Working on a globe

A whole-world project starts and ends with the planet. You cut low-distortion regions off it, work each one in the section editor, and fold the result back onto the sphere. The globe workspace is where the cutting and the folding happen, and where the world tells you which parts of it are current.

You reach it by opening a world whose workflow mode is A whole world. A flat map never sees this screen; it is the single map, so there is nothing to cut or reassemble.

The three things on a globe#

Everything in the workspace is one of three objects.

The globe is the world map plus, once you have run a colour pass, the coloured planet composed on top of it. One world has one globe. It is what Export globe ships.

Regions are the areas you drew and chose to work on. A region is a real section: it opens in the section editor, it has its own heightmap, biomes and render, and it moves through a three-stage pipeline. Regions are listed in the Regions panel.

Globe tiles are created for you by the world colour pass. They cover the planet's land in overlapping circles so the whole sphere can be coloured without you drawing anything. They never appear in the regions list, but they can be opened and edited like a region, and they get their own collapsible group in the side panel.

Editing a region or a tile marks the globe out of date. One action, Re-compose globe, folds every edit back in.

Cutting a region off the globe#

Pick the Box or Lasso tool from the Globe tools toolbar and drag on the sphere. Rotate is the default tool and orbits the planet instead of drawing. Pressing Escape anywhere on the stage clears the draft selection and returns you to Rotate.

New region in the panel header does not open a dialog. It selects the Box tool so you can draw; the dialog appears once you have a selection.

A selection the app cannot use is refused, with the reason under the name field:

• a box needs both corners, and some width and height;
• a lasso needs at least three distinct points and has to enclose an area.

Three more cases are refused once you confirm. A selection that reaches 100 degrees or more from its centre is near-global or not representable as one local section. A selection that runs off the edge of the map is refused as clipped. A region larger than 8192 px on its long edge, or larger than 32 megapixels in total, is too large; draw a smaller area or lower the output resolution.

Why the cut is a reprojection#

A flat world map stretches east to west as you move away from the equator. At 60 degrees a pixel covers half the ground east to west that it covers north to south. Cutting a rectangle straight out of that image would hand the terrain model, the brushes and the river routing a landscape stretched by a factor of two, and the amount of stretch would change with where you drew.

So a region is reprojected onto its own map centred on your selection, using an equal-area projection that keeps local distortion small. A kilometre is a kilometre across the section. That is what makes a 33 km brush 33 km wherever you use it, and what lets settings such as catchment area, snow line and lapse rate mean the same thing on every section of the planet. The same transform runs in reverse to put the finished section back on the sphere.

The cost is that a region has to stay local, which is the 100 degree rule above. A near-hemispheric selection is not one section.

The composer dialog#

The line above the advanced controls reads <N> geographic points · feathered edge included, a reminder that the region you get is slightly larger than the ground you drew, so its edges can blend into the globe.

Square crop · Gaea / terrain diffusion is a checkbox under the advanced controls, on by default. With it on, the region expands around your selection to an Output long side square, feathered edge included, which is the shape Gaea and the terrain models want. Untick it for a rectangular section.

Two extents, and which one you are being shown#

Every section has two sizes: the ground you drew, and the slightly larger area the section actually covers once its feathered edge is added. On a region the difference is roughly 20 percent. On a globe tile, whose edge is wider, it is roughly 45 percent: a nominal 3000 km tile covers about 5900 km.

The region card, the tile rings on the sphere and the EXTENT field in the section editor's footer all quote the size you drew. Exported heightmaps quote the larger covered size, because that is the size of the file you receive.

The globe view#

The sphere needs WebGL. It falls back to the flat view when WebGL is unavailable or when the stage is under 280 px on its short side.

The on-canvas Zoom in, Zoom out and Reset view buttons step slightly further than the keyboard, and the zoom buttons disable at the ends of the range.

The sphere carries a faint latitude and longitude grid, a coloured patch and a SEC NN label per region, and the draft selection as a dashed outline while you draw. Region patches are green when the region is ready, amber when it needs terrain or has been edited since the last compose, and daylight-yellow otherwise.

The Flat view is the same world as a flat map, and zooms further in than the globe. With a selection tool active you can draw from the keyboard: arrow keys move the cursor by 1 degree (5 with Shift), Space anchors the first corner, Enter completes the selection and Escape cancels. A live readout shows the cursor's longitude and latitude. The small inset in the corner of the globe view switches you to it.

Show original appears once the globe has been coloured. It swaps the coloured globe for the world's own colour or height layer, so you can see the planet as it was before the colour pass. The button reads Showing original while it is on.

Save globe PNG, in globe view, saves the sphere exactly as the canvas draws it, named after the world and the time. The grid, region rings and labels stay out of the picture.

In the Flat view, drag the map sideways to choose the longitude at the centre of exports. A Centre N° readout beside the view switch shows the current centre, with Reset to return to 0°. The same centre is the starting point of the Export globe projection preview.

The Globe tools toolbar also carries Paint, which paints world layers on the sphere with the World brush. It is available in globe view only.

The Guide overlay group in the side panel is the same control the section editor's Draw panel uses, and one guide selection is shared between them. On the globe the guide is drawn as a layer between the terrain and the atmosphere, so a reference sketch can be traced directly onto the planet.

Scale chip, explainer and scale bar#

The scale chip in the top bar reads the coloured globe's ground resolution followed by the planet's circumference, for example 90 m/px ⌀ 40000 km. A ≈ prefix means the figures are estimated from the size of the world map rather than stated by the world itself.

Clicking the chip opens the scale explainer, which unpacks it into four rows:

The scale bar over the canvas picks a round distance (1, 2 or 5 times a power of ten) and draws it at its true width.

The regions panel#

The panel header carries the eyebrow Geographic layers, the title Regions, a count, and the New region button. New region is disabled while the region list is still loading and while a world enhance pass is running.

While a region is being carved, a live row shows its section id and <STATUS> · <stage> · N%, or RECONNECTING… if the app has briefly lost track of the job. The row has a cancel X. Cancelling past 90 percent asks first, because the region may finish before the cancellation takes effect.

A finished region gets a card: preview thumbnail, name, status (with · EDITED appended when it has changed since the last compose), its extent and id, three pipeline dots, and a delete button. Clicking the card opens the region drawer. Deleting asks for confirmation: the region and its own files are removed, and the dialog notes Shared or unsafe assets are kept., meaning anything another part of the world still uses stays in place.

With nothing drawn yet the panel shows No regions yet and a Draw the first region button, which also just selects the Box tool.

The three-stage pipeline#

Every region and every tile moves through the same three stages, always in this order:

1. Rough terrain
2. Terrain detail
3. Section colour

Each is marked DONE, CURRENT (the first incomplete one) or TODO. The three dots on a region card are the compact form of the same thing.

The region drawer lists the stages and names the next incomplete step using the words the editor uses for it (Generate terrain, Generate terrain detail, Render section colour), and says that step runs in the section editor. It cannot run a stage itself, which is why its only action is Open in editor. When everything is done it says so instead.

The World brush#

The World brush group paints world layers straight onto the sphere. Pick Paint in the Globe tools toolbar, or open the group. The globe takes the broad-brush tools: fine sculpting, stamps and Deterrace stay in the section editor.

A layer switch at the top chooses what you paint, and each layer has its own modes, bound to the number keys:

Strokes save to a world-level layer first. Apply is the separate, confirmed step that writes the saved layer into the world (Apply to terrain, Apply to climate, Apply to rock map, Apply to cover map or Apply sea ice) and marks the globe out of date. A layer with unsaved strokes shows an amber badge on its tile.

Rock type#

Rock type offers 38 rock types from Gleba's geology, 12 sedimentary, 10 igneous and 16 metamorphic, plus broad classes for mixed or unconsolidated ground. Each swatch shows the rock's own colour. The rock type chooses the exposed-rock palette and the shallow seabed colour; terrain still controls texture and vegetation cover. The world needs a rock map first, imported or started from a legend under Source maps.

Rock colour dials#

In Rainfall mode, below Terrain physics and the Prevailing wind card, four dials set how painted rock colours the land. They act through a Look.

Sea ice#

Sea ice paints over ocean only. Target ice sets the share from 0 to 100%; painting 0% clears ice the world already has there. Applied ice shows in every month. Remove painted ice takes the applied ice back off the world and keeps the saved layer, so Apply sea ice puts it back; uploaded or imported ice is untouched. See Seasons and sea ice.

Source maps#

The Source maps group holds the maps the colouring is derived from, and every one stays editable after the world is created. The rows include Biome · Köppen, Rainfall, Temperature · optional, Water, Lithology, Land cover, Sea ice · optional, Wind · optional and Ocean currents · optional, with Bathymetry locked.

• Lithology is the rock map the Rock type brush paints. Edit its legend here.
• Sea ice · optional takes a 2:1 greyscale PNG, read as a Mask or as Ice fraction.
• Wind · optional and Ocean currents · optional each take a ZIP holding flow.json and flow.f32: whole-world east and north flow speeds in metres per second. Wind drives Wind streaks; currents drive Sediment & algae transport and sea-ice motion. Without a map, generated flow stands in.

Changing a source map marks the globe out of date. Nothing re-colours until you update the globe.

World Climate Lab#

Choose Import a World Climate Lab globe when starting a project to select a complete climate-data export folder. Set the planet radius; elevation, coastline, temperature, rainfall and Köppen classes use the export's own scales. World Climate Lab exports contain no sea-floor depth, so the initial ocean is shallow until terrain is generated or bathymetry is supplied.

For an existing globe, use World Climate Lab in Source maps: Choose WCL folder…, then Apply climate, then update the globe. This replaces its temperature, rainfall and Köppen source maps while keeping its terrain. The rainfall map is the export's total precipitation, snow included, so cold regions get their full water supply. Monthly temperature and total precipitation supply the seasonal climate and the terrain model's seasonal inputs. Surface temperature is converted to a sea-level equivalent at 6.5 °C per km of elevation, the same rate the colouring uses. All original PNGs and their metadata are kept in the project.

Version 1 wcl-climate-data exports are supported. The whole folder is checked before it is applied; unsupported land climate classes and incomplete exports show an error and change nothing. See Seasons and sea ice for what the monthly data drives.

Atmosphere#

The Atmosphere group lights the globe view.

Globe tiles#

Tiles are planned by the colour pass, not by you. The planet is covered with evenly spaced circular tiles about 3000 km across, and only the tiles that sit over land are kept, which gives roughly 20 to 40 tiles on an Earth-like world. Neighbouring tiles overlap by about a third so their seams blend. Each part of the finished globe is taken mostly from the nearest tile, so an edit to one tile stays inside its own area instead of ghosting into its neighbours.

The Globe tiles group in the side panel is collapsed by default and hidden entirely when the world has no tiles. Its header shows the tile count and, when any tile has been edited since the last compose, an N EDITED badge. The On globe checkbox draws the tile rings on the sphere.

Rings show the ground each tile claims, without its feathered edge. An edited tile draws amber with a dot at its centre; every other tile draws in fainter daylight yellow. Clicking a ring, or a thumbnail in the grid, opens the drawer for that tile. Tiles that are not ready are disabled in the grid.

Opening a tile in the section editor#

Open in editor on a tile hands off to the same section editor a region uses. A tile is a real section, so it has a heightmap, biomes, a render and the same pipeline.

Editing a tile has one consequence you need to know before you start. It marks the tile edited, which marks the globe out of date, and the two ways of updating the globe treat that differently:

• Re-compose globe re-renders only the tiles whose sections changed and folds them into the globe. Your tile edits survive.
• A fresh Colour globe re-plans and rebuilds every tile from scratch. It refuses to run while edited tiles exist unless you tick Rebuild all tiles, discarding N per-tile edits in the dialog. That checkbox does exactly what it says.

Colouring the whole world#

Two buttons in the actions row start the whole-world passes: Enhance world terrain and Colour globe. Both open the same Whole-world passes dialog, armed for the pass you pressed, and the other pass stays on offer so the two can be chained. The buttons read Enhancing world terrain… or Colouring globe… while those passes run, and are disabled until the region list has loaded.

The dialog has two sections, Terrain and Colour.

The footer states the estimate, and the primary button names exactly what will start: Enhance terrain, then colour globe, Enhance world terrain, Colour globe, or Nothing selected.

The dialog carries a standing warning: This processes the entire world and can take many hours. with Try at least one focus-area section first to confirm the look. The globe uses the same render settings a section does, so a section is the cheap way to find out whether you like them. The same warning notes that Colour globe can pause after the current tile, and that completed tiles are kept for Resume, including after restarting the app.

The two resolutions#

Both are given as the width of the whole globe, never the size of one tile.

Terrain and export detail is how much detail the globe keeps. It sets the resolution each tile's colour and terrain are saved at. A colour export stays sharp up to this width, and the largest choice, 32768 × 16384 px, matches the largest export. Native keeps the world's own width. Changing this setting later means running Colour globe again.

A width above the terrain's own width only sharpens the colour. The note under the select says so, for example This world's terrain is 8192 px wide, so relief finer than that is the terrain enlarged; run Enhance world terrain first for finer terrain. Finer terrain comes from Enhance world terrain, described in Ranges and drainage. On a small planet a very fine detail can make a single tile too large to cut; the pass then stops at once and asks for a lower detail.

Globe preview is how wide the globe you look at is drawn: 2048, 4096 or 8192 px. It is only the preview: an export rebuilds from the saved tiles and ignores it. The preview cannot be wider than the terrain and export detail, and wider choices are greyed out with needs more terrain and export detail. 8192 takes several times longer to update than the default and needs about 13 GB of free memory; on a machine with less, the update takes longer still.

You can change the preview at any time without regenerating terrain. Pick a width in the panel footer and press the button beside it.

How the pass runs#

Tiles are rendered west to east, and the globe on screen updates as the finished area grows. That is why the globe appears to have dawn breaking across it while the pass runs: the lit part is the rendered part, and the unrendered side is dimmed so it reads as the planet's night side rather than a hole in the image. On a large world these updates come less often. The terminator strip above the canvas follows the job's real progress.

Every ready region is folded into the same globe ahead of the auto tiles, so a hand-authored region wins where it overlaps one. A region contributes only inside its own outline, so open ocean is left as it was. Where no tile covers, the globe falls back to the same deep-ocean colour the tiles paint (so the sea does not step at every tile boundary) and to a plain elevation colouring in the small gaps between overlapping circles.

Rivers and water on the globe#

Every globe tile is a section render, so each one routes its own flow and draws its rivers. On tiles the river Width is raised to 400 m and River strength to 0.8, so rivers stay legible when the whole planet is on screen; sections keep 150 m and 0.55. Hand-drawn lakes and the Water mask export belong to sections.

The quick base map that shows wherever no tile covers draws no rivers. Its climate borders are softened over much wider distances than a section uses, so they do not render as hard poster edges at whole-planet scale. A faint seam can show at the 180° meridian on that base map.

World status and the stale banner#

One status drives the chip over the canvas, the banner, the footer dot and the panel button.

While a pass runs the summary reads <verb> · <stage> · N%, using the same verb as the job card: Enhancing world terrain, Colouring globe, Re-composing globe or Rebuilding globe. When nothing is outstanding it reads Everything you edited is folded into the globe.

What makes the globe stale#

The globe remembers what it was built from. Any of these marks it out of date:

• a region added since the compose;
• a region edited since the compose;
• a region removed since the compose;
• a globe tile whose section changed (a per-tile Generate or Enhance);
• the heightmap re-imported, or the world's layers changed.

The summary line states which, for example 2 regions changed · 1 tile edited or heightmap re-imported. The banner adds a screen-reader line with the same counts.

Before the globe has been coloured, every region counts as an addition and every tile as edited. A world with neither reads up to date, because the imported world map is the globe.

The tile-edited check is deliberately cautious: any change to a tile, even a rename, counts. For a guard that protects work from being discarded, warning too often is the safe direction.

Re-compose globe#

The banner's primary action, and the same button in the panel footer, is Re-compose globe. It is enabled only while the globe is out of date.

What it does depends on the world. When the globe has been coloured and the change is local, only changed tiles are re-rendered, regions are folded in, and the globe updates. When the change affects the whole world (the heightmap was re-imported, or there is no coloured globe yet) it rebuilds every tile from scratch. Before any globe exists at all, the button builds the world map from your ready regions.

The panel footer alongside it states READY n/N across regions and tiles, and GLOBE PREVIEW with the width the globe is drawn at, or no globe yet. The width is a menu. Picking another one changes the button to Update preview to N px; nothing runs until you press it. Widths above the globe's terrain and export detail are greyed out.

Export globe#

Export globe sits in the top bar and again in the panel footer, and is disabled until the globe has been coloured. The dialog carries its own status chip (UP TO DATE, NEEDS UPDATE, UPDATING), the source it will ship, a Projection picker with a draggable preview and a Centre longitude field, a Style choice of Satellite, Parchment or Paper atlas, a resolution ladder from Native up to 32K, a layer checklist, a destination preset and an output folder. Projections and paper styles are covered in Maps and projections, and the layers in Exporting.

Every numeric resolution is disabled until the globe has its saved tiles, because a high-resolution export is rebuilt from them; run Re-compose globe first. Globe colour is fixed when the globe is coloured, so an export ships exactly the colour that pass produced.

A world export caps at 32768 px on the long edge, and so does a section export.

Export anyway#

On an out-of-date globe the primary button reads Export anyway, beside Re-compose first. The note above it says what an export of the globe as last composed leaves behind, for example 1 new region left out or 2 edited tiles kept as last composed. When the terrain itself changed under the coloured globe, the note reads The terrain changed under the coloured globe. and the export is refused until you colour the globe again.

The job dock#

Long globe jobs report to a stack of cards in the bottom-left of the stage, whether they are queued, running, done or failed. The dock outlives the dialog that started the job, so a dialog closing on submit can never be mistaken for success.

Card titles are Rebuild globe, Re-compose globe, Colour globe, Enhance world terrain and Create region. Status reads Queued, Running, Paused, Done or Failed. The meta line shows <stage> · N% while running, stopped at N% on a failure that got somewhere, and the elapsed time when done, plus reconnecting… while the app catches up with the job. A failed card prints the reason and a Try this: fix.

Running and queued cards offer Cancel where the job can be cancelled. Failed cards offer Retry, except a region creation, whose button says Refresh because the selection you drew is gone and only the list can be refreshed. Retrying a terrain or colour pass reopens the Whole-world passes dialog so you confirm the options against the world as it is now. Finished cards can be dismissed.

Colour globe also offers Pause. It finishes the current tile and any colour renders already in progress, keeps their terrain and colour, then shows Paused with Resume. The partial globe stays visible. Wait for Paused before closing the app; reopening the world restores the paused card and its preview. Resume uses the original run settings and reuses completed tiles that still match. A changed world input rebuilds the tiles that no longer match; edits made to a paused tile are never discarded unless you choose to discard them. Pause applies to full colour passes.

When anything is running or failed, the top bar grows a rollup like 1 RUNNING · 1 FAILED. Clicking it scrolls the dock into view.

Cancelling takes effect at the next safe point, so it may take a moment, and a cancelled job keeps everything it had already completed.

A practical order of work#

1. Create the world in whole-world mode. Import an equirectangular heightmap, or start from a blank ocean planet and paint continents onto the sphere.
2. Cut one region first. Draw a box over somewhere representative, open it, and take it through the pipeline: generate terrain, add detail, render colour. This is where you settle the render settings. It is also what the Whole-world passes dialog tells you to do before committing hours to the planet.
3. Colour the globe. Press Colour globe. Start with Terrain and export detail at 2048 × 1024 px if you only want to see the planet whole; raise it when you know what you are shipping. For finer terrain than the world holds, run Enhance world terrain first.
4. Cut the regions you actually care about. Anywhere that needs real detail becomes a region, worked in the section editor. See Painting terrain for the section-side work.
5. Edit tiles opportunistically. A tile that reads badly can be opened and fixed without becoming a region. Just remember a full re-colour would discard that edit.
6. Re-compose globe whenever the banner says the globe is out of date.
7. Export globe at the resolution and layer set you need.

Steps 4 to 6 are a loop. The globe is never rebuilt behind your back; nothing here starts on its own.

What it costs#

Two operations are expensive, and both are explicit, estimated up front and cancellable: terrain enhancement on the GPU, and colour rendering on the CPU. Everything else in the workspace (drawing, panning, opening drawers, toggling overlays) is instant.

Some relative figures:

• A section render is progressive, at 512, 1024 then 2048 px, and each pass shows a frame you can look at. The last pass is most of the progress bar.
• A whole-world colour pass renders every land tile: on the order of 20 to 40 renders on an Earth-like world. Two tiles render at once.
• Re-compose globe re-renders only what changed, so its cost follows the number of edited regions and tiles rather than the size of the planet.
• A catalogue Look builds ground cover for every tile, which makes the colour pass roughly 10 to 15 times longer than Climate palettes.