WorldEngine for VS

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 Toolkit.  This separate mod page exists for distribution of the actual worldgen mod itself.  What's the difference?  The toolkit is needed to generate the planet files that this mod uses.  However, this is a standalone mod and as such comes with a planet.  So if you were like, wow, that seems like a lot of work to try out a new worldgen then this one can be used without the toolkit, you'll just be limited to the pack-in planet.

How to use

* If you aren't generating your own planet, you can drag and drop it into your mod folder as with any other mod.  You will get the planet I have included in the screenshots.
* If you want to update the generator that the toolkit uses, extract the contents of this mod into the mod-template folder in your worldengine-kit.
* Lastly if you *have* a planet and you want to use that instead, you can repack the mod with your planet file.

**IMPORTANT** The planet is 'stretched to fit' over your world size and I do NOT recommend a 1 million block world.  You can do it, but it will mean biomes and oceans will take literal hours to traverse! I recommend a 256k or smaller world size if you want a comfortable play space.

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.

Planet Versions

Unless you regen chunks it should be assumed that changing versions will cause distortions in your world!  However, worldgen versions may also target specific planet files, in which case planets would need to be regenerated to work with a newer version.  Right now repack tools are not provided, but if I change planet versions one day I will include them as part of the toolkit.

Version 1 - Compatible with all worldgen versions > 0.20.0

About the screenshots

I'm using rivers, watersheds, farseer, a chunk range of 1024, 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.