Exporting

An export is a background job. You pick a destination, tick layers, and Dayside writes every one of them at a single matched resolution into a folder on your machine. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is packed into a proprietary container: you get PNGs, small JSON files describing them (sidecars) and a text sheet.

There are two export dialogs. A section export re-renders the section at full resolution. A globe export rebuilds the whole planet from the tiles the colour pass saved. They ship different layer sets.

Two ways out#

Both queue a job and drop it into the Acquisitions drawer, which you open from the inbox button in the top bar. One export runs per world at a time; a second request while one is running is refused.

The Export button is disabled while painted changes are still saving, while palette preferences are saving, and when the palette catalogue failed to load. Export globe is disabled until the globe has been coloured.

Exporting a section#

Destinations preset the layer set#

Pick the destination first. It replaces your ticks with a preset, so change it before you start ticking rather than after.

Files is the default. The destination only chooses the starting ticks; every layer stays available under every destination.

The other layers are in no preset, so you tick them by hand: Satellite colour · analytic, Satellite albedo · unlit, Water mask · rivers + lakes + sea, Heightmap · water surface, the imported masks, the settlement layers and Night lights. The Blender preset leaves out Biome class masks on purpose: a displacement-plus-colour workflow feeds a colour ramp from the single Biome mask, and one file per class would be a folder of unused images.

Resolution comes from the workspace header#

The export dialog shows the resolution read-only. You change it in the Output select in the section editor's top bar, which offers Native, 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K and 32K. The choice is remembered per world and section on this machine.

Native writes the section at its own size. A numeric choice sets the long edge exactly, and the short edge follows the section's proportions.

The dialog prints the resulting W × H px, and appends · final upscale when the target is larger than the section itself. That label means what it says: the section is rendered at its own size and the result is enlarged to the target. A 16K export of an 8K section is an enlarged 8K render, and the dialog warns you when you pick 16K, noting that it needs a lot of memory.

Section exports reach 32K#

Both a section export and a globe export cap at 32 768 px on the long edge. Above that the export is refused with Use 'native' or a long edge no larger than 32768 px. The height-derived layers reach 32K without running short of memory. The satellite layers render at the section's own size and enlarge from there, and the dialog warns at 16K that this needs a lot of memory.

The export runs its own render#

An export uses your current render settings, including sea, palettes, seed, hillshade and rivers. The satellite layer is a fresh full-resolution render with those settings. Move a slider and export without re-rendering and the file gets the new look, even though the canvas still shows the old frame.

Every layer of one export writes at the same size, so the masks line up with the colour pixel for pixel.

Lowering Colour detail renders colour and water appearance at a smaller size while keeping the chosen output size for height and hillshading. Night lights use the sea and lake coverage from that same colour render; rivers stay lit. This saves a second full-size render. The export warning and the night-light receipt note the reduced-detail water coverage. Water-surface elevation exports still need full colour detail.

The render is most of the time an export takes. Satellite albedo · unlit and Water mask each need a render of their own when exported alone, but ticked alongside Satellite colour they share its render and finish almost immediately, so the set costs far less than separate renders.

Cancelling is safe for your output folder. Layers are written to a temporary folder and only moved into the destination when the whole export finishes, so a cancelled export leaves no half-written folder behind.

Output folder#

Leave Output folder empty and the export lands in <world folder>\loresat_exports\<timestamp>_<section>_<destination>. Type a path and it is used as given, created if missing. The finished acquisition shows the full path with a copy button.

Section layers#

The export writes layers in a fixed order regardless of the order you tick them. Rows that need something the world does not have yet are hidden or greyed, with the reason.

An export that includes either heightmap layer also writes handoff.txt beside the sidecars.

The settlement and night-light layers are described in Settlement and night lights.

Transparent overlays for paper maps#

With Map style on Parchment or Paper atlas, the colour row becomes Parchment map or Paper atlas map, and four transparent overlays join the list:

Paper styles drop Satellite albedo · unlit, Water mask, Heightmap · water surface and Night lights. See Maps and projections for the paper controls.

Input maps#

Under Input maps, the dialog also offers the section's own source maps at the heightmap's size. Rainfall and temperature format writes them as Greyscale · 16-bit PNG, Colour · globe climate ramps or Both. Select all input maps ticks the whole set.

Satellite albedo#

Satellite albedo · unlit is the base colour for a renderer that will light the surface itself. The hillshade is gone and the shallow seabed is present but unlit. Pair it with Satellite colour · analytic if you want the lit and unlit halves of the same render.

If the section cannot produce a true unlit colour, the export stops with an error rather than shipping a shaded image under this name, and tells you to fix the section or drop the layer.

Water mask and sea mask#

These two answer different questions and you usually want both.

Sea / land mask marks everything at or below 0 m as sea. It comes from the heightmap alone and knows nothing about rivers or lakes.

Water mask marks where water actually stands in the render. Ocean and lakes are white. Rivers are drawn with soft edges, so a channel narrower than one pixel shows as a faint line instead of a solid one. Dry land is black, and a dry salt pan counts as dry.

The water mask is only as good as the rivers in the render, so with Rivers off it shows standing water only, and with River strength at 0 no channels are drawn. Globe tiles draw rivers into the colour, but the water mask is a section layer with no globe equivalent.

Heightmap and land heightmap#

Both are 16-bit greyscale PNGs with a JSON sidecar. The sidecar states the height in metres that black and white stand for, which is all another tool needs to read the file as real elevation.

Heightmap spans the full range from the deepest ocean to the highest peak, so ocean depth is kept and sea level sits partway up the grey scale. The sidecar, the receipt and handoff.txt all give that sea-level brightness.

Land heightmap flattens the ocean to sea level, so black is exactly 0 m and the whole grey scale covers land alone. On an Earth-like world that is roughly twice the height precision of Heightmap, which matters most on low ground, where displacement terracing shows first. A flat or all-ocean section still exports as a valid all-black file. Ocean depth is not in this layer at all: pair it with Sea / land mask if you need the waterline, or use Heightmap for bathymetry.

Heightmaps export as 16-bit PNG; there is no EXR option. The UI labels the format PNG 16-bit.

Biome mask and biome class masks#

Biome mask is your Köppen map for the section at the export size. Class borders stay hard, so no in-between colours appear that would read as extra classes. It writes as an indexed-colour PNG when it holds 256 colours or fewer, and as a plain RGB PNG otherwise.

Biome class masks splits the same map into one black-and-white mask per class actually present, white for in-class. The borders match Biome mask exactly, so a project can use both without any drift between them.

Only classes that appear in the section get a file. Files are named biome_class_<code>.png after the Köppen code; when the map's colours cannot be matched to standard codes, they are named class_<index>.png instead, and biome_classes.json lists which colour each file stands for.

Both layers need a Köppen map in the world. Without one the rows grey out.

Biome class weights#

Biome class weights is the soft version: one 16-bit map per Köppen class giving its share of the colour at each pixel, the same blend Dayside paints with. Shares follow rainfall and temperature at each point's elevation, with your Köppen map as the starting point, so a class fades out where its climate does instead of stopping at a painted line. On every pixel the shares add up to one. snow_cover_16bit.png holds the snow as rendered.

Use them to mix one material per class, for example a SatMap per class in Gaea. biome_weights.json lists the classes, largest share first.

Layers that are not built yet#

Snow mask and Normal map appear as greyed rows with a soon badge in both dialogs. In the section dialog, River mask shows import first until you import one with a round-tripped heightmap; the globe dialog lists it as soon.

Until then, use Water mask for rivers, and generate normals from Land heightmap in your renderer to pair with Satellite albedo · unlit.

