Setting up a world

Every project in Dayside begins in the worlds picker and, for a new project, in the setup wizard behind New world. Setup decides two things you cannot casually change later: whether the project is a flat map or a planet, and what its ground scale is in kilometres. Everything downstream (river catchments, snow line, brush sizes, export resolution) is measured against that scale, so it is worth getting right before you build.

The worlds picker#

The picker is the front door. It lists every world Dayside knows about, with a search box (Search worlds), a cycling Sort button (Sort: Recent, Sort: Name, Sort: Size) and a count chip. Recent orders by when you last opened each world on this PC, Size by image size, Name alphabetically.

Each card carries a status badge:

Below the title you get opened <relative time> (once you have opened it at least once) and the world's pixel size.

If the engine is unreachable the grid is replaced by a takeover panel titled Can't reach the Dayside engine, with a Retry connection button. The picker also retries by itself every 5 seconds. On a fresh install with no worlds you get the NO WORLDS YET takeover instead, offering Import a world and New world.

Opening an existing world#

Click a card. A loading dialog steps through its captions (Loading project, Restoring layers, Warming preview, Almost there), then offers Open <name>. If loading fails you get Could not warm this project and a Try again button. A world opens into the section editor if it is a flat map, or into the globe workspace if it is a whole world.

If the open itself fails afterwards, the picker shows a Couldn't open <name> dialog with Dismiss and Retry.

Opening a project folder in place#

The Open a project card takes an existing Dayside project folder. It opens the Windows folder picker and then works in that folder: Dayside makes no private copy, and the status line afterwards reads Project opened in place. Dayside will save changes in that folder. Cancelling leaves everything alone (No folder selected. Your projects were not changed.).

Removing a world#

The trash icon on a card opens a two-stage confirmation.

Stage one is always safe: Remove from list takes the world out of your worlds list and leaves every file on disk. For a project you opened in place, this is the only stage offered, and the folder you chose is never touched.

Stage two is reachable only for a world Dayside created inside its own data folder, behind the Delete files from disk… link. Delete files permanently erases the world folder and everything in it, with no copy kept and nothing sent to the Recycle Bin.

Flat map or whole world#

This is the one choice in setup that changes the workflow. On the import path it is the fork at the top of step 1, Maps, under the question Is this a flat map, or a whole world?; the blank starts pick it for you.

A flat map#

A flat map is one rectangle with no globe behind it. You land straight in the section editor and can paint and render immediately. A flat map records a map width in kilometres and a height that follows from the image's aspect ratio. It has no planet radius, regions, globe tiles or globe export.

A flat map can be 10 km to 5,000 km on each side. If the width you enter, or the height that follows from the image's shape, falls outside that band, the build stops with a message naming which side is out of range; Dayside does not quietly resize it. The same limit applies to blank starts. A 7,000 km continent has to come in as a whole world cut into sections, not as one flat map.

A whole world#

A planet you edit through focus areas. The image is treated as an equirectangular global map, and the project gains a planet radius, the globe workspace, region carving, per-tile editing and globe export. You draw a region on the sphere, Dayside cuts it out in an oblique Hammer projection so it is low-distortion, you edit it in the section editor, and the result folds back into the globe.

A whole world is the heavier path. It is worth choosing when you want a planet you can zoom into anywhere; a single continent or a single map sheet is faster and simpler as a flat map.

Choosing for a project that never said#

Projects created outside the setup wizard may not record whether they are a flat map or a whole world. Dayside works it out, and if the project could be either, opening it shows the fork dialog One map, or a whole world? before the editor: A flat map opens the editor, A whole world opens the globe workspace.

The switch is one-way in practice. Once a world has focus areas it refuses to become a flat map, and says so: keep it as a whole world, or delete its focus areas first. If the project changed in another window the dialog asks you to review and confirm again.

Where the terrain comes from#

The wizard opens on the start chooser, How do you want to start your world?, with three cards and, below them, a fourth way in.

Start blank fills its canvas at roughly 28 % of Height at white (about 1,100 m at the 4,000 m default) and puts the waterline at zero, so everything is land. You raise ranges and carve seas with the height brush. Start a blank globe puts the waterline above the fill instead, so you get an ocean planet with nothing on it and paint the continents on yourself. Neither generates terrain for you, and neither takes a seed.

Dayside does not grow a planet from a seed.

Importing a World Climate Lab globe#

Import a World Climate Lab globe expands under the three cards. Click Choose WCL folder… and pick the complete climate-data export folder. Then set Project name (default WCL globe) and Planet radius (km) (default 6371), and click Create WCL globe. The new globe opens in the globe workspace.

The importer reads version 1 of the World Climate Lab climate-data format. The folder must hold a full-world 2:1 grid with a land mask, elevation, annual temperature, annual rainfall and precipitation, Köppen climate classes, and the twelve monthly temperature and precipitation maps. Those monthly maps are what the Climate month control renders from. A World Climate Lab export carries no sea-floor depth, so the ocean starts without authored bathymetry.

The steps you get depend on the card:

Above the steps sits a capability chip that checks this PC while you work: Checking this PC…, then either This PC can import, colour and export or Some components need attention. Check again re-runs the check, and any repair Dayside can offer appears as its own button beside it.

Name and physical scale#

The Maps step (or Details, or Planet) holds the name and the scale. A flat map asks for a width; a whole world asks for a radius.

Earth's 6,371 km radius gives a circumference of about 40,030 km. Ground resolution readouts (the scale chip, the scale bar) and region sizes all follow from the radius.

Scale locks once the heightmap is read#

The scale fields lock as soon as a heightmap has been read, because the numbers are built into the imported map. Set them before you drop the file. The Sea & terrain step shows them read-only with an Edit map button back to the Maps step, but the fields there stay locked. To change the scale after importing, use Restart setup.

Importing a heightmap#

Drop a file on the drop zone (Drop your heightmap here) or click it to open a file picker. The zone stays disabled until the scale fields are valid, so a file can never be read against an unset scale. While reading you see Reading heightmap…; afterwards you get the filename, a W × H · N-bit badge, a Replace <filename> button and a short fingerprint of the file.

File format and bit depth#

Use a 16-bit greyscale PNG where you can. An 8-bit heightmap carries 256 elevation steps across the whole range, which at the default 4,000 m Height at white is about 15.7 m per step, and those steps show up as terracing once relief shading and slope-aware colour go over them. JPEG is 8-bit and lossy on top of that.

Colour images are accepted and read as a single channel, keeping their full bit depth, so a 16-bit map keeps its range.

Whole-world images must be 2:1#

A whole-world heightmap has to be exactly twice as wide as it is tall, because it is read as an equirectangular global map. Anything else is refused with A whole-world image must be twice as wide as tall. Flat maps take any aspect.

Replacing the file#

Replace <filename> re-imports at the current scale. A new heightmap clears every companion map, because those have to match the heightmap's exact size, so a climate map or rainfall map you already attached has to go back on.

Changing the flat map or whole world choice also discards the imported map, and the wizard warns you before it does.

Additional maps#

Under the heightmap sits the Additional maps list, marked optional. Each row has a Choose map button, and each map is checked in the background while you add the next. You can continue with just a heightmap. Every row must match the heightmap's exact pixel size.

Climate drives the biome colour ramps, the snow model's precipitation, and the lake model's water balance, so it reaches further than it seems to. With no Climate / biomes map, the build summary reads No climate map supplied, and climate is derived from latitude and elevation instead.

More Gleba / World Climate Lab maps#

A collapsed list under the main rows takes the reference maps that Gleba and World Climate Lab export: colour keys, temperature extremes, monthly rainfall, aridity, humidity, vegetation, soil, snow and cloud cover, wind and ocean circulation, a land and water mask, waterbodies, river flow, rock type, crust and tectonic plates, slope and true colour, about 35 roles in all. These originals are saved with your project as references. They do not change terrain or climate during setup. PNG or JPEG; animation sequences and folder uploads are not taken here.

One of them does feed a setup control: a Land / water mask added here enables Use my land mask's sea level on the next step.

A Gleba RockType map goes in later, through Source maps > Lithology in the globe workspace. That panel reads Gleba's rock colour legend: Name Gleba colours names every colour it recognises, seabed colours as their own class.

Derived climate cannot place arid or Mediterranean zones, because those need a moisture model rather than temperature banding. Ground at or above 18 degC reads as tropical, which is treated as 2,000 mm/yr of rainfall. That is very wet for the snow and lake models, so if your world is meant to be dry, author a climate map.

Matching climate colours to Köppen classes#

Uploading a climate map opens a confirmation table, Match your climate colours to Köppen classes, listing every significant colour with its coverage percentage and a suggested Köppen class. Each row is a dropdown carrying all 31 classes plus Ignore (ocean / background). Colours that look like ocean are pre-set to Ignore.

Use these biomes applies the mapping and recolours the map into the standard Köppen palette. The button stays disabled if every row is set to Ignore. The detected ocean colour is remembered here, which is what makes Use my climate map's ocean available on the next step.

Rainfall#

Choosing a map on the Annual rainfall row, once a heightmap is in, opens the Rainfall panel.

A rainfall map does two jobs: it weights river catchments so a desert basin gathers less flow than its shape suggests, and it tells terrain generation how wet each place is.

Rainfall at white#

Uploading opens a panel asking What rainfall does white mean? with one field, Rainfall at white (mm/year), valid from 1 to 100,000 in steps of 100. This number is the only record of what your map's brightness means in millimetres.

Get it wrong and nothing visibly breaks. A 12,000 mm/yr map entered as 3,000 tells terrain generation the world is a quarter as wet as you meant, and produces a plausible world with the wrong climate.

Editing the number re-reads the map and the statistics follow live: Resolved scale, Driest, Mean, Wettest, Fully dry, At white and Size. Two warnings can fire:

• uniform: the map is a single flat value with no variation, so it will not make rivers or terrain any more climate-aware than having no map at all. Usually a blank layer got exported instead of the rainfall channel.
• saturated: a large share of the map sits at pure white, so it was probably clipped and the real peak is higher than the number you entered. Raise the value or re-export without clipping.

Use this rainfall map at <n> mm/yr commits it. Afterwards the row reads Rainfall map attached, with the resolved scale, the pixel size, the file fingerprint and a Remove rainfall map button.

Sea level and the ocean floor#

Step 2 on the import path. It opens with a read-only summary of Highest land and either Map width or Planet radius, plus an Edit map escape hatch.

The waterline#

Dayside proposes a waterline by finding the brightness that best separates the dark ocean values in your heightmap from the brighter land. It reports the result as About N% is below the proposed waterline. and a N% ocean chip, with a preview image showing the sea in blue at the current setting. Two edge cases get their own wording: an essentially all-ocean map, and a map where no clear ocean was found (you can keep an all-land map).

The waterline also sets the vertical scale of the ocean. Above it, brightness runs evenly from 0 m up to Height at white. Below it, brightness runs evenly down to the sea floor. Moving the waterline therefore changes the depth scale as well as the shoreline.

Reading the waterline from a mask#

A heightmap alone is an ambiguous land and sea reference, because a bright shallow shelf can out-read a genuinely low island. If you have a land mask or a climate map, it is ground truth and the waterline becomes whichever brightness best separates its land from its sea.

• Use my land mask's sea level appears when you added a Land / water mask under More Gleba / World Climate Lab maps on the Maps step. The mask must match the heightmap's size. The brighter side is treated as land, so a pure black-and-white mask and one with an off-black sea both work.
• Use my climate map's ocean appears only when you attached a climate map that had an ocean colour, and uses that class as the sea.

Deep-ocean floor#

The Ocean depth source radio group decides where the bathymetry comes from.

A synthesized margin has a shelf 130 m deep and 60 km wide, an 85 km slope, and an abyssal floor at 6,000 m.

Synthesizing matters more than it sounds. A map with no depth reads to the terrain model as flat land at the coast, and the model invents coastal relief to explain it. A real shelf anchors the shoreline.

A depth map goes in on the Maps step, through the Bathymetry row; Separate depth map on this step offers Add a depth map on Maps to take you back there. Set Bathymetry: deepest point (m) and click Apply bathymetry to commit it. Back on this step the map reports N% land (pure white) · proposed waterline N%, with a Use this map's sea level button if you want its waterline instead of the heightmap's. Land and sea still follow the waterline above; the depth map only supplies ocean depth. The Keep it button stays disabled while Separate depth map is selected with nothing attached.

When your maps supply depth, the synthetic sea floor setting does not apply, so it never overwrites real bathymetry.

Building the world#

The last step reviews what you chose:

The primary button names what it will do: Create & render for an import, Create blank world, Create blank globe. While it runs the pane shows a progress caption (Creating your world…, or the current stage), and on success <name> is ready followed by Opening the editor…. Dayside then opens the world for you, straight to the globe workspace for a whole world and to the section editor for a flat map.

Save, resume and restart#

Creation keeps going in the background, which is what makes the wizard safe to leave.

• Cancel creation stops the run and keeps the work so it can be resumed. It is offered while a creation is in flight.
• Resume creation picks a cancelled creation up again.
• Save and close leaves the wizard, keeping a running creation so it can be resumed later.
• Restart setup clears everything and returns to the start chooser. It asks first (Restart setup?) and it discards any imported heightmap.
• The header close button is disabled while a creation is active, and does the same as Save and close otherwise. Escape does the same thing as the close button, and closes the restart dialog first if that is open.

Reopening setup returns you to the step you had reached: the drop step when nothing has been imported, Sea & terrain once a heightmap is in, and Build once creation has started. The blank starts return to their own last step.

Unfinished imports are kept for 30 days and then expire.

Where you land#

A flat map opens the section editor#

The world becomes one section you paint, render and export directly. The footer reads EXTENT <w> × <h> km from the recorded scale. Terrain authoring, rendering and export are covered in Painting terrain.

A whole world opens the globe workspace#

You get a rotatable sphere, a Flat view, and a side panel of Regions and Globe tiles. Nothing is carved yet.

To make a region, pick the Box or Lasso tool, drag a selection on the globe, then name it in the composer that appears. Under Advanced controls the composer offers Output long side (default 2048 px, up to 8192 px) and an Overlap policy of Allow overlap or Reject overlap. Each region is cut with a small feathered margin around it; the size Dayside quotes is the selection you drew, without that margin.

Every region and tile you edit marks the globe out of date, and the status chip switches from Globe up to date to Globe out of date. Re-compose globe folds your edits back in. Export globe ships the result, and stays disabled until a globe exists to ship.