never desert in FT 3

Thudain · January 2012

I'm new here, trying to make a fantasy world starting with FT 3.0.12 --- I've got the world settings mostly Earth-like (circumference 25000, axis tilt 23.5). My problem is that deserts never appear, despite the Sea percentage being 12. Even when I raise the base temperature to 99 and drop the annual rainfall to 20, I still get no deserts at all.

I understand that I can paint in deserts; my issue is that I don't understand why they're not generated for me. What am I doing wrong? Thanks.

Torg Smith · January 2012

In order to get the Climate to show desert you need the rainfall to be less than 5”. If you set base rainfall to 15 and random to 30 you should see desert. This does not necessarily mean there is a desert there, only that the rain amount is classified as desert levels.

If you go to the Menu Map->Show Other Shader->Show Image Climate. It will open a dialog box with the climate information in it. If you cursor over the desert area, it will tell you temperature and rainfall amounts that it expects.

Thudain · January 2012

First of all, thanks for the help, it definitely pointed me in the direction I realized I wanted to go.

Second, I have FT 3.0.12 so the "Show Image Climate" choice is directly under the "Menu" menu tab --- there is no intermediate "Show Other Shader" choice. I mention this purely for the benefit of other newbs reading this in the future.

Third, I followed your advice and tried different combinations of various World Settings values, including "Rainfall" (base and random), "Temperature" (both Earth-based and hard-coded base/random/variance), and "Percent Sea" (under Primary). But no matter how many I attempted, I never got the result I wanted --- a world with all possible climates. In particular, I could not get both desert and evergreen forest.

Finally, I ended up using the combination that got me the closest (12% sea, temperate 99:16:90, rainfall 32:64) then painted in the deserts I wanted by defining the exact area via the freehand selection tool, then using Tools -> Global Set -> Rainfall Value to zero out the rain. Instant desert! I did try using Tools -> Paint Value -> Climate method, but the little brush would only apply a tiny little bit at a time, and I wanted large deserts.

This is an extremely nice tool, and I believe that almost all of my problems are due to my inexperience with it. Except it would be nice if the World Settings dialog box would close when I press the Esc key ;-)

Thanks again, Torg.

wade · January 2012

i have found that in order to get the full range of climates, i have to put in a small base value for rainfall, and a very large random amount. i just used 10 in base, and 300 random, and was able to get both desert and tropical evergreen forest. this is using the default temp characteristics.

Torg Smith · January 2012

You can also modify the climate image as well. I would save the original and create a new one based on the original. This might allow you to have more control on amount of each.

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never desert in FT 3

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