Exporting the globe#

Export globe opens from the globe workspace top bar or from the side panel footer. The dialog header carries a status chip: UP TO DATE, NEEDS UPDATE or UPDATING.

Source#

There is no source picker. The dialog states what it will ship: the coloured globe with every region and tile edit folded in or, when the world map was built from your regions rather than a globe colour pass, the world map stitched from those regions.

When the globe is out of date the footer offers Re-compose first, and the primary button becomes Export anyway, which ships the globe as last composed. The note above the buttons lists what that leaves behind, such as new regions left out or edited tiles kept as last composed. When the terrain itself changed under the coloured globe, the export is refused until you colour the globe again.

Resolution and retained tiles#

The ladder is Native · as displayed, 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K and 32K, each labelled with the page size it yields in the chosen projection. Equirectangular output is 2:1, so a 32K equirectangular export is 32 768 × 16 384 px; other projections have their own page shape.

Every numeric option is disabled until the globe has saved tiles. Until then the dialog tells you to run Re-compose globe first, because that pass produces the high-resolution globe the export ships.

Native ships the globe as it is drawn on screen, at the Globe preview width (8192 px at most). A numeric resolution rebuilds the globe from its saved tiles, which hold detail up to the globe's Terrain and export detail, so 16K and 32K are genuinely more detail rather than an enlargement of the preview.

A scale readout under the buttons gives Pixels, Detail in px/cell, Ground in m/px and an approximate Est. size.

Projection and style#

Pick one of eleven projections, drag the preview sideways or type a Centre longitude, and choose Satellite, Parchment or Paper atlas under Style. A paper style adds a Title field. All of it is described in Maps and projections.

Globe layers#

Eleven layers can be built from a coloured globe. Six come from the globe itself: Satellite colour, Satellite albedo · unlit, Heightmap · 16-bit, Land heightmap · sea at 0 m, Biome mask · Köppen and Sea mask. The albedo is the colour with the hillshade removed, rebuilt from the same tiles over the same seams as the colour, so a renderer can light it itself and the two stay aligned. Five come from the settlement scenario: Settlement suitability · 16-bit, Population density · 16-bit log, Land-use fractions · 16-bit set, Settlement history · 16-bit and Night lights · 16-bit set. Until you bake, those rows read Bake a settlement scenario first. or Bake night lights first (Settlement, Night lights). With a paper style, Night lights reads Not available with paper styles.

Rows fall into four kinds:

• selectable, a normal tick;
• locked, always ships and cannot be dropped, as with a world map whose layers are fixed;
• blocked, with the reason printed, for example that some sections have no terrain and need generating first, or that some sections have no Köppen map;
• soon, for the three layers not built yet.

The footer counts exactly the layers the export will write, and the primary button disables at zero with a tooltip asking you to select at least one layer that can be produced.

Two section layers are absent from the globe set. Satellite colour · analytic would duplicate Satellite colour, which on the globe is already haze-free. Biome class masks are a section-only layer.

Colour is fixed when you colour the globe#

The globe's colour comes from the tiles the colour pass rendered. An export ships that colour; changing a render setting afterwards needs a new Colour globe pass, or a Re-compose globe for edited tiles and regions.

What lands in the folder#

The colour layer ships as satellite.png, plus a .npy file holding the same colour at full precision for tools that can read it, and mosaic_manifest.json, which records which version of the globe was exported and at what size.

The height and mask layers use the same filenames as a section export: heightmap_16bit.png and its sidecar, land_heightmap_16bit.png and its sidecar, biome_mask.png, sea_mask.png. Ticking several height-derived layers costs little more than ticking one.

There is no handoff.txt for a globe, because Gaea's map size applies to a section and a whole planet is far larger than Gaea accepts. The globe heightmap sidecars still carry the Gaea numbers, which will report that the map exceeds Gaea's 2400 km limit.

