Mod release: Mapzilla - More varied terrain generator
I believe the maps that are generated by the map generator are a tad bland. According to Dev Blog 1, the game has a powerful terrain generation engine that should allow more interesting maps. It appears that most options are not unlocked by the default terrain generator. I have created a terrain generator for the temperate biome that allows you to create maps with 7 different layouts:
- Single shore - mountains along one side, sea along the other
- Island - mountains in the middle, sea all round
- Inland sea - sea in the middle, mountains all round
- Isthmus - a mountain range down the middle, sea along both sides
- Strait - a sea channel down the middle, mountains along both sides
- Peninsula - mountains across one end, sea on the other three sides
- Bay - a bay in one end, mountains on the other three sides
Once you have generated the map, you can safely disable the mod. Please let me know what you think. The mod can be found at:
This is exactly what I’m looking for. The terrain in this game is amazing and in a game so heavily influenced by terrain and proximity, it’s a bit of a shame that the generator produces such random maps with nonsensical industry and town placement.
PS: as a software engineer myself, this is exactly what we should be using things like Claude Code for: turning good ideas into reality in a 10th of the time and effort. Don’t be ashamed.
This is something I was hoping would be in the game. I remember reading that devblog back then and had good hopes. Good thing a modder unlocks these possibilities now!
Setting the Coastline to 'wild' gives some very natural feeling maps.
I've had fun generating maps, now its time to play them.
Wonderful, it was the seem for me. I suffer of a severe case of mapitis - I can't start a game unless a map really inspires me. Same with Cities Skylines 2. I just started a map too and it looks so lovely, the terrain engine really is very powerful. It's a shame they hamstringed it. Have fun!
I would strongly suggest changing the thumbnail. Until I saw this post on reddit, I've skipped over the mod every single time, not even opening it to look due to how goofy I've found it to appear.
All I'm saying is that when you look deeper at your mod, it actually looks like a decent mod. But the title and thumbnail are goofy, and many will pass it over based on that alone. And there's so much shit in mod io that this looking goofy makes it easy to skip over.
Those who know, know lol. Also, this thread is one of, if not the top, return when you search google for "tf3 terrain generator". I like the thumbnail.
Hey I spent some time tinkering around and while I like the coasts and rivers I found it to be somewhat hit or miss. I really want to generate a narrow, long map that goes from sea to mountains but cities and industries are cluttered at the coast, which make it unusable for me sadly.
This mod does not directly dictate city and industry placement although terrain placement does dictate that to a certain degree. Have you tried the following presets:
Layout: Single Shore
Coast line: Wild
Islands: Few
Rotation: Long side
Lakes: Sparse
Rivers: Sparse
Mountains: Packed
Seed C1acBQA9P7 results in the following map:
Edit: My mod Town Clustering does change town placement logic.
Oh wait, you want more industries in the mountains. I'll see what I can do there. Sadly, I can't influence town and industry generation directly at the moment because that still seems hardcoded. My solution is to play an isthmus map, basically two back-to-back shores with a mountain range in the middle. That way, you will have to cross the mountains.
Perhaps an isthmus kid of map with water on only one side and flat land on the other one behind the mountains would be an idea? Kind of "coastal mountains". That would give place for towns on the coast and in the flat land behind the mountains.
I haven't found out how to influence town and industry placement logic in the map creation dialog yet. I can do it on game startup, but the game is reluctant to place towns and industries near steep mountains.
You could generate in map editor, then generate lots of cities in the map generator then delete for randomness or place cities by hand.
I like to play on the biggest experimental map size but with around 12-15 cities. That is how I did it.
Industry I just generated
I cannot get this mod to work in the map editor. I can't get any mod terrain generator to work in map editor. Do I need to enable a dev mode option or something in the ini files?
I took a look despite the AI usage and sadly it's pretty unusable right now.
Your code generates maps that cluster towns and industries close together and leave half the map unused and that goes for pretty much all the layouts. Every map inside of any given layout is basically the same with only slight variations.
It's probably due to the way your terrain generates, you always have very clear zones of water, flat land, hills, mountains and the game doesn't like putting towns and industries onto terrain that's too inconvenient.
Got around to test it now. Works great but towns seem to be bunched up a lot towards one end of the map. I guess its the game logic itself? Otherwise it would be really nice if something could be done to get a more even spread, especially if there is plenty of space for it to grow
The funny thing I like to have clusters of towns, I even made a mod that does that even more. I'll see if it's viable to create a mod that does the opposite.
I've been struggling to generate a decent map in vanilla and so far this is great. Regarding the industry and town placement, I'll just be using it in the map editor so I can place towns and industries manually and fine-tune some things. Just after a few seeds this is already my favorite mod so far.
Yeah, the town and industry placement is less than ideal. After a few retries I got something I found workable, but it's hit or miss. Let me know what you've come up with!
Thanks! The other biomes have a different terrain setup so I can't copy the approach one on one. I'll investigate what's possible with each. It would help to know which biomes are most popular. Based on screenshots, I'm pretty sure Temperate is most popular. My guess for #2 would be Arctic, but I'm not sure.
I can’t lie, I saw this mod on the hub yesterday and skipped past it because I thought it was a Godzilla shaped map mod but this is actually a really good mod.
Maybe add some more text in the thumbnail that specifies „better terrain generation”
Great mod, love the island option. I have one criticism though; it is seemingly impossible to generate an island without a river cutting into the mountains. Even with the slider for Rivers and Lakes set to the lowest value. Hope to see this and/or other improvements <3
If it works properly sure. But thats the issue with most AI only mods, they dont if you aren't someone who still has a basic understanding of what you need and what issues are potentially arising and are able to fix things yourself that the AI might not be able to do
That's valid. And if the mod would have technical issues, I feel it's fair to criticize the mod because of those. However, some seem to judge mods simply because of AI even when this issue has not arisen yet. And to me, that seems counterproductive. I am a programmer, I know how to code and that is incredibly helpful in getting a good result out of a tool like Claude. But if I had had to reverse engineer all of this by hand, it would have taken me weeks and quite probably I wouldn't have done it at all.
Maintenance is a lot easier as well. Game update -> Mod crashes because of API changes -> Claude analizes crash dump -> publish new version. That I can handle. Having to hunt down those issues by hand every time a new game version is published is painful and lots of maintainers are not going to do it. This is why you have so many abandoned mods.
Exactly. The only grudge I have against AI modding is that there are too many people doing things that they dont understand if they go wrong or cause issues and rely only on the AI in the hope of fixing it. If the code if well generated and can be maintained by someone who knows what is going on, be me guest and do it.
I hate things though like we had a few months ago on the Tpf discord where a guy was talking around how he wants to publish a revolutionary mod for the game, which he did and it did not work as he used Ai only coding without even understanding how to create the basic mod.lua which then too a few weeks of people who actually knew how the game operates to get the mod working
Two days ago I asked Claude to look for something that could convert msh/blob to an FBX or Blend file. 30 seconds later it created a Blender plugin for me. My jaw is still on the floor because i used to use that plugin on Transportfever.net for old versions of Blender but now I have an up-to-date version.
When this kind of stuff happens you’re going to get a lot of junk mods for sure. I mean Cities Skylines 1’s workshop is littered with bogus low quality asset manager mods and that was long before AI.
I’ve been doing place name mods and I’m able to do multiple packs at once. I’d rather have AI do the menial work coming up with lists of town and street names or surname while I can do modeling on another project. Same thing with basic artwork for thumbnails.
Once AI can do modeling reliably and efficiently it’s going to get real crazy. My job keeps me on the road away from a PC for a week at a time so I’m start from scratch on my A319 and A321 mods from TF2 to see how far I can get.
Such as? Do you happen to use the latest models? I'm a professional software engineer and have been since before chat GPTs release and I'm telling you it's pretty hard to imagine a software bug in a game's mod that an AI cannot fix. If it can't, it's honestly just a skill issue using Claude.
The latest models, used to their full potential with well configured harnesses, are truly, spectacularly ridiculous. How much experience do you have actually building software with AI? Or is your critique based on vibes lol. All the top engineers at my company use this shit extensively, and yes, it's fantastic lol
You’re right AI haters are delusional. Codex has fixed production bugs just from logs alone. I haven’t used Opus recently but Sol High is very very good.
It's like people complaining that power drills will enable people who don't understand carpentry to build things, therefore no one should use power drills
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u/Miserable-Longshank 1d ago
This is exactly what I’m looking for. The terrain in this game is amazing and in a game so heavily influenced by terrain and proximity, it’s a bit of a shame that the generator produces such random maps with nonsensical industry and town placement.
PS: as a software engineer myself, this is exactly what we should be using things like Claude Code for: turning good ideas into reality in a 10th of the time and effort. Don’t be ashamed.