Say which tiles are a biome's ground, its water and its hills, and which objects grow there.
What a Biome Is Made Of
The generator used to work out its own art: it took the map's biome, looked for a tile palette, fell back to whatever tileset was tagged with that biome, and fell back again to the demo art that ships with a new project. Four guesses deep, with nowhere for you to say what you actually wanted — so a map full of your own painted tiles could still generate in art you had never chosen.
A biome now decides. Everything a generated map is drawn with — its ground, its own water, the tiles its hills are made of, and the objects scattered across it — is authored on the biome, once. Every map that uses that biome then paints and generates the same way.
Anything you leave empty is not drawn. It is never swapped for something similar. That is what makes a generated map predictable.
Where to find it#
Open a map, then Manage Biomes from the tile palette on the left — or the biome editor from anywhere it is offered. Pick a biome and everything below is on it.
There is deliberately no per-map version of this. A map and its biome could otherwise disagree about what "plains" looks like, which is the confusion this replaced.
Setting it up#
- Open the biome you want to author.
- Under Ground — autotiles, add the tilesets its land is drawn with. Add several and set a weight on each to mix them.
- Add a Ground — blended entry too if you generate maps in Blended style — that mode reads a different list, and a biome with only autotiles generates blank in it.
- Set Water to this biome's own sea, lake and river tiles. Water is not a biome of its own: a swamp's water is not a tundra's.
- Open Hill slots if this biome has cliffs, and pick the tiles each piece is drawn from.
- Open Objects that grow here and add the trees, rocks and props it scatters. You can tick several and add them together.
- Generate a map that uses the biome.
Hills are stamps#
Cliff art is stamps — plain tiles, placed one at a time, drawn by hand. Nothing is resolved from neighbouring tiles and nothing is composed for you, so a hill is only ever made of tiles you drew and put in a slot.
A hill is nineteen of them:
| Slots | What they are |
|---|---|
| Lip (3) | The top edge of the cliff, sitting on the plateau itself. You can still walk on it |
| Face top (3) | The first row below the lip |
| Face middle (3) | The middle of the face. This row is the one that repeats when a cliff is taller than three tiles |
| Face lower (3) | The last row of the face |
| Base (3) | Where the cliff meets the ground below it |
| Inner corners (4) | Where the outline turns back on itself — a notch cut into an edge |
Each run of three is west, centre, east. The west and east columns draw the vertical ends of a cliff band; the centre repeats along its length. Between those two kinds of repetition, nineteen slots draw a hill of any width, any height and any outline.
There is no north-facing cliff art, because from above you cannot see the far side of a hill — the plateau simply continues.
Every field#
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ground — autotiles | The land, in Autotile style. Add several and weight them to mix |
| Ground — blended | The land, in Blended style. A separate list, because that mode reads different art |
| Overlay | Laid over the ground on part of the tiles. Coverage decides how much |
| Water | This biome's own sea, lake and river tiles |
| Hill slots | The nineteen tiles a cliff is drawn from. Empty ones are simply not drawn |
| Objects that grow here | What is scattered across the biome, with a weight and a layer each |
| Prop density | How thickly those objects land, scaled by World Gen → Object Density |
Gotchas#
- Autotile and Blended read different lists. A biome with autotiles but no blended ground generates blank in Blended style. If a map comes out empty, check which style it is generating in.
- Water is per biome, not a place of its own. Leave it empty and the sea falls back to the old built-in pairing, which may be art your project does not have.
- Hills need a lip and a centre face. With neither, no cliffs are drawn at all — and nothing is blocked either, so you get no invisible wall around every rise.
- A grouped object is offered once and scatters whole. An RPG Maker tree is several sheet cells; pooling it pools the tree, not a quarter of one.
- An empty object pool means a bare map. Nothing is scattered by default — the generator will not invent scenery you have not chosen.
- Weights are relative, not percentages. Two entries at 100 and 300 mean 25% and 75%; the editor shows you the resulting share.
- Changes apply the next time you generate. They do not repaint terrain you have already generated or hand-painted.