Acquisitions and the receipt#

The Acquisitions drawer lists every export, running and finished. Each entry shows the destination and resolution, a status pill (QUEUED · POSITION n, EXPORTING N%, DONE, or a failure), the time, the layer and file counts, the priority, a read-only path field with a copy button, and Prioritise and Cancel while it is running.

The receipt#

A completed export shows a receipt headed Export complete with the number of layers shipped and how long it took, then one row per file that was actually written. Each row gives the filename, the real pixel dimensions read back from the file, the file size and a Copy file path button. A file that went missing or cannot be read says so in place of its dimensions.

The count is what shipped rather than what you ticked. Warnings recorded during the run, such as a globe layer that could not be built, are kept with the export.

Set in Gaea#

When the export wrote a heightmap layer, the receipt adds a Set in Gaea panel with the numbers to type into Gaea's terrain definition, one block per heightmap layer, each with a copy button:

The layer is always named, because Heightmap and Land heightmap differ precisely in their sea level and that is the pair most easily mixed up: the land layer's sea level is exactly 0.0000.

If an export was recovered after the app restarted, the panel has no numbers and points at handoff.txt instead, which holds the same figures on disk.

Scale metadata in the export#

The heightmap sidecar#

heightmap_16bit.json and land_heightmap_16bit.json record how to turn grey values into metres, the brightness sea level falls at, the exported size and the section's own size in pixels, the ground size of one pixel in metres, the area the file covers in km, the section id, whether the ocean is kept or flattened, the Gaea and Wilbur numbers and the Blender settings.

The area the file covers includes the feathered edge a region is cut with, so it is slightly larger than the shape you drew on the globe. That is the right number here, because the file is what Gaea receives. The Regions panel and the editor footer quote the drawn selection instead, so the two readings differ by roughly the feather.

handoff.txt#

An export including either heightmap layer writes handoff.txt beside the sidecars. It opens with the section id and its pixel size in m/px, then per layer: the extent in km, the resolution in km/pixel, a For Gaea block with map size, suggested height, the working when the section is over Gaea's limit, sea level and terrain width, and a For Wilbur block with the erosion preset, the scale in km/px and px/km, and how metres map onto Wilbur's 500 to 3500 height range.

The Wilbur recipe follows: six steps in order with every setting filled in for this section's size, plus blur radii worked out again for 4096 and 8192 px re-exports, because those radii are in pixels and the same area at a bigger resolution would otherwise be under-blurred.

The preset comes from the section width: LOCAL under 500 km, REGIONAL under 1500 km, CONTINENTAL under 4000 km, SUPERCONTINENTAL above that.

The other sidecars#

biome_classes.json lists each class mask with its Köppen code, filename, palette colour, pixel count and share of the section. Pixels that match no class, such as a white background or an off-palette colour, belong to no mask and are counted separately.

mosaic_manifest.json ships inside a globe export folder and records which version of the globe was exported.

There is no coordinate reference system#

Exports carry physical scale rather than map coordinates. There are no GeoTIFFs, world files or coordinate system codes. What travels with a file is the area it covers, the ground size of a pixel and, for a section, its id. Treat the files as images with a known scale and set that scale by hand in whatever uses them.

Taking an export into Blender#

The heightmap sidecars carry the Blender settings so the numbers are stated rather than guessed.

Set the colour space first#

Set the image's colour space to Non-Color before you do anything else. A 16-bit heightmap read as sRGB gets a brightness curve applied, and the terrain comes out wrong in a way that still looks plausible. It is the most common heightmap-in-Blender mistake, which is why the sidecar lists it first.

Displace numbers#

The sidecar gives the Displace modifier's two settings for that file:

Land heightmap is the easier choice for displacement work: midlevel 0 needs no lookup, and the whole grey scale covers land.

Equirectangular globes wrap a sphere#

An equirectangular world export is exactly 2:1, which matches a UV sphere's default UVs in Blender. The other ten projections are flat maps for print and do not wrap a sphere. The sidecar notes this too, with the two consequences: detail bunches up toward the poles, and the left and right edges meet at ±180°. Displace a subdivided UV sphere with Land heightmap, feed the satellite PNG to base colour, and the mapping needs no adjustment.

