Looking for Advice with FT3+
I am looking to build a world map for an existing project and I was looking for some advice on a couple of points.
First, I have some geography reasonably well laid out in the main theater of interest, and some broad strokes around lay of the land/continent size position for a few key regions, but the rest of the world is largely a black box. I have been looking at FT3+ capabilities, but I'm not sure whether I'd be better off trying to insert my known topography into a random map, or if I should just "bite the bullet" and craft the entire world by hand, letting FT3+ just "fractal" it up afterward ala CA155.
Second, there are some areas of this world which have additional biomes separate from default set, not solely indicated by temperature and rainfall. I'm fine with painting those biomes in by hand, but I would like FT to fractalize up and blend the borders of these biomes, and ideally export them in my climate map. It seems like what I need primarily to be able to do is add a new climate, but I haven't found a way to do that?
Third, I wanted to paint a variety of coral reefs. I'm not really sure how to get this into FT. Perhaps I just need to do this on CC3 exports? But I was hoping to have a master FT3 geography file and do targeted exports for various theaters of interest. Any advice on how I might accomplish this?
Comments
To me, FT3 is a way to find and/or sculpt new worlds, rather than detail existing ones. It's quite a lot harder to use if you already have lots of ideas already set in concrete.
It might be easier to start this in Campaign Cartographer by creating a world sized map (each map unit is either a mile or a km), and drawing the predefined parts of the world as simple land shapes using the native land drawing tool. That way you can try out land shapes for the rest of your world relatively quickly, rather than sculpting and resculpting in FT3 several times over, which takes much longer.
I've never used FT3, so can't advise on specifics regarding that. However, from seeing how others have used it over the years, and how its use is described on the ProFantasy website, one option beyond Sue's suggestions that occurs to me would be to randomly generate one or more FT3 worlds, changing each one (remembering to save any that seem interesting first), till you arrive at one you feel you could fit your extant mapped areas into, and use that as the basis to work from.
As Sue said though, you will need to do most of the work you're wanting after that by hand - the blending, adding undersea features like coral reefs, etc., so this might not be any quicker than doing it all by hand anyway.
I basically did what Wyvern recommended. I had a concept in mind for the main kingdom, but I had to go through hundreds of maps off and on over months to get something I could work with. Then I had to do some terraforming to carve out some land, so a series of Great Lakes got connected to the ocean. Oh, and then I flipped it upside down. But 95% of it was adjusting settings and flipping through maps.
This is sort of what I had originally imagined I would have to do. In fact, I already started down this path, although it took me only a few 100 or so generations to find a map that might service, but I found the amount of sculpting I had to do was a bit high, once I considered scale (so maybe I didn't look hard enough). Which then led me to checking out other techniques and then seek advice here. Also the more sculpting I did, the less "natural"/organic the terrain appeared. Beside this, the main issue with just starting at CC3 is that I really do want to have the rest of the world realistically generated for me, at least as a start line. It's too bad I can't select a portion of the map and just ask FT3 to reswizzle the elevations there. Scripting it seems would only let me raise/lower I believe, as per the tools already exposed in FT3.
Another thought I had that might work... Since FT3 doesn't particularly consider currents and really just does, as I understand it, a fractal/perlin noise generated altitude map, then set a sea level and a sort of lerp to desired heights based on settings... I could generate a map, convert it to an image map or maybe bake it in, then bring that map in, replacing the parts I wanted ala CA155 and then have it regen over the blended images. I don't know how well that would work though.
Either way, to use FT3 ideally I would still want to solve my climate quandary and.. I'm not sure if coral reefs in FT3 even make sense, I guess. Perhaps I somehow do those by hand in CC3 and back port them? I looked at the "scripting" capabilities of FT3, but I didn't see anything that looked co-optable for generating coral reef patterns that mirror the coast lines and have that primary/secondary branching patterns emblemistic of coral... That said, in thinking about it, the coral reefs are not entirely natural in this setting, so... Maybe I'm overthinking it.
I put together my world of Sihjul with FT3, but did it a little differently. Not great for generating weather, temps, biomes, etc. but it worked very well for just getting land shapes and elevations.
I set the map to generate a ton of smaller landforms, found the general shapes and elevations that I wanted and exported them, then resized and combined the ones I wanted in CC3+. Kinda like working a jigsaw puzzle.
Coral reefs may be too fine-scale features to work well in FT3. My impression is the program doesn't provide such fine detail for undersea areas as overland ones (though it might if you did a waterless world, and then later assigned an arbitrary elevation as "sea level"; do remember, I have no experience with the program, however!). Plus, placement of coral reefs in real-world locations tends to have a degree of randomness about it anyway (at least, so far as we understand things currently - "cold water" i.e. deep water, non-tropical coral reefs have been little explored, mapped or understood so far, for instance). And if you're working with some kind of terraforming for those reefs in the first place...😁