Despite demon_boy's love of valleys, after careful experimentation with various mapgens, I have decided this is my favourite one to create an Australia-like terrain. All my experiments with valleys turned out to either be Switzerland (nothing but mountains, slope everywhere) or jagged flat land without any extremes.
Due to this mapgen's nature, I had to edit the biome definitions in Australia mod in order to let snow spawn on its mountains more than once in every blue moon, in order to get the Australian Alps biome and snow gum trees. I also was quite unhappy with how it seems to create a lot of broad river deltas by default. Instead I have modified it so it creates fewer, narrower, and shallower rivers, with steeper banks. This creates a somewhat steeper bank but still a small transition to the river itself, rather than huge low lying areas. It also makes the areas where a river cuts through the hills more beautiful in my opinion. Most of all though it makes the rivers more Australian - creeks without much depth or width, which is all that can be found across most of Australia's landmass.
Here are my custom parameters:
Code: Select all
mg_flags = caves, dungeons, light, decorations, biomes, ores
mgcarpathian_river_width = 0.03
mgcarpathian_river_depth = 14
mgcarpathian_valley_width = 0.09
mgcarpathian_np_rivers = {
flags = eased
lacunarity = 2
persistence = 0.6
seed = 85039
spread = (1000,1000,1000)
scale = 2
octaves = 5
offset = 0
}
mgcarpathian_spflags = caverns, rivers
And finally a minetest-mapper render of the seed 'invector', (-2000,-2000) to (2000, 2000) around 0,0:
(Please ignore the default forest around the spawn point, it's a mistake :)
It has been pointed by a mate of mine that this area lacks major oceans, though I'm not sure if it's a seed problem or inherent to the current settings. I am not too fussed about this, as Australia is mostly one large island with rivers and some small lakes (mostly dams), plus large low-lying salt lakes. There's no real ocean to speak of except at the edge of the continent, though that is where most of the population can be found.