Subdivide enough that the mesh can carry the map. A 16K globe export holds detail a low-density sphere will not show. For a section placed on a globe, with atmosphere and clouds, use Dayside Bridge.

Albedo and water mask#

For a lit render, use Satellite albedo · unlit as base colour rather than Satellite colour: the satellite layer has the hillshade baked in, and lighting an already-shaded image gives you two suns.

Water mask completes the pair. Invert it into a roughness input, or use it directly as the mix factor between a ground shader and a water shader. It lines up pixel for pixel with the colour layers from the same export, so no alignment work is needed.

Dayside Bridge for Blender#

Dayside Bridge 0.2.3 is a Blender add-on that places a section export onto a globe and builds the scene around it. It needs Blender 4.2 or later, nothing else, and no network access. Install it from Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Install from Disk… and enable it; the panel appears in the 3D viewport sidebar (N) under a Dayside tab.

1. Set World Folder to the world's project folder.
2. Pick an Export. The list shows every export in that world's loresat_exports folder that holds PNG layers, newest first.
3. Press Build Globe Rig on an empty scene.
4. Choose the colour layer (Satellite colour, Satellite albedo · unlit or Satellite colour · analytic), whether to displace, and the relief exaggeration.
5. Press Place Section on Globe.

Check Placement reports where the section lands and how far the placement differs from its true footprint on the sphere, without touching the scene.

The globe rig#

Build Globe Rig creates, and re-creates in place on a second run, a globe made of near-equal faces with extra subdivision at render time, a three-layer atmosphere sized in kilometres (air, haze and absorption), one volume per cloud deck, a sun and a camera aimed at the selected section. It also sets Cycles and a black world. Near-equal faces are what displacement needs.

Clouds#

Cloud Style offers Volumetric, Painted, Surface + Displacement and Cellular 3D (Experimental). Use satellite weather examples draws on bundled cloud fields built from NASA Aqua and Terra MODIS imagery. Cellular 3D (Experimental) generates low stratocumulus between 1 and 2.5 km from a coverage map you supply, with Cell Size (km) and Cloud Seed.

Round-tripping through Gaea or Wilbur#

For Gaea, enable Square crop when creating a region (enabled by default). The region expands to a square around the selection, including its feathered edge, and all exported layers share that square. Existing rectangular sections stay rectangular: cropping only the heightmap inside Gaea would misalign the masks and the return import.

Export Heightmap, Sea / land mask, Rainfall and Temperature. Use the full heightmap_16bit.png to keep bathymetry. The land-only variant flattens the ocean and is meant for land displacement.

The ready-made Gaea project#

A square section export that includes the full Heightmap also contains dayside_gaea.terrain, a Gaea 2 project with everything below already set. Open it in Gaea and you will find:

• Inputs from Dayside: the heightmap and every other exported map, loaded with the right File settings. Rainfall, when exported, feeds the erosion's precipitation and the rivers' sources.
• Shape the land: an Erosion and a Rivers node on Gaea's defaults. Tune or replace them freely.
• Coastline lock: keeps the coast exactly where it is. Sea areas keep their exported depths and eroded land never sinks below sea level, so the coastline you import back is the one you exported. Leave this group in place for the round trip.
• Return to Dayside: a Sea node at the export's sea level, to check the coast in the viewport.

The terrain's map size and height are the Set in Gaea numbers, already reduced when the section is over one of Gaea's limits. The project refers to the maps beside it, so keep the export folder together if you move it. After building, import dayside_return_height_Out.png as the full heightmap, with dayside_return_rivers_Rivers.png as the river mask. Gaea builds projects at power-of-two sizes; the import fits the result back onto the section either way. The project is saved in the Gaea 2.3 format.

To keep the coast, leave the coastline lock in place. If you remove it, the returned heightmap defines a new coast, as described below.

Erode in Gaea without leaving Dayside#

With Gaea Professional or Enterprise installed, the Gaea button in the section editor builds the section in Gaea for you and brings the result straight back. Choose the erosion and river settings (they are Gaea's own, with Gaea's defaults), pick a build size, and press Erode in Gaea. Progress shows the Gaea node being built, the run can be cancelled, and Revert puts the previous terrain back. The coastline is kept exactly.

The first time, press Test Gaea build: it builds a tiny project to check that your Gaea licence allows command-line builds, which Gaea Community and Indie do not. If a build fails while Gaea itself is open, close Gaea and try again. The section must be square: create the region with Square crop.

Gaea colour by climate class#

Export Biome class weights with the full Heightmap and the Gaea project gains a colour group: one SatMap per Köppen class in the section, mixed by the class weights, so Gaea's colour follows Dayside's rainfall and temperature exactly as Dayside's own colour does. Each class starts on the Gaea SatMap closest to Dayside's colour for it. Snow and ice caps are laid in Dayside's snow colour. The group's result is saved as dayside_return_colour_Out.png.

To use your own SatMaps, open such a project in Gaea, change the SatMap of any Colour node, save, then in the Gaea panel choose Use edited project… under Colour template. Every later Gaea project for this world uses your choices; classes you did not change keep the default. Defaults goes back.

In the Gaea panel, Bring back Gaea colour builds that colour along with the erosion and makes it the section's land colour. Dayside's sea, beaches, snow, rivers, lakes and relief lighting stay on top, so the section still matches the rest of the world. Changing the terrain afterwards drops the Gaea colour; build it again to bring it back.

Setting up Gaea by hand#

In Gaea's File node, use Raw scale, Enforce Linear Gamma off (default) and Is RGB off. Keep Autolevel/normalization off through the return export. Set the Sea node's Level to the sea-level brightness shown in the receipt, in handoff.txt and in the sidecar. Use the exact value given for that file, because it changes with the section's ocean depth and peak height. Compare the coastline with sea_mask.png before erosion. These settings were checked in Gaea on a full round trip; do not confuse the File node's gamma toggle with Blender's Non-Color setting.

The climate exports are greyscale 16-bit PNGs with sidecars. Rainfall uses your authored annual rainfall map where there is one, and the climate model elsewhere. Temperature is the sea-level temperature, including any authored temperature, with no cooling for elevation applied. Climate is worked out at up to 2048 px and enlarged to the heightmap's size; the sidecar records the original size. Black and white normally mean 0 and 12000 mm per year for rain, and -100 and +100 °C for temperature; values outside that widen the range, and the sidecar states the actual ends. Use these maps as smooth colour-blend masks, or use the sidecar to find a physical threshold.

With World Climate Lab climate imported, Climate month selects one of twelve equal orbital months for the surface and climate exports. Monthly rainfall is an estimated amount in mm per orbital month; monthly temperature stays at sea level. Sidecars name the selected month, the actual year length and the approximation, with climate worked out at up to 1024 × 512. Choose Annual to keep the annual export described above. Monthly ground moisture and snow are estimates anchored by World Climate Lab's annual soil-water and snow and ice maps, because its export has monthly temperature and precipitation but no monthly soil-water or snow and ice maps.

Wilbur accepts rectangular heightmaps, so Square crop is optional for a Wilbur-only workflow. Open the full heightmap as a greyscale height surface and follow its height mapping in handoff.txt. Save the original land selection (heights above the mapped sea level, or the inverted sea mask). Keep that selection active for every fill, erosion, noise and blur pass, and turn Use Only Selection on for precipitation erosion. Do not feather the selection into the sea. The erosion numbers are starting suggestions; compare ocean samples before and after the first pass.

Avoid using Span to stretch the heightmap's lowest and highest points to 500 and 3500: those points may not be the file's true black and white. Wilbur's author confirms that Span works on the selected samples, so it can also remap only part of the terrain. Use the Scale/Offset mapping from handoff.txt instead. Wilbur selection guidance.

Save a 16-bit greyscale height PNG with unchanged dimensions and orientation. If Wilbur stretches the saved PNG to its own lowest and highest values, the original sidecar no longer applies: handoff.txt explains how to work out a replacement from the saved range. Check a no-edit round trip before committing to erosion.

The import dialog asks which export you round-tripped, prefills the Gaea Height you were told to use, and accepts the exported heightmap's JSON sidecar directly when the section changed since the export. The file can be any resolution: it is fitted to the section rather than cropped. Picking the land-only variant keeps this world's bathymetry and takes the coastline from the file's own 0 m.

The returned heightmap defines the new coast, including land lost to erosion and land gained from river deposits. The original sea mask is only a selection aid while editing. A land-only import keeps existing ocean depths, but former land that is now underwater sits at sea level, because that file cannot describe new depths. Use the full heightmap to bring those depths back too.

Add optional River mask and Lake mask files alongside the processed heightmap in the import dialog. Use white for water and black for dry land, with exactly the same dimensions, orientation and framing as the returned heightmap. 1-, 8- or 16-bit PNG and normalised float TIFF are accepted. Each supplied mask replaces the calculated rivers or lakes; an entirely black mask removes them. Types you leave out are calculated as usual. Previously imported masks are cleared when new terrain is imported without them.

Imported rivers are kept even when river display is switched off, so the combined water mask export still contains them. Lake masks are read as water or dry (anything brighter than mid-grey is water), and their outline is kept even on flattened terrain. Masks carry no water heights: lake surface levels are estimated from the surrounding shore, never below the lake bed.

The export dialog offers the imported river and lake masks as separate 16-bit PNGs at the heightmap's size. They also drive the combined water mask and the section colour. Editing the terrain afterwards leaves them out of step; import updated masks after changing the terrain. If the section has edits not yet baked, press Bake to native first: the import then replaces the full-resolution terrain and keeps the section's full resolution.

One warning worth repeating: changing the heightmap invalidates a refined coastline, so plan to re-refine after a round trip.

Seasonal sequences and animations#

Seasonal exports are section-only, and need a world with complete monthly climate data. See Seasons and sea ice for what the months change.

Climate sequence in the section export dialog chooses Current month / Annual (the usual single export), All 12 orbital months or Selected months. With a sequence, tick months under Months to export; Select all months and Clear months reset the ticks. Satellite, parchment and paper atlas maps all support sequences.

Selected layers are written in calendar order into folders such as month-02, month-06 and month-11. All months share the same terrain, settings and seed. One cancellable export job handles the sequence, and seasonal_sequence.json records the selected months and their files. The month selection survives an app restart.

Include looping GIF preview adds an animation when a colour layer and at least two months are selected. The GIF is at most 1024 px on its longest edge and holds each frame for 0.75 seconds, with one 256-colour palette shared across the sequence. Monthly PNGs keep your chosen export resolution. Smooth seasonal transitions, on by default with the GIF, adds eight in-between frames between adjacent selected months, including December to January, and each month then lasts 0.8 seconds; gaps in the selection remain cuts.

Play seasonal previews in the Colour group shows the months on the canvas, and the climate inspector exports field GIFs and mask ZIPs. Whole-world satellite exports use the coloured globe, so a seasonal satellite sequence needs a section.

Atmospheric haze#

Atmospheric haze · aerial perspective, under Options in the section export dialog, is off by default. It adds haze to satellite.png only, scaled to the section's real size, and the analytic layer stays clear. It needs the Satellite colour layer and a section with a known physical size, and is unavailable with a paper style. The haze reads the Sky settings of the globe's Atmosphere group, so an alien sky exports with its own colour. See Alien worlds.