Terrain and generation reference

This page lists every control that changes elevation, with its default and its range. Colour controls live in Colour and climate reference; this page stops at the point where the heightmap is final. For the workflow around these controls, read Painting terrain and Enhancing terrain.

How to read this page#

Each table gives the control's label as it appears on screen, its default, the range the slider or field offers, and what it does. Every spatial figure is ground distance unless it says pixels.

Physical scale#

Scale is set once, in the setup wizard, and everything downstream is measured against it. Changing it later means rebuilding the world.

A blank globe starts as a 4096 x 2048 ocean planet with no continents.

Section geometry#

A region cut off the globe has its own pixel size. These are set in the region composer's Advanced controls.

Each region keeps the aspect of what you drew and carries a margin of extra terrain around it, so edits at the edge have context. The stored region therefore covers more ground than your selection: about 20 % more on a region, and about 45 % more on a globe-colour tile. The Regions list and the section footer both quote the area you selected.

Hard limits: a region may not exceed 8192 px on an edge or 32 megapixels in total, and a selection whose farthest corner sits more than 100 degrees from its centre is refused, because it cannot be flattened into one section.

Sea level#

Sea level is 0 m. Land is positive, ocean is negative, and each section records how the brightness of its heightmap maps to metres above and below that line.

The Sea level slider#

At the top of the Height brush group in Draw mode.

At 0 or 1 the panel warns that either end of the slider can leave an all-land or all-sea map with no usable coastline. Once a section has been through Generate, it also warns that moving sea level reclassifies land and ocean the model authored. Set sea level before you generate.

Sea level at import#

Set once, in the wizard's Sea & terrain step.

Above the waterline, brightness rises to Height at white; below it, brightness falls to the deepest point, and the two meet exactly at the waterline. A heightmap that runs land and sea floor as one continuous ramp implies a deepest point from where the waterline sits, and that is the inferred figure the panel shows. An EXR or DEM whose values are already metres is read as metres directly. The waterline can also be read off a land mask or a Köppen climate map of the same size. See Setting up a world.

Leave the synthetic sea floor on unless your map really carries depth. The terrain model reads a flat ocean as low coastal land and invents relief there; a real shelf and slope anchor the coastline.

Sea level during Generate#

Generate always treats 0 m as sea level when it splits land from sea. The model authors detail; your input owns sea level.

The height brush#

Four brush modes share one group. Set height is the continuous brush; Stamp, Landmass and Coast are placement tools and are covered further down.

Size#

The bounds are per section, so the slider always spans something useful. The size is shared with the Biome brush. A section that records no ground scale sizes the brush in pixels instead and says so in the panel; its physical size then differs between sections.

Strength, flow and edge#

The pair of sliders under Size swaps depending on whether the mode is relative or absolute.

Set-height modes#

The widened floor and ceiling (abyssal plain and above Everest) mean you can always paint outside the section's current range. When the target sits outside that range the panel warns that Apply changes will widen the span, and that the smallest height step the section can store grows with it.

The level palette#

Saved elevations that Deterrace later reads as its band centres. Add the current target with + Add current (n m); each saved level is a chip you can click to reuse or remove. [ and ] step the target through the palette in every mode except Relative. Alt-clicking the canvas samples the height under the cursor into the target.

Landform stamps#

One click places one landform. Dragging does not build it up. Each tile carries its own measured ground size and relief, so placing one at 1x puts a real range down at the size that range actually is.

Jitter#

Categories are the stamp library's own landform classes: 1 Fold, 2 Block, 3 Rift, 4 Plateau, 5 Hills, 6 Volcanic, 7 Canyon, 8 Dunes, 9 Range, 10 Region. One is open at a time. The panel refuses to size a stamp on a section with no ground scale, and warns when the placement is wider than the section.

Landmass shapes#

A landmass placement writes no heights. It marks an area as land or sea, and Dayside turns the whole batch into terrain with a real continental margin when you apply. There is no cap on how many placements go into one coastline, which is what the panel means by PLACE AS MANY AS YOU LIKE.

Shapes are grouped by real size class: 1 Skerry (under 3 km across), 2 Islet (3 to 8 km), 3 Isle (8 to 20 km), 4 Island (20 to 50 km), 5 Large island (over 50 km). Above 5x the panel states plainly that the outline is no longer that island, it is that island's outline used as a continental silhouette. The shape stays plausible because coastlines look alike at every scale; the size is yours.

Coastline detail#

Shared with the Coast lasso: one set of settings, one continental margin per section.

The outline you place is smooth at its new size, so these controls add real coast detail back at the right physical scale.

Sea floor#

Behind each new shore Dayside lays a coastal plain about 15 km wide, and the slope from shelf to ocean floor runs about 85 km. The same placements with the same settings always give the same coast.

The coast lasso#

Trace a loop and the coast inside it is redrawn. Nothing outside the loop changes, the preview is live, and Revert is available after you apply. The lasso previews from the applied terrain, so it refuses to run while you have unapplied strokes.

Coastline shape#

Sea floor#

The lasso smooths your traced outline less than a landmass apply does, so more of the shape you drew survives, and it builds a continental margin by default.

Deterrace#

Melts the steps of a contour-style heightmap into ramps while every pixel stays inside the elevation band it was drawn in. Land only: the sea floor is untouched.

The modal scores the section first and reports what share of land sits on a detected level. A low score discourages the run, it never blocks it. Running Deterrace undoes a refined coastline, so refine the coast afterwards rather than before.

Terrain models#

The model sets the scale. Each one works on a grid of coarse cells of a fixed ground size and draws the detail inside each cell, so the cell size decides the size of everything the model invents. Picking the wrong one gives you correct-looking terrain at the wrong scale.

90 m is the default and the recipe the reference world was generated with. Base-lite is Dayside's own whole-world model. It runs a fixed recipe and ignores precision, output resolution, SNR, rainfall, coastline and post-processing settings; only Seed applies. Its output is lightly filtered at the very finest scale so it does not shimmer into moiré as you zoom, and your authored detail is left untouched by that filter.

The modal steers you between them:

• A 30 m run on a section wider than about 1000 km (128 coarse cells) is flagged as beyond the continental threshold, with the note that 90 m matches the reference recipe at that size and keeps native output within the 32 768 px limit.
• Base-lite below a 3000 km long edge is flagged because it invents features from roughly 2.7 to 46 km across and adds nothing finer than about 2.4 km, so at that size the 90 m and 30 m models produce far more detail.

Which models appear depends on what is installed. Base-lite also needs its own runtime configured on the machine.

The Generate modal#

Re-synthesizes the section's terrain at true physical scale, then colours it. Climate is carried over unchanged.

Model and precision#

Output resolution#

The modal states the resulting size, pixels per coarse cell and approximate metres per pixel before you start. At or above an estimated 4 GB it warns that assembling the result needs roughly that much system RAM, and that the final heightmap PNG will be similarly large.

Detail#

Three preset cards lead the section: Sketch (90 m, SNR 0.20, x1, the default), Faithful (30 m, SNR 0.05, x1) and Faithful, faster (90 m, SNR 0.05, x2). A preset sets model, SNR and feature scale together; moving any dial off a preset's exact values leaves the preset. The feature-scale slider shows the resulting effective cell size in km.

Rainfall conditioning#

The physical scale comes from the millimetres per year at white that the rainfall layer recorded when you imported it. Only a layer with no recorded scale is read as 3000 mm/yr at white, and a map made for any other range is then mis-scaled with no visible sign: you get a plausible-looking world conditioned at the wrong climate.

Coastline#

The two coastline options cannot be combined. On whole-world globe runs Model authors coastline is always off, because it can still scatter stray land across open ocean.

Advanced post-processing#

A collapsed band at the foot of the modal, hidden for Base-lite. Raw model output is on by default, which writes the model's output as it comes. Turning it off reveals the other controls; the band header then reads reconciled, or reconciled · N changed when you moved a control off its default.

Every Generate starts again from your authored heightmap and sea floor, never from the last generated result, so repeating it does not drift the terrain or creep the sea level upward. Large sections are generated in overlapping pieces that are blended together without seams, and open ocean deep enough to be unaffected keeps your authored sea floor. With raw output off, land heights are matched to your map area by area and the summits above that are the model's own.

Relief matching#

Relief body match, under Advanced post-processing, is off by default and exists for one defect: sharp peaks standing over flat ground. It lifts each area's land so its spread of heights matches your input's, while the coastline and each area's highest point stay where they are, so it cannot move a shore or invent offshore land. It only ever lifts, never flattens.

It is not part of the reference recipe, and it only applies on sections large enough to be generated in pieces. Turn it on only when you have looked at a render and can name the flat interior it is meant to fix.

Whole-world passes#

The Whole-world passes dialog opens from either globe button, Enhance world terrain or Colour globe. Its Terrain half holds these controls.

Ranges and drainage works at a fixed ground resolution and maps your world onto it by latitude and longitude, so it scales with the planet's radius: a smaller planet gets the same kilometre-scale ranges on a smaller sphere.

The dialog's Colour half (Colour globe, Terrain and export detail, Globe preview and the palette controls) is covered in Enhancing terrain.

Revert and snapshots#

Generate takes a snapshot of the hand-authored heightmap before the first run on a section, and Revert to authored heightmap in the modal footer restores it. Deterrace keeps its own snapshot, restored with Revert to previous heightmap. Both buttons appear only when a snapshot exists. A revert protects future generates; it does not undo a generate you have since built on.

Defaults worth leaving alone#

• Elevation SNR at 0.20. Small values mean strong adherence to your terrain. Raising it loosens the model from what you painted, which is rarely what someone reaching for a "more detail" slider wants. 0.20 is the value the terrain model's author recommends for imported heightmaps. The one deliberate departure: drop to 0.05 when a model-authored run must respect authored shallows and island layouts.
• The model choice. The coarse cell is a physical scale. A 30 m run on a continental extent produces mountains at the wrong size, and the result looks right until you measure it.
• Relief body match off. It fixes one specific defect and is not part of the reference recipe.
• Raw model output on, unless you need the authored coast held. Turning it off brings back the coastal hold, the ocean low-band swap and peak handling, at the cost of some of the model's own coastal detail.
• Sea level before Generate. Moving the waterline afterwards reclassifies land and ocean the model authored, and the editor says so.
• Synthetic sea floor on. A flat ocean reads to the model as coastal lowland, and it invents relief to fill it.