Vulcanite Planet (Patreon)

Here is the Vulcanite planet. Rivers of lava, volcanoes, and red desert. It’s still a work in progress but is a big improvement over the current vulcanite planets, which are essentially featureless because they are all volcanic and no water.

The Alien Biomes volcanic terrain was always intended to have lava, but getting lava to work in a way that doesn’t look terrible has been a big challenge. The first attempt at making lava was predictably to base it on water. The benefit of using water is that the tileset is animated, but the downside is that it really just looks like orange water or sludge, and looks especially bad at night. It’s not that an orange jelly planet isn’t interesting, it’s just not what I was going for. There were a few other attempts before getting the solution in the screenshot, and the one I’ve ended up with is not without its downsides. The main downside being that the texture is static; it won’t shift and churn the way I’d want it to. Getting something that glows at night is still a big win though (I won’t spoil the secret of how that works just yet). I find it enough to get a moