WorldEngine for VS Toolkit

Been a lot of worldgen mods popping up recently, and perhaps I too caught the same bug because here I am offering my take on the subject.

What am I trying to fix?

My issue with procedural worlds are a lack of coherency.  The worlds don't often feel authored because they aren't, they are the result of random noise that goes on forever.  No shade on noise, it's made a lot of pretty worlds, but I took a cue from Dwarf Fortress: what if we generated the planet *first* and used that data to inform the generator?  Well, you'd have a stable world.  One that follows consistent rules, has consistent outcomes, and can be reasoned about.  Where are the mountains?  What is the climate like?  The planet is also generated ahead of time and uses mostly vanilla generation behaviors, which has the benefit of not costing much more than vanilla world generation.  In short, you generate an entire planet first and then the game uses the climate and continental data to fill out your world.

Am I seeing double?

If you are looking at *this* you might be looking for WorldEngine for VS.  This separate mod page exists for distribution of the worldgen toolkit.  What's the difference?  This toolkit is needed to generate the planet files that the mod uses.  If you want to tryout a standalone mod, that one comes with a planet already.  If you want to generate your own planets, you need this toolkit, if you just want to have a planetary worldgen (or update your toolkit) you can use the standalone mod.

How does it work?

Generate a planet, start a new game.  The new game uses that planet.  This overrides some of the climate options in the world settings so things like rainfall, the equator, etc... won't do anything though other spawn features will.  Primarily I override the random noise generators for the temperature, precipitation and use a custom elevation picker.  After that it's purely vanilla.  This means that spawn rates and even the seed will change the world's contents, but have less of an impact on it's features, and some generation options will not work: primarily those related to temperature and preciptitation.

**IMPORTANT** A couple notes, the planet is 'stretched to fit' over your world and I do NOT recommend a 1 million block world.  You can do it, but it will mean oceans go on literally forever! I recommend a 256k or smaller world size.  However, the smaller the planet and the smaller the world, the more blocky some features like shorelines may become.  Lastly, the worlds can be a bit flatter than you might expect due to weak progressive elevation in worldengine.  It's less of a bug and more of an artistic flaw, but tempering elevation is something I'd like to fiddle with.  Lastly is the big one:

BY DEFAULT VINTAGE STORY SPAWNS YOU AROUND 0, 0.  FOR MANY PLANETS THIS IS IN THE OCEAN.

Thus, if you wish to make a server it is recommended you generate locally, set the proper spawn location and then copy the world to your server.  A lot of caveats, I know, but if the idea of a large, cohesive planet interests you that's all I'm offering here.

What it is not

I do not add biomes, change spawn rates, change graphics, add landmarks, etc... The point of this project is that the world generator is not fed a continuous noise field, but instead inherits a stable known climate and world shape, and then does it's work as usual.  Thus anything that appears or does not appear in your world is a byproduct of vanilla generation.  What it can exacerbate is long features, like deserts or plains, being uninterrupted for very long stretches because the climate model is extremely coherent.

Compatibility

I started with it in mind, and so *generally* it works with vanilla generation changes.  Terra Prety and Conquest, probably not a good mix.  Rivers, watersheds and terrain slabs?  Used for the screenshots, I'll let you decide if it's worth it.  Farseer compatibility?  Works just fine and recommended to really enjoy the splendor of the planet.  Dungeons, villages, etc...?  I'm using those too.

How to use

I have done my best to make it simple and error free, it is not, however as simple as dropping it in your mod folder.  First you have to generate a planet, *then* drop it in your mods folder and unfortunately that first part is the catch.  I use a modified Mindwerks WorldEngine backend to generate the necessary planetary data, which is then bundled up along with the worldgen into a zip file which you install like any other mod.  However, because WorldEngine is a python project, I also wrote a frontend to provide a better UX (though CLI is an option if you want it).  However, that means that the install process requires Python, and it must be setup before use.  I include a 'setup.bat' to try and automate this process as much as humanly possible, but that's the pain point in this method and if you aren't comfortable with using third-party tools, well, someone can always make a planet, package it and upload it for all I care.  That's how the mod works.

Requires Python: 3.9 or greater, however, 3.12 is **strongly** recommended to avoid package shenannigans.

Steps:
1. Unpack zip
2. Run setup.bat
3. Run PlanetKit.bat
4. Click Generate & pack mod
5. Wait
6. Open 'output'
7. Copy {world name}-worldengine.zip into your mods folder.
8. Launch VS and start a new world as usual

Lastly, the output data is purely visual for your own reference.  Because I'm merely *feeding* the generator and different world seeds will produce different individual features, small features (islands are most affected) may end up being ignored outright in generation.  Throw it in ChatGPT and ask it to make a server map, use it to plan out where you want to explore, but just know that these maps are a visual representation of what the generator was given, not necessarily what it decided to produce.

About the screenshots

I'm using rivers, watersheds and running a custom color pipeline over the screenshots so they look super hype.  I know someone is going to ask, so I'm putting this here so it can't be said I didn't make it clear, the mod only affects how landforms are generated, it is not a graphical mod.  Please install your favorite graphical enhancements.