Size of map from 5,000 miles to 40,000 miles doesn't seem to make a difference???

Bad Hair Day

I am using Pro Fantasy Fractal Terrains Pro version 2.3.
I have it set up with:

Planar World
highest peak 45,000
Circumference 88,000 mi
Wilbur ridged multi fractal
30% sea
Small land size

I've gone through 75 worlds and carefully looked at each one.

I then set the circumference from 88,000 down to 10,000.

I went through another 35 maps.

There is no appreciable difference between the two scales.

I get the same 2,3 or 4 mountain ridges, and when I measure the ridge in the small map it's 376 miles,
and on the big map it is 2,500 miles across.

My point in having a world that is 20,000 miles by 20,000 miles is that it is a fantasy world, and it is a very important plot point that each of the nation states are well isolated from the others. They are barely aware of each other, and given the sheer distance, invasion and take over of one kingdom by another kingdom (or even two kingdoms working together) is simply impossible.

This then restricts the world to minor military skirmishes, and all the heavy stuff is pure politics.

In order for my novel and D&D campaign to work (I'm trying to get a two-for-one out of all this work), I need a plausible world.

So what tweaking do I need to do to get a 20,000 mile square world to have mountain chains and features that are on the proper scale of dozens to a couple hundred miles across?

I'm happy to provide any further technical information. Please ask away.

Sincerely,

Val Lynne

jslayton

The Circumference world value controls how distances are measured, not the feature size of the terrain elements. The size of terrain features are controlled by the Land Size slider. If you'd like smaller land elements than the ones provided by the Land Size slider, go to the Fractal Function tab, uncheck Automatically Compute Parms, and enter values into the Size data entry fields. I recommend using the same values for X, Y, and Z to avoid getting some unusual stretching in the shape of the land masses.

Let's say that you're interested in a planar world that's 40,000 by 20,000 miles with a whole bunch of connected land areas like that shown in the attached image. On the World Settings property sheet Primary tab, I set circumference to 40,000 miles, World Seed to 1, Roughness to 0.68, and percent Sea to 30. On the Fractal Function tab, I selected Wilbur Ridged Multifractal as the Method, unchecked Automatically Compute Parms and set Positions to 10, 10, and 10 with Size set to 10, 10, and 10 for X, Y, and Z. I then did apply and did a screen shot of the result. The mountains are pretty close to your requested size.

I really don't recommend trying to do huge areas of planar terrain with FT, though, because the climate, rainfall, temperature, and map projection tools all are incorrect for planar worlds; they only work for spherical ones. I do recommend taking a look at http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/CGTutorial/index.html for some suggestions about world editing with FT.