Fractal Terrains: Mapping tidally-locked worlds

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if there's a way to do this in Fractal Terrains. I've got a planet which is tidally locked to its primary; it has a "hot pole" always facing the star, a "cold pole" always facing away, and a narrow twilight band habitable zone in between.

Does anyone know if there are any settings in FT that I can use to get somewhere close to this?

Cheers,

Sarah

Comments

  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    There are no settings that you can put into FT to get what you're after. FT always assumes a body that rotates much faster than it orbits. The displayed temperatures are average insolation at the top of the atmosphere modified by a random value. A 90-degree axial tilt gives a world warmer at the equator than at either pole, but that's not what you're after.

    You can use the selection and global temperature raise tools to easily make bands of decreasing temperature from one pole to another, but that's also not quite what you're after for a tidally-locked world unless you define the maps on the pole as temperature poles rather than physical poles. Even if you make such a distinction, FT cannot model this sort of thing correctly and you will need to paint appropriate rainfall and climates manually.
  • Thanks for your answer, Jslayton - I'd begun to figure as much. Happily I've sort of drawn something adequate up by doing a lot of manual editing and fluffing of the Terraformer files, to the extent that I have something passable, certainly for the icosahedral and sphere map images I need at this first stage.

    I guess tidally-locked worlds are just a bit too obscure yet! One day! :-)

    Cheers,

    Sarah
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