Your first world

This gets you from launch to a file on disk. It uses the import path, because that reaches a picture fastest and needs no GPU. Where a step has depth behind it, there is a link out rather than a detour.

You need a greyscale heightmap as PNG or JPEG. Anything works: a render from another tool, a scan of a pencil sketch, a height field you already own. If you would rather look around first, open one of the two example worlds instead (see The example worlds below).

1. Start a world#

Click New world in the worlds picker. The setup wizard opens.

On the first pane, How do you want to start your world?, choose Import a heightmap.

2. Choose the shape and the scale#

The import path has three steps: Maps, Sea & terrain and Build. The Maps step opens with the question Is this a flat map, or a whole world? This is the only choice that changes the workflow, and changing it after you drop a file discards your imported map.

Pick A flat map for now. A flat map is a single rectangle and opens straight in the editor. A whole world instead gives you a globe you carve regions off, and asks for a planet radius rather than a map width.

Under the fork, fill in three things:

• Project name, which starts as My project.
• Map width (km), default 200. How wide the whole image is on the ground. 1 to 100 000.
• Height at white (m), default 4000. The land elevation pure white means.

Get the width right. Every brush, every river, every snow line and every landform stamp in the app is denominated in real ground units, so the map width is what makes them mean anything.

3. Drop the file#

Drag your heightmap onto Drop your heightmap here, or click it to open a file picker. The app reads the file and shows its dimensions, bit depth and a short fingerprint of the file. The drop zone stays disabled until the scale fields are valid, so fill those in first.

Below the drop zone, the Additional maps list is optional. You can leave every row on Choose map and continue with just a heightmap:

• With no Climate / biomes map, the build summary reads No climate map supplied and the renderer estimates climate from latitude and elevation.
• With no Annual rainfall map, rivers use uniform runoff.

Setting up a world covers every row of that list.

4. Set the waterline#

The Sea & terrain step shows a preview with the sea painted in and tells you what percentage of the map falls below the proposed waterline.

• Waterline, 0 to 1 in steps of 0.005, starts at the level Dayside proposes from your image.
• Coastline softness, 0 to 1, default 0.5.
• Deep-ocean floor defaults to No depth in my maps, with Synthetic sea floor on Auto. That synthesises a shelf, slope and abyss under your ocean. A flat ocean reads to the terrain model as flat land, so leave this on unless your heightmap genuinely encodes depth.

If you added a Land / water mask on the Maps step, Use my land mask's sea level reads the exact waterline from it instead of guessing. A climate map with an ocean colour offers Use my climate map's ocean the same way.

Click Keep it.

5. Build it#

The Build step summarises what you chose. Click Create & render.

Creation reports its progress live. When it finishes, the wizard closes and the section editor opens with your terrain loaded.

6. Take the first render#

The canvas opens with a NO ACQUISITION YET pill and an Acquire button. Click Acquire.

The render is progressive: a 512 px pass, then 1024, then 2048, each one replacing the frame on the canvas. The composition is readable within seconds and the detail arrives as the ladder climbs.

When it lands, the canvas chip reads ACQUIRED with a timestamp and the pixel size.

7. Art-direct the image#

The Controls panel on the right is where the look is set. In Render mode its groups run in this order:

• Colour, open by default: the map style, the Look, the Climate month and the Climate palettes.
• Land coverage, open by default, for the world's landscape and settlement scenario. Its choices apply to the whole world.
• Biome blending, for how climates meet.
• Water colour, for the Rivers switch, river density and width, green banks and river strength.
• Sea, for shallow tint, deep cutoff and deep water colour.
• Sea ice, shown only when the world carries sea ice data.
• Snow & ice, for the snow line in degC and its coverage.
• Global look, for Relief, Relief shading, Texture detail and Seed.

There is no Rivers group and no Lakes group. Rivers are a switch inside Water colour, and lakes are placed in Draw mode with the Lake tool.

Every edit marks the preview stale. The canvas shows PREVIEW STALE with a count of what changed, and the button becomes Re-render. Nothing renders until you ask, which is what keeps the sliders usable. Use Compare in the header to hold the previous frame against the current one.

Full reference for every control lives on the render pages.

8. Optional: generate real terrain#

If your heightmap is a rough blocking rather than finished ground, this is the step that makes it real. It needs an NVIDIA GPU.

Click Generate in the header. Leave the model on 90 m for a continental section; 30 m is for playable ground and wants more VRAM. The Sketch preset is the default and is right for a blocked-in map; the Faithful cards are for real or precise heightmaps. The control worth understanding is Elevation SNR, default 0.20: lower values stick closer to the terrain you drew, though only above the model's cell scale; the finest detail is always the model's own invention.

For most of the run the progress bar is estimated from elapsed time, so it slows as it nears 85 %. While it runs, a Cancel button sits beside Generate in the header; cancelling leaves the section on its current terrain.

When it finishes, a colour render starts on its own so you can see the new ground, and Revert to authored heightmap stays available if you want your original back.

Set the sea level before you generate, not after. Moving it afterwards reclassifies land and ocean the model authored.

See Painting terrain if you would rather draw the terrain than import it.

9. Pick the output resolution#

In the header, Output sets the final resolution for heightmap and colour exports: Native, 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K or 32K. It starts on Native and is remembered per section.

4K is a sensible first export. Section and globe exports both accept up to 32 768 px on the long edge.

10. Export#

Click Export in the header. The dialog opens on the Files destination, which ticks everything available; Blender, Unreal and Tabletop preset smaller layer sets.

Useful layers for a first run:

• Satellite colour, the render itself.
• Heightmap, 16-bit PNG plus a small file that converts its values to metres.
• Land heightmap, the same encode with the sea clamped to 0 m, which is what you want for Blender displacement.
• Water mask, rivers, lakes and sea in one grey mask, useful as a roughness driver.

Set an output folder or leave the default, which is a timestamped folder under loresat_exports beside the world. Click Acquire.

The job runs in the background and lands in the Acquisitions drawer, reachable from the header. Every layer is written at one matched target size, so the colour and every mask line up pixel for pixel. Time grows with the resolution you chose, and the satellite colour layer takes most of it.

When it completes, the receipt lists every file with its dimensions and a Copy file path button. If you exported a heightmap, the receipt also shows a Set in Gaea panel with the map size, height and sea-level brightness to type into Gaea or Wilbur. The same numbers are written to handoff.txt in the export folder.

That is a finished image on disk.

If you started a whole world#

The globe workspace sits in front of the section editor rather than replacing it.

1. Draw a region on the sphere with the Box or Lasso tool.
2. Name it in the composer and click Create region. Advanced controls hold Output long side, default 2048 px.
3. Open the region and run steps 6 to 10 above inside it. The pipeline strip on each region card tracks its three stages: Rough terrain, Terrain detail and Section colour.
4. Back on the globe, Re-compose globe folds finished regions and tile edits into the sphere.
5. Export globe ships the whole planet, up to 32 768 px on the long side.

The globe's top row carries two buttons for the whole-planet passes, Enhance world terrain and Colour globe. Both open the same Whole-world passes dialog, armed for the pass you clicked, and the dialog lets you chain the other one after it. Colour globe processes every tile and can take many hours, so get one section looking the way you want before you start it. Enhance world terrain runs the terrain models described in Ranges and drainage.

The example worlds#

A packaged install adds two ready-made worlds to your list on first launch, built from real Earth data. Both carry real bathymetry, a Köppen climate layer and a mean annual rainfall layer. They install once; if you delete them, they stay deleted.

8192 × 4096 is the largest whole-world image the import path accepts, so a region cut from the Earth example never carries more source detail than 4.89 km/px. Finer ground comes from Generate. The Honshu example exists to show real 90 m terrain, and it is coastal on purpose: Fuji, the Sagami and Suruga troughs and the trench flank beyond them all sit in one section.

Sources, all of which permit redistribution:

• Elevation and bathymetry: NOAA ETOPO 2022 v1, public domain (CC0 1.0). The Earth example uses the 60-arcsecond surface; the Honshu sea floor uses the 15-arcsecond surface.
• Honshu land elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles, from NASA/USGS SRTM, USGS/NGA GMTED2010 and NOAA ETOPO1.
• Rainfall: CHELSA-bioclim v2.1 BIO12, CC0 1.0 (Karger et al. 2017).
• Climate classes: Beck et al. Köppen-Geiger v2 (1991 to 2020), CC BY 4.0 (Beck et al. 2023), resampled and recoloured for Dayside.
• Earth land cover: ESA WorldCover 2021 v200, CC BY 4.0, counted into per-class fractions for each cell. © ESA WorldCover project 2021 / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium.