Colour and climate reference

This page lists every control that shapes the satellite colour render, what it does to the picture, and the places where a setting is capped or does nothing. For how to drive a render from start to finish, read Rendering the satellite image.

Reading the tables#

Every table uses the same columns.

• Control is the label in the Controls panel, exactly as it appears.
• Default is the value a new section starts with.
• Range is the slider's range and step.
• What it does says what moving the control changes in the picture.

Most of this page applies to the Satellite map style only. The paper styles, Parchment and Paper atlas, have their own ink controls, described in Maps and projections.

Distances on this page are in kilometres or square kilometres of real ground, so a setting means the same thing on a small section and a large one. A distance smaller than one pixel of the render cannot be drawn and fades out. See Silent caps in one place.

Sea level and water#

Sea level is a datum#

Sea level is 0 m by definition: land is above it and ocean below it. The render has no sea-level slider. To move the coastline, use Sea level in Draw mode, under Height brush, which shifts the whole heightmap up or down and saves the result.

Moving it updates the preview live and commits when you release it. At either end of the slider the panel warns that you are about to make an all-land or all-sea map with no usable coastline. After a model Generate, the panel warns that changing sea level reclassifies the land and ocean the model made, and advises setting sea level before Generate instead.

Two water models#

The Sea group opens with a Water model switch. Physical is the default. Classic is the original depth-ramp look, and its controls are under The four-zone sea optical model.

Physical colours water the way a satellite records it. Clear, deep water is close to black navy. The turquoise of a shallow coast is the seabed showing through the water, so it depends on the depth, how clear the water is and what the bed is made of. Each coast takes a background water type from its climate: clear blue in the tropics, clear coastal water in arid and mediterranean seas, green-grey on temperate shelves and brown, peat-stained water in boreal ones. Away from land the water becomes open ocean, which shifts with latitude from subtropical blue-black to a greyer subpolar tone. A Flat world has no latitude and uses the average of the two.

Shallow channels, terraces and depressions in the heightmap show through clear water, so the seabed detail you see is the detail in your heightmap. Deep water hides the bed, and the renderer does not invent channels the heightmap lacks. It also does not repair depth errors: fix fill-value artefacts and other bad depths in a heightmap before you import it.

Seabed and beach colours come from the world's rock layer. Each rock type takes its own colour, so a basalt coast has dark sand and a chalk coast white sand, and the painted rock carries on out to sea as far as Rock reach offshore. Warm, clear water over a shallow shelf adds pale reef sand on top. Rivers carry silt into the sea, where it spreads along the coast for about 150 km. The amount comes from the rainfall layer and the rock each river drains, and it thins out over deep water, so plumes hug the shelf.

Without a rock layer every coast gets one neutral sand, and the panel shows NO LITHOLOGY LAYER: COAST COLOURS USE CLIMATE DEFAULTS. Without a rainfall layer, or without a heightmap for the whole world, there are no plumes and River sediment has nothing to scale. A Flat world uses its own map's heightmap and rainfall. A section with no land in it takes its water type from the climate of the nearest coast.

Physical still reads two Classic settings that its layout hides. A lower Deep cutoff makes the water murkier, and Tint shallows by biome turned off gives every coast the same clear coastal water. While either is away from its default, the group shows CLASSIC SETTINGS STILL APPLY: with the setting named, and a Clear button that returns just those two to their defaults. The per-climate tints, the seabed visibility sliders, Shallow tint and the Classic beach ring have no effect in Physical.

Reset in the group header restores every sea setting and keeps the water model you are on.

Physical water controls#

Clarity, River sediment, Coral sand, Deep water colour and Coast blend sit in the group. The rest are under Advanced, collapsed.

The Whole-world passes dialog carries the same switch and dials in a collapsed Sea section whose summary names the model the pass will paint, Sea · Physical or Sea · Classic. Deep water colour and the Classic sea controls are section-only.

A globe remembers the water model it was painted with. A globe painted Classic stays Classic: reopening the world sets the switch from the globe, and the next Update globe repaints nothing. In Physical, moving a dial or Coast blend repaints every tile once, and so does an edit to a world layer the water reads (rock, heightmap, water mask, rainfall or biome), because silt and open ocean spread across tile edges. When the next Update globe will repaint every tile although you edited none, the globe status line says so and names the cause.

The four-zone sea optical model#

These are the Classic controls, shown when Water model is set to Classic.

Classic colours water by depth through four zones: transparent turquoise over a visible bed at the shore, saturated cyan fading into medium blue by about 25 m, a faint ghost of the bed at 45 m, and below that a uniform inky deep. The deep zone shows no depth detail on purpose. A colour ramp that keeps describing depth for kilometres reads as a drained basin.

Deep cutoff is the control for shelves that read too bright. Lowering it below 45 m squeezes the whole shallow ramp into less depth, so the turquoise covers less of the map. The three seabed visibility sliders under Advanced do the other half of the job: they set how much lit seabed shows through at each zone, and lowering them mutes the texture without changing the colour. The panel prints the current zone depths under Advanced, and marks the deep zone DEEP VISIBILITY: 0 (FIXED).

Murky climates lose the seabed sooner than clear ones. At the default cutoff a tropical shelf shows its bed to about 45 m, a temperate one to about 18 m and a boreal one to about 13 m.

Beach and seabed colour also follow the coast's climate in Classic. White carbonate sand is tropical; temperate coasts get grey-brown shingle, boreal coasts dark cobble and icy coasts pale rock flour.

The deep sea is the only part of the image the hillshade does not touch. The shallow seabed is lit.

The beach ring#

Classic draws a pale beach ring about 1 km wide along ocean coasts, up to 40 m above sea level. Physical draws its own beach instead, set by Beach width.

Inland lakes get no beach ring, on purpose: a ring around a lake reads as a halo rather than a shore. On a very large section, or at a low Texture detail, the ring is narrower than a pixel and fades out. That is expected.

The water mask#

Water mask is an export layer that marks where water stands. It is white for ocean and lakes, grey to white along river channels in proportion to how much of the pixel the channel covers, and black for dry land. Dry salt pans count as land. It is section-only: globe tiles draw rivers into the colour, but the globe export has no water mask.

It differs from the Sea / land mask export, which only marks ground at or below 0 m. The water mask leaves out enclosed basins that stay dry and adds lakes and rivers.

Climate: temperature, lapse rate and rainfall#

Temperature comes from latitude, from distance to the ocean, and from elevation. Near sea level it runs from about 27 °C at the equator to about 10 °C at 45 degrees and -18 °C at the poles. Interiors are colder than coasts, with stronger seasons, and every kilometre of height cools the ground by about 6.5 °C.

A section with no location on the world has no latitude to read. It gets one uniform temperature and no seasons, so its summer equals its yearly average.

The Warmth slider under Snow & ice is the only temperature control. Reset on that group restores it along with the three snow sliders.

Rainfall#

The colour render has no rainfall control. Rainfall reaches it two ways.

A rainfall layer attached to the world makes rivers grow faster in wet regions and slower in deserts, so a desert basin carries less water than its size alone would suggest. Without a rainfall layer, rain is treated as even everywhere, which still renders correctly. The amounts come from the mm/yr at white you entered when you attached the map, so check that number: a wrong value changes river and lake sizes without any warning.

Everything else comes from the climate classes. Each class carries one typical yearly rainfall figure, listed in The seven macros, and that figure is half of the snow model.

Rivers and flow routing#

Rivers come from real drainage. Water is routed down the terrain, and a cell becomes a river once enough rain-weighted area drains into it. Channel width grows with the size of the area upstream. Both are set in real units, so the same network appears at every preview size and section size. Changing resolution adds or removes small tributaries; it never makes rivers fatter or thinner.

These controls sit in the Water colour group of the section panel. The group styles water and flow colouring only. Rivers and lakes are placed in Draw mode, under Height brush, with the River and Lake tools, which carve the terrain and save the water shapes. Rivers drawn there join the drainage the colour reads, so they get the same green banks, flow widening and water mask as the rivers found at render time, and the found network can still appear beside them. Lakes come from the Lake tool, drawn by hand or picked from Suggest lakes; the panel has no lake dials.

On an ordinary section render the water mask export follows the drawn rivers, so Density, Width and River strength change it too. A world with an imported river mask, and a render that prepares a water surface for export, use a fixed 25 km² threshold and 150 m width for the water itself, and there these dials change only the picture.

With Rivers on, ground can green where no river is drawn. A channel needs at least the Density area, while Green banks and Flow widening fade in gradually with drainage, so wet ground below the threshold greens without a channel.

Flow-routed wetness#

Drainage also sets how wet the ground reads, which pushes valleys and river corridors toward the lush end of each climate's colours. The effect spreads over a couple of kilometres either side of a channel, so vegetation responds across a valley while the channel itself stays sharp. Inside closed depressions, where water pools, the ground reverts to the terrain-only wetness estimate.

River colour is keyed to climate#

Each climate has its own river colour. Dry climates get a river lighter than the land around it, and wet or cold climates a darker one, which is why the same River strength slider does both.

River colour blends between climates over 25 km whatever you set Coast blend to. That control does not move river colour.

Caps and gates on rivers#

Width is capped at 12 km. That is a guard for continental basins, so treat it as a ceiling you should never reach.

A channel narrower than one pixel is drawn one pixel wide and partly transparent, in proportion to its true width. That keeps the same network faithful from a coarse preview to a full-size render.

No river starts inside a closed depression 6 m deep or more, and the ground there uses the terrain-only wetness estimate.

Rivers entering from beyond the section are estimated from the surrounding world, so a large river crossing into the frame may draw narrower than its full catchment would make it. River sizes inside a section are a lower bound.

Lakes and the endorheic balance#

A closed basin does not simply fill to its rim. A lake's size is the balance between the water flowing in and the water evaporating off its surface. In a wet climate the basin fills and overflows, and the river carries on downstream. In a dry one the lake shrinks until evaporation matches inflow, or dries out altogether. Checked against Earth, this balance gives the Caspian, the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea close to their real sizes, and leaves Lake Eyre dry.

The section panel has no lake dials. Lakes come from Draw mode: brush one with the Lake tool, or pick one from Suggest lakes, which ranks the top ten basins on the current terrain by how much of each one the climate fills. Draw rivers first, because the suggestions read the current drainage. A drawn lake switches lake handling on for its section by itself.

Without a drawn lake, a closed basin renders as dry ground (or a salt pan, below) and never floods.

Enclosed pockets route as land#

Ground below 0 m counts as ocean only where it connects to the edge of the map, or where the world map marks it as ocean. Any other ground below 0 m is an enclosed basin, and it is treated as land: rivers drain into it, and it takes land colour, climate and snow. Its floor gets sea-level temperatures, as Death Valley does.

What you author outranks the physics. An inland sea you authored stays a sea. A basin the terrain model happened to create is treated as dry ground unless you add a lake. A basin that touches the edge of the map cannot be told from a cut-off sea, so it reads as ocean.

Playa pans#

A closed basin in a dry enough climate, with at least 4 m between its floor and its rim, renders its floor as a pale salt pan when it holds no lake. A shrunken lake keeps a pan ring around it. The pan colour, #e8e1cd, is brighter than any desert ground so a dry lake reads as its own feature, but not pure white, which would read as snow.

A cold playa snows over like any other ground. In the water mask a playa is dry land.

A lake in a cold climate renders as open water; frozen lake surfaces are not drawn.

Snow and ice#

Snow survives the year where summers are too cool to melt the winter's fall. Warm summers melt snow and heavy snowfall feeds it, and the two trade off. That is why Patagonian and Norwegian glaciers reach the sea at 46 to 60 degrees while the Tibetan Plateau at 5000 m is largely bare, and why the Dry Valleys sit free of ice inside Antarctica.

The model works out each place's summer temperature and snowfall, finds where they balance (the equilibrium line), then lets slope, sun direction and avalanches cut bare faces and glacier tongues into the result.

Moving the snow line#

Snow line moves the balance point of the snow model warmer or colder. The default, -2.0 °C, is the neutral setting. Higher is a warmer line and more snow.

The panel prints an approximate height in km under the slider. Treat it as a rough guide: the model has no single snow-line height, because snow reaches lower in wet climates and on shaded slopes.

Snow shedding reads slope the same way at every resolution, so 50° means the same on a fine render and a coarse preview.

Reading a snow render#

Two things surprise people.

Frame brightness is not a guide to snow cover. Ground too cold for trees but free of snow renders as bare rock and scree, which is dark, so widening the snow band can make the frame darker.

Temperature follows climate borders closely, while snowfall is averaged over a wide region, because moisture arrives on the wind. So an ice-cap climate keeps its ice even when it borders a warmer, drier class, and snow follows the terrain across a climate border instead of stepping at it.

Tested against 13 real mountain ranges, the model places the snow line within about 600 m of the published figure on average.

Biomes and Köppen classification#

Climate classes are authored, either by uploading a Köppen-coloured climate map at setup or by painting classes with the biome brush. The render has no classification controls.

An uploaded map is matched to the standard Köppen colours. A colour close to one of them takes that class. Pixels far from every class colour, and near-white background, are treated as unknown and filled from the nearest known class. If a crop of a coarse climate map shows a stepped, pixelated edge, the render softens it automatically. The class masks you export follow exactly the same borders as the colour render.

The seven macros#

Every Köppen class folds into one of seven climate groups. Each group has its own colour palettes, a minimum sea-level temperature and one typical rainfall figure.

The floors are why an authored world does not have to obey Earth's latitudes. A temperate zone you placed at 60 degrees south renders as temperate country, because your climate map outranks the latitude estimate. Height still cools peaks into alpine snow. Ice works the other way and caps temperature, in summer as well, so an ice-cap class keeps its ice even at mid latitudes. Slope, sun direction and avalanches still cut bare peaks and faces into an ice cap.

Near a climate border the floors blend smoothly, so a snow line crossing the border follows the terrain.

Tundra and ice say little about how much snow falls, since they occur in polar deserts and on soaking maritime mountains alike. Their low rainfall figures are for polar regions. On a mountain ice cap the model uses the rainfall of the surrounding climates instead, so the glaciers are fed. The polar figures apply only where there is no other climate in the frame, which is a true ice sheet.

The no-Köppen fallback#

With no authored climate, the render classifies by temperature alone, which means latitude and altitude bands and nothing else:

It cannot place deserts or mediterranean climates at all, because those need rainfall. The consequence: on a world with no Köppen layer, all ground at 18 °C or above reads as tropical, with 2000 mm/yr of rain. That is very wet, so glaciers reach low and lake suggestions fill generously. Authoring a Köppen layer is the intended path.

Biome blending and ecotones#

Transition width is the strongest single control over how the image reads from a distance. Climate shapes come only from your authored classes and the terrain; nothing adds random wobble to the borders.

Patchiness stops at 0.15 because stronger values scatter desert and forest colours into a camouflage pattern. Use 0.05 or less for a hint of grain, and leave it at 0 otherwise.

For Wet bias, climates rank from driest to wettest as arid, medit, tundra, boreal, temperate, tropical. Ice takes no part, because snow is set by the snow model.

Two things can move Transition width away from the slider value. The width cap pulls it down, and the panel then shows an amber CAPPED AT n KM ON THIS MAP note. A focus area cut from a coarse world climate map can push it up, without a note, to soften the map's pixel steps. See Silent caps in one place.

The texture base#

Each climate's colours run from a dry, bare end to a wet, lush end. The terrain decides where on that range each pixel sits:

• wet ground and valley floors lean lush;
• steep slopes and crests lean bare;
• broad tonal patches tens of kilometres across, like changes in underlying rock, break up flat interiors;
• finer mottling a few kilometres across, and a light per-pixel grain, add the texture real imagery has;
• the wettest valleys darken slightly.

Three of these drives have sliders under Biome blending → Advanced. They tie the colour to the terrain itself, which keeps gentle country from looking airbrushed. Each has a Reverse toggle for a world where the drive should pull the other way, such as steep ground reading lush rather than bare. Setting all three to 0 leaves only the broad drives.

Palettes and gradient variants#

Each climate has a set of palette strips taken from satellite imagery. They are sorted dark to bright, so the colour changes gradually where one rock province meets another.

By default each climate blends its palettes in proportion to how common each look is on Earth. That is the Automatic Earth mix card.

Cards are named by climate, so you see "Hot desert", never "Sahara". The panel has two families: Render gradient (gradients extracted with the terrain in mind) and Natural transect (unaltered strips of satellite pixels).

If the palette list cannot be loaded, rendering and export are blocked until it is fixed, so a render never quietly swaps in a different look.

Lithology provinces#

Which palette a pixel gets is decided by a shared rock-province pattern, so a geological province carries on across a climate border. Provinces are about 160 km across with rugged outlines, and palettes cross-fade between them. Uplands lean toward the darker palettes (exposed rock massifs) and basins toward the brighter ones (sand seas). River corridors lean bright, giving ribbons of sediment across dark provinces. Palettes within one climate are pulled toward a shared tone, so provinces read as shifts within one family of materials.

The variant budget#

A small section realistically sits inside one or two rock provinces, so a section only shows as many palettes per climate as its size allows: one for anything under about 320 km across, then one more for each extra 320 km or so.

The practical consequence: a 200 km section shows exactly one palette per climate, however many you added to the list. You see your top choice and nothing else. To see the spread, render a larger section.

Relief and hillshade#

Two controls, and they are not interchangeable. Relief changes the pattern of the shading, meaning how steep the terrain reads. Relief shading changes its strength, meaning how much it darkens. The light comes from the north-west, 45° above the horizon.

Turning shading off#

Turning Relief down does not remove shading. Very low exaggeration flattens it into an almost uniform brightening that clips pale ground (snow, ice, sand, pale sediment) to flat white.

To take shading off, set Relief shading to 0 %. That also makes very large renders faster and much lighter on memory, since the shading pass is skipped.

At 0 % the shallow seabed still shows through the water, unlit, as it does in the albedo layer.

Native anchoring#

Real terrain looks steeper the finer you sample it, so a small preview would otherwise shade flatter than the finished render. Relief compensates for this, so previews match the full-size result. Globe renders also correct for latitude, so shading near the poles is not stretched.

Changing Relief shading needs a new render, like a sea or snow change.

The albedo layer#

Satellite albedo · unlit is the colour render without the hillshade and without the seabed lighting: the flat surface colour that a 3D application wants for relighting. Exported alongside the satellite image it adds almost no time. Exported on its own it costs a full render. It is section-only.

Colour grade and post-process#

Dayside has no colour grade on the finished image. The colour controls that exist change a Look's material colours before lighting, inside the render, so each one needs a re-render. They are the Palette colour dials and the Alien world wheels, both under Biome blending → Advanced, and both need a Look other than Climate palettes. Grade the exported image in your compositor, and use the albedo layer if you want to relight rather than regrade.

The Global look group holds two speed and repeatability controls alongside the two relief sliders.

Texture detail changes detail and speed only; rivers and colours stay the same. Drop to Draft while you dial in climate and snow, then put it back for the version you keep.

Seed re-rolls the mottling, the rock provinces, which palettes a small section shows, and the Patchiness pattern. Terrain and climate are untouched.

The Satellite albedo · unlit and Water mask export layers are made for work in other applications. Both are section-only.

The Colour group#

Palette dials#

These sit under Biome blending → Advanced in the section editor, and under Palette in the Whole-world passes dialog.

Alien world#

The Alien world band, under Biome blending → Advanced, recolours a Look for an invented world. Each material group keeps its measured lightness and texture while its hue and colourfulness move. It needs a Look, and with every strength at 0 the render matches the ordinary Look. See Alien worlds.

The sky dials live in the globe's Atmosphere group and are read by the globe view and by the haze on section exports.

Sea ice#

The Sea ice group, and the same dials in the Sea section of the Whole-world passes dialog.

Rock dials#

These four sit in the globe's World brush, in Rainfall mode, and apply when the globe is painted. They act through a Look.

Sediment and algae#

The Sediment & algae band at the bottom of the Sea group. Section-only.

Silent caps in one place#

These are the places where what you set is not exactly what renders. Where the panel tells you, this says how.

1. Transition width is capped at about 10% of the section's width. The slider shows an amber CAPPED AT n KM ON THIS MAP note, and anything above the cap does nothing.
2. A coarse climate map can widen the blend beyond your setting. A focus area cut from a coarse world climate map gets a wider transition than the slider says, to soften the map's pixel steps. The panel does not report this.
3. River width caps at 12 km, and a river narrower than a pixel draws one pixel wide and partly transparent. Neither is a tuning control.
4. No river starts inside a closed depression 6 m deep or more.
5. Anything smaller than a pixel cannot be drawn. The Classic beach ring and Beach width fade out on large sections. This is expected.
6. A small section shows one palette per climate. A 200 km section shows only your top palette for each climate.
7. Some controls are inert without rivers, and the panel greys out the first five: Flow widening, Density, Width, Green banks, River strength, and also Drainage greening with its Reverse.
8. Coast blend does not move river colour. River colour always blends over 25 km.
9. Closed basins stay dry unless you add a lake. Standing water inland comes from the Lake tool in Draw mode, drawn by hand or picked from Suggest lakes.
10. Relief turned low is not shading off. It over-brightens. Use Relief shading at 0 %.
11. Globe tiles draw rivers wider and stronger (400 m and River strength 0.8, against 150 m and 0.55 on sections) so they read at globe scale. The globe also uses much wider climate blends, mottling and rock provinces than a section, because section-sized features would vanish below one globe pixel and turn climate borders into hard poster edges.
12. A world with no Köppen layer reads all ground at 18 °C or above as tropical, with 2000 mm/yr of rain, which is very wet for snow and lakes. Deserts and mediterranean climates cannot appear at all.
13. River sediment does nothing on a world with no rainfall layer or no whole-world heightmap. The plumes have nothing to carry. A Flat world uses its own map instead. The dial's tooltip says so, but nothing else in the panel does.