Sorry for being away so long. Someone stole the energy cables from my street (yep, welcome to Brazil, where people stole energy cables) and so I got no internet all these days.

I have a lot to catch up. As I had no feedback, I worked just a little on it, then jumped back to the Archipelago, where I made huge progress there. :slight_smile:

And to clarify these last comments, I know this is not really like the minecraft version, and the reason is in the definition. Mesas are tall, large(fat) and layered mountains, with flat tops. While Canyons are more like long ravines carving the earth. Both are hard to replicate. I will keep the style shown here, but a mesa biome would be cool too, maybe one day…

I see some suggestions, and I liked a lot the idea about bones, at least as small terrain decorations. Custom mobs too although that is out of my skills. Also removing the very green trees is a must, got it. And adding the big cactus, (although it has the pear cactus already)

It will take some time until I update this.

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Biome is updated based on the ideas and suggestions traded on previous comments.
Main post now have both the old, first sketch of the biome and the new a18 version with the changes discussed.

Changes from one file to another are:
Small layers, giving more stripes.
Removed forest trees (oaks, pines)
Added small flower cactus, small and big (tree) cactus and tumbleweeds
Created rib cages bones, seen on the top most layers.
Grass covered rock layers at the bottom layers.
Changed green grass to more a yellowish grass, except around lakes.

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This looks really cool gotta check this out on my own soon:D!

I have nothing to say - just look :slight_smile:

:heart: :heart::heart::heart::heart:

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very nice… I definitely want to try this out (after I survive a system migration. headaches… steam keeps forgetting my login credentials for some reason).

One teeny suggestion: perhaps generate a running or dried river in the “channel”, which is typical of canyons? May make the terrain even more interesting. :wink:

problem: water is not funtional at the moment - but in work xD

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If I learn how to (easily) remove blocks at world gen, I will definitely add rivers (dry or not) into biomes. For now, I couldn’t really get it to work (I tried making a cave mod before, didn’t worked well…)

So, I was messing a little with this biome, and get some other interesting terrains shapes. Now I’m confused with what I should do… Check the pictures, each has a slight different terrain generation, some go away from what I originally intended. What you guys think about them? Should I invest in a different terrain?

pic1, non stretched terrain

pic2, stretched by 2 (the mod has terrain stretched by 6)

pic3, stretched by 3

pic4, rock pillars

pic5, rock pillars with more flat areas (both green and rocks areas flat)

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umm… do all of them? :stuck_out_tongue:

They’re all rather pretty, but the terrain stretching creates very different effects. The stretched canyons are awesome, but so are the more “hilly” and plateau-ed versions; and while the rock pillars aren’t my preference I still find them attractive.

Is it possible to do a couple of different passes of generating rock formations? If you could have a mix of the long canyons, some larger and flatter plateaus, and a few large rocks and tall spires scattered around then that would look incredible. In other words, if you can combine these different options to increase the formation variety within a single map…

In other games (mainly Towns) where I’ve messed around with map generation, there was usually some way to limit where features are placed. I know that Stonehearth uses elevation and proximity for some cases; but can you somehow set zones for certain features to generate in? If you can do that, you can make clusters of terrain with slightly different methods (e.g. have one section of canyons be more stretched than their neighbours). That might give you enough control to use the “clay pits” as dry riverbeds, or to put patches of desert around the map edges, or do other cool such cool things.

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Oh wow, I was actually trying to make something like pic5 for one of my mods, but couldn’t figure out the values, and then positioning the trees in the mountains was difficult. :disappointed_relieved:

Do you have any tips to achieve the rock pillars with enough flat areas to build?

Torn between 3 or 5 with maybe 5 being slightly ahead of 3.

Wow, lovely Biome :heart:

I can’t wait to try this one :smiley: really!!

Ps. Added this new Mod also in the list of my website “Stonehearthseeds - Mods”

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would be interesting, if we fix an interesting biome,world-seed,location, and have community players posts their settlement designs just to see how people deal with the interesting features.

Or make it simpler: start the first community game: prepare a fixed savegame (with a fixed number of mods) at a starting location, and let people download and play them then post story/results. maybe fixed a time, like monthly?

What is more interesting than an interesting map, is to see what different people do to it :wink:

In this generation I used something like this (I don’t know exactly what I used, I just tried reproducing it now and looked similar enough)

  "noise_map_settings": {
     "octaves": 1,
     "persistence_ratio": 1,
     "bandlimit": 2,
     "__comment": "can stretch the terrain vertically to allow for long mountain ridges",
     "aspect_ratio": 1
  },

Quick explanation, octaves 1 will make the terrain very random instead of smooth hills. More octaves, more smooth.
persistence_ratio goes from 1 to 0 (with fractions), 1 is unchanged, while numbers like 0.001 will make it avoid steep walls in the very random terrain. So I used 1 here to max the walls possibilities.
bandlimit is kind of a “zoom”. Go from 2 and up (with fraction) (can’t use 1 or it bugs the game in a infinite loop while creating the terrain). It makes everything bigger or small. The same seed with a bigger value will have larger mountains with more distance between them.
And aspect_ratio stretches (or shrinks with lower than 1 values) the terrain in one axis (can have fractions too). For the ravines effect I used 6, which is super high. Normal biomes uses at most 2

There are many other settings depending one what you want to achieve, but these ones are the main ones.

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I wonder what creation would arise if those values were variable during creation. I imagine that the range would have to be small to prevent game breaking maps.