Mapgen problems

How do I justify "desert" next to a big lake? Doesn't water = green stuff?

I can probably do "a wizard/dragon did it" for a couple, but I have so many. Does anyone know what else those terrain markers can represent than sandy wastes?

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There's desert around the Caspian Sea.

and around Lake Chad. The Nile runs through a desert. Salt Lake is a (non-freshwater) body of water in the middle of a desert. Etc. This happens all the time.

Right, but that sounds like a big desert around a little lake. These maps have all these smaller pockets of "desert" tiles all over the place and I'm having trouble reconciling it. When I look at features of hills and mountains and forests I know what I'm looking at cand imagine how it appears on the ground.

>Lake Chad

Deserts don't have to be sandy, heck they don't even have to lack rainfall. Poor soil and high winds can leave you with desert like conditions.

Almost every conceivable atmospheric and geographical anomaly is present somewhere on earth.

As long as it looks believable, you're fine. Yeah yeah, pick a direction for the wind, try to make mountain ranges look like they make sense, etc. But don't take it too seriously. As long as it looks plausible enough, nobody will bat an eye at it except armchair geologists.

The *real* point of the map is to tell you stuff like: THIS major nation holds all these sea routes. THIS ridge of mountains is what's been holding back these two feuding clans from coming into all-out war for so long. THIS giant desert is why people don't go further south, and why some varieties of monsters thrive in the lack of civilization there. Etc.

But honestly, do whatever feels best to you. If figuring out all the tectonic plate movements since the planet was a ball of burning silicon makes you happy, then you should do it. Because what 'feels' right to you is what's going to give you the best map.

>Lake Chad
>Pond Virgin

>How do I justify "desert" next to a big lake?
Aral Lake, you dumb idiot?
Chad?
Caspian Sea?
Dead Sea?

It's like you never had Geo in your entire life, you fucking high school drop-out

>Little lake
Get back to school, you idiot.

I'm using a software tool that generated "reasonable" formations. Problem is I don't know what the desert tiles are meant to represent.

Also these are 6 mile hexes, so a region map and not a national/international map

Little compared to the fucking desert, duh. And no I dont have an atlas next to me

Just claim that you based your climate distribution on New Zealand and you dump all kinds of stupid bullshit on the map.

...

virgin Erie vs. chad Chad

>Doesn't water = green stuff?
Only in the places the water can affect. Early human civilisations were based around rivers for this reason: river flood plains can be used for irrigation.
Deserts come about due to lack of precipitation (this is why the arctic is technically a desert). A region can lack rainfall for a number of reasons. The obvious one is if rainclouds don't form due to environmental factors, then there won't be much rain. Another is rain shadows, which are caused by mountains (the rain falls on one side of the mountain, but not the other, creating an area of low rainfall).
>Poor soil and high winds can leave you with desert like conditions.
This is another important factor. Similarly, a lack of vegetation for whatever reason (such as crop mismanagement) can cause desertification.

>And no I dont have an atlas next to me
You are using internet, you dumb faggot. You have any atlas you can dream about in 5 seconds. Jesus fuck, this is not your everyday stupidity.

>Early human civilisations were based around rivers, because alluvial soils require very little effort to be used for agriculture and most primitive tools will do
Irrigation came much, much later. And that goes without mentioning the factors like flooding (which was only useful in case of Egypt and danger everywhere else) or hostile terrain anywhere else.
Gardening on alluvial soils is the oldest agricultural activity known to man. It predates even fully sedimentry lifestyle.

donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/

Can someone try generating a world there and tell me what kind of places it shows as desert tiles? Low elevation? Dry? Is there another terrain type (like moors) I could easily replace some of them with?

>sedimentry lifestyle

Pretty good pun though. Early agriculture did often depend on sediment brought by rivers for a fertilizer, just look at ancient Egypt.

That would be sedimentary. is, by their own standards, a drooling moron who doesn't know how to use auto-correct, let alone find a dictionary on the internet. Literally the kind of cretin you'd expect to drown from staring at the sky during a thunderstorm.

If your players arent autists or geography teachers they literally wont notice.

This is time you could spend improving your campaign by working on stuff that will actually matter, like what your players would do in that lake-adjacent desert.

>Also these are 6 mile hexes, so a region map and not a national/international map
So you "little" Lake Chad or Aral Sea would be 20 respective 30 hexes across. Just for comparison with the map you posted.

>hex tiles
>using a mapgen
>being this fucking casual
your own fault.

>hex tiles
>casual
Come back here when you run a campaign efficiently with your dreamworld 100 meter resolution freeform maps instead of key locations within hexes. And actually have travel rules instead of just arbitrarily deciding where the players end up.

To be frank, I never saw the need for hex maps when I can use proper GIS tools instead. Road navigation and travel times included.

>How do I justify "desert" next to a big lake? Doesn't water = green stuff?
You ever notice how the Sahara Desert is surrounded by water on three sides?

>If your players arent autists or geography teachers they literally wont notice.
>This is time you could spend improving your campaign by working on stuff that will actually matter, like what your players would do in that lake-adjacent desert.
Best advice.

>Aral Lake

It used to be the Aral Sea. Poor thing...

Honestly the first thing I notice about the Sahara Desert is that Sahara is Arabic for Desert. I love it when language does that.

There's a place in England where there is a hill, which the locals back in the day just called the Hill, or "Pen" as the word was in Old English. When maps started being drawn of England and some catographers cam around. By this point the English word had become "Hill" but the locals still called the hill "Pen". The catographers - not being linguists and so not understanding that "Pen" was just "Hill" - decided you couldn't just called a hill "Pen" and so marked it as "Pen Hill".

But wait, it gets better. After a few centuries, linguistic drift caused the name "Pen Hill" to be truncated to "Penhill", then eventually to "Pendle". So the hill was just called "Pendle". Some cartographers came alone one day after this, looking to update the maps. When they asked the name of the hill, and were told it was "Pendle", they decided you couldn't call a hill just Pendle, and so marked it down as "Pendle Hill".

Long story short, in England there is a hill with a name that translates out to "hill hill hill".

It's not even that big a hill.

that looks pretty neat. how does it handle elevation?

There's actually a lot of cold deserts in russia and I think there's one in eastern germany.

What software is this?

>Honestly the first thing I notice about the Sahara Desert is that Sahara is Arabic for Desert. I love it when language does that.

There is a road in Australia that goes the same. Gulgan Road, as they wanted to give the local aboriginals part of naming it so they just asked 'We are making a road, what would you call it?' and were told in the local aboriginal language 'A road?' and they just ran with it without checking they'd got it across right.

Donjon

“Armchair geologists”? What the hell is that?
Oh, haha, look at this idiot

Depends on what you want to do with it.

On the vector side, you can create an elevation (point) layer and basically re-create what landscape surveyors have been doing since centuries: Record elevation points in a grid, making sure to pay special attention to peaks, ridges and water bodies' boundaries. The result is an implicit TIN (triangulated irregular network), which you can use to create the typical contour lines map as well as a raster heightmap of nearly any resolution.

On the raster side, there's a lot of support for processing of DEM (digital elevation model) layers, though for straight editing you're better off with using a paint program. Ideally one which supports more than just 8-bit greyscale.

>Doesn't water = green stuff?
Immediately around it, sure. But I don't think that extends out too horribly far. I mean, I guess it depends on what sort of ground water there is, but I don't think it's a given. And maybe there's bedrock immediately under the dirt which isn't very permeable to water?

Also, there's this:
>The Atacama Desert (Spanish: Desierto de Atacama) is a plateau in South America, covering a 1,000-kilometre (600 mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains. It is the driest non-polar desert in the world. According to estimates, the Atacama Desert proper occupies 105,000 square kilometres (41,000 sq mi),[5] or 128,000 square kilometres (49,000 sq mi) if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included. Most of the desert is composed of stony terrain, salt lakes (salares), sand, and felsic lava that flows towards the Andes.

>Geographically, the aridity of the Atacama is explained by it being situated between two mountain chains (the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range) of sufficient height to prevent moisture advection from either the Pacific or the Atlantic Oceans, a two-sided rain shadow.

Pic:
>Map of the Atacama Desert. The area most commonly defined as Atacama is yellow. In orange are the outlying arid areas of southern Peru, Altiplano, Puna de Atacama and Norte Chico.

>“Armchair geologists”? What the hell is that?
Really lazy geologists, who just sit around in their chairs while other geologists are digging up mineral samples and yell out shit like: "Hey! See if there's a quartz deposit over there!".

I only see one thing that looks like a desert. The other brownish spots could easily just be arid grasslands like the Dust Bowl.

>Windows 95 system theme

What are you 50?

Not quite, still got a few years to go. But I was going to uni when Win95 was released and quite liked the scheme.

Is there anything where I could set up coastlines and fault lines and let random generation handle elevation, climate, and rivers? I have a rough idea of what I want but I want it to be geographically plausible.

>How do I justify "desert" next to a big lake? Doesn't water = green stuff?

Hadley cells

kekst
thanks, user, now I have to awkwardly tell my coworker I can't really explain to him what made me laugh so suddenly

from thumbnail I thought it's a sketch of Space Marine

Redditors really killed this meme

>Mapgen problems
>How do I justify "desert" next to a big lake? Doesn't water = green stuff?


You use markov chain where a desert can't be near a lake

I like generating hex maps, but sometimes even when I'm doing it area by area myself, the though creeps into my mind that unless I heavily curate what each area looks like as I go, it's going to look like total nonsense by the end. The moment I pop down a big sandy desert, I know where I probably am geographically in my world and I have to keep that in mind for everything else in and around that latitude on the hexmap or else do some serious brain-wracking to figure out why these two biomes are on the same level as one another.

And when you're "Procedurally" generating hexes, I can never figure out how to take roads or rivers into account. Surely there are roads and rivers I can't yet see the end of but would be going through the known area, you know?

Generating/selecting the world as I go is legitimately fun, but it's really hard to keep sensible.

Not in my language. It was always called Aral Lake, even before Soviets intentionally fucked up irrigation to drain the lake's basin.
Now it's two lakes and a desert in the middle of it.

Also, it never was a sea. Just really big salt-water lake. Currently extra-salty on Uzbeki side and just salty on Kazakch side.
And I really don't understand the grand plan of the glorious leader of Uzbekistan to keep draining the basin. Created ten more problems for the one solved (getting cheap access to a small-ass gas field), since it pretty much screwed the agriculture the original irrigation project was supposed to bolster, all while making water scarce and even more expensive to use.

>There is a road in Australia that goes the same. Gulgan Road, as they wanted to give the local aboriginals part of naming it so they just asked 'We are making a road, what would you call it?' and were told in the local aboriginal language 'A road?' and they just ran with it without checking they'd got it across right.
I've always been suspicious of these stories, how come the Aboriginals can understand the question but can't answer back in the same language?

>what is a scale
>what is vtt software
>what is pixlecounting