Download link: KT Landscapes by Neil Thapen

This is (very slow) work-in-progress, part of a roguelike jet combat game. This part is a tool to make 1000x1000km maps to fly over.

The maps are created over "eras":

Mesozoic - original rough landform, patterns of strong and weak rock.

Cenozoic - simulates millions of years of erosion and deposition. This is isostatically compensated, and also parts of the land are rising and parts falling over time. It has a "fake" simulation of extensional tectonics, in that you can press a key to open up "rifts", representing a plate being pulled apart and thinning in places. There is no compressional tectonics right now, i.e. no big mountain chains. There is an old javascript version of some of this here - Procedural Island - with some old discussion on this subreddit - [deleted by user] : r/proceduralgeneration

Quaternary - Has the same processes as the cenozoic, but with a smaller timestep. It also simulates climate, based right now on the winds and temperatures at different latitudes on the eastern side of an earth ocean. It does this separately for January and June. From these it takes rough estimates for the soil water and available sun energy each calendar month, and based on these computes vegetation. The last screenshot above is from an old build, where I was calibrating this to try to recreate the vegetation of Iberia. A big thing missing here so far is glaciation, which would make high mountains be much more rugged; also endorheic basins and proper treatment of deserts.

Holocene - generates settlements. Basically every bit of flat land that can support a forest becomes farmland, and this creates villages where there is enough farmland. Then villages compete over time to draw taxes from nearby villages and grow bigger and stronger - I found algorithms for this from work on reconstructing ancient settlement patterns from sparse archaeological data, which in turn repurposed work on modelling the growth of British shopping centres in the 70s. I need to add roads, a more sophisticated treatment of farming and irrigation. Also the algorithm is currently very "local", which maybe models an agricultural society all right, but does not seem right for an industrial one; really there are market towns and villages, but no hierarchy of bigger cities above that.

Anthropocene - renders it to ascii, or rather, to codepage 437.