Algernon's Watersheds
Worldgen revamp using a Watershed model. Adds meandering streams, groundwater, and erosion
Description
<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New info</span>
Watersheds 7.0 and Terra Prety 7.11 are now out
You should try them together, the new features are designed with eachother in mind.
Watersheds 7.0's coastal erosion will play nice with Terra Prety also.
Watersheds 7.0 comes with new features, and a lot more polish
The streams are now carved in two passes, so no more crazy water on rough terrain.
Since they can carve through rough terrain, they're good with any landforms now, even vanilla.
This let me add a new massive scale of streams that run thousands of blocks long.
You'll get more streams, very long streams/rivers, inland distributary fans (simple deltas), 3rd order tributaries, better meandering, a cleaner water surface, more interesting stream shapes, more stability, and better performance
Only update or add Watersheds on a fresh world
As with all worldgen mods, you shouldn't change them mid-save.
At best you'll get bad chunk seams between the old and new generation.
You will need to delete your old Watersheds config and get a new one for 7.0
Watersheds expands on Vintage Story's rich worldgen, modelling how water flows through terrain to carve out large-scale hydrological features.
This terrain-aware watershed model is completely unique, and allows for original worldgen features that previously haven't been possible with infinitely generating worlds.
Watersheds gives your worlds these three hydrological features:
Height aware Stream Systems, Terrain Erosion, and Groundwater.
Every one of them is configurable. Pick and choose what you want and how you want them to work.
Theres a lot of configs, so I made a config editor to make them easier to adjust.
Check out what you can do in the config editor here: https://algernon733.github.io/WatershedsConfig/
Streams are the main feature of Watersheds. By using simulated rainfall water flow paths on the actual terrain's slope, they're able to follow the terrain height and carve through the shape of the terrain just like a real stream would.
They start high up inland, and slowly get wider and as they flow downstream and downhill, bending in all directions around the shape of the world.
Along the path downhill Watersheds can generate crazy meandering streams, braided streams, tributary streams, canyons, waterfalls, stream valleys, oxbow lakes, rapids, point bars, distributary fans and more, all within the context of the surrounding terrain.
The Watershed model maps a cheap abstraction of the terrain around you, and how water would flow through that terrain.
This addresses the core issue of terrain-based stream generation that AlcatrazEscapee (TFC developer) identified in their article here.
That issue is that streams need to have context about the surrounding terrain if you want them to flow down the terrain slopes. And if you want to have context about the surrounding terrain, you'll need to look at an exponentially increasing amount of possible terrain where a stream could flow.
So the longer a stream can get, the more terrain you'll need to check.
By breaking apart the base game terrain generation to the point you can just check the terrain at individual points, you only have to cheaply check spread-out points on the world around you, and use them to build an estimate of your greater surroundings.
Streams are just one thing you can make with this. Knowing the terrain thousands of blocks away from you opens up a massive amount of other possibilities.
Check out my terrain sampler for details and ideas of what you could make: https://mods.vintagestory.at/algernonsterrainsampler
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