Using Rock 3 with Wilbur

NZgunner · April 12

Rock 3 is a free application on Steam that allows you to play around with a few parameters and quickly generate new worlds. It exports a number of maps including biomes, elevation, rainfall and temperature, but the one we'll be using is the heightmap.

The worlds aren't necessarily better than those you can create in FT3+ (they are worse in some ways), but give some extra variety as they don't appear to be based on a fractal model as much. You can change the world by setting a slider to have more tectonic plates for example, and mountains tend to be on the edges of landmasses rather than in the centre.

The heightmaps you can export from Rock 3 are .png files, and with a bit of fiddling you can use them in a similar way to sculpt a world as per the One Day World Builder.

The first thing to note is that the export resolution is fixed at 2048 * 1024, so these are relatively smaller maps - or at least ones with less fidelity. The biggest downside I've found is that there is a seam on the edge of the exported map that messes with subsequent adjustments - the worst being the impact on rivers. You can get around this by generating a world with a nice big vertical ocean gap and rotating the view so that the export has the edge along that gap.

You can open the .png heightmap in Wilbur and one of the first things you'll notice is that the height range is from 0 to 178 metres. This may not be the best way to go from here to a decent map you can start to use erosion on, do it but it works for me,

Use the select - from terrain - height range option and choose 135 to 180 (135 seems be about right for sea level)
Use filter - mathematical - span and set the range from 1 to 9000
Use filter - other - remap altitudes and in the pop-up choose non-linearity of something between 1 and 2, and click apply then ok (without this step you will probably have too much overall elevation)
Use select - inverse and set the span of the ocean from -1 to -10,000
Save your new map as an .mdr file and use all the cool tricks in the one day world builder to sculpt valleys and add rivers

This is a bit of a quick and dirty, and may not even be the best approach, but I've made some nice looking worlds with it. One thing I might try an do a bit better is the height range in the oceans to get better continental shelves - but the ocean is less important than the land in my opinion 😀

If anyone else plays around with it I'd love to hear your suggestions.