About

Strathfall is a mod that reimagines the vanilla world-gen with new terrain, continents, and flowing rivers.

It is a hobby project with a few specific goals:

Create fantasy worlds consisting of a limited number of continents
Explore climate modelling as a means of controlling biome distribution
Explore interesting and novel ways to do procedural river generation
Explore interesting and novel ways to create epic landscapes
Explore aspects of game-design relevant to exploring vast worlds (eg movement!)
Make a world-generator that performs better than the Vanilla offerings

The mod reuses the v1 biomes from the base game for a similar look and feel, but replaces the underlying continent and terrain tech to create scaled-up worlds with flowing rivers, waterfalls and cool landscapes.

Disclaimer

The current state of the project should be considered a tech-demo. Open-world sandbox-y survival play is possible but you might not find the full gameplay loops/experiences that you are used-to in a vanilla Hytale world.

Some aspects of world-gen are currently under-developed, broken, or missing entirely:

No dungeons
No ocean biome generation
No volcanic islands (zone4 biomes)
Cave generation is very bare-bones
Prefab generation is a little immature (might have some wonky placements etc)
Resource generation (such as ores) kinda sucks and is somewhat incomplete

User Guide

If that^ hasn't put you off and you'd still like to install the mod, wonderful! Strathfall can be installed like any other Hytale mod.

Add the mod jar to your Hytale mods folder
Go to create a new world
Ensure Strathfall is enabled in the world's mods list
Create the world
Explore!

FAQ

1. Will you support v2 biomes?

Unfortunately v2 biomes are too tightly coupled to the way the v2 generator works, which make it incompatible with both the technical and performance goals of the project. v1 biomes are much less prescriptive over how you use them which makes them easier to integrate with the way our generator works.

2. Why those project goals?

We're big fans of "world building" and finding ways to recreate (or fake) real-world processes to produce believable results. It's not so much about "realism" for us, but the "immersion", and creating worlds that we want to keep exploring (and to stop and take screenshots in!).

We also love making computer go brrr, so trying to achieve all this^ while making something that runs fast is a really interesting challenge.

TLDR; because we're big nerds and modding is fun.

3. What specs do I need to run this mod?

No higher specs than the game's minimum requirements. In testing the mod performs and scales better than both the vanilla v1 and v2 generators. That said, the gameplay experience really benefits from being able to run the game at higher render distances (ie 512 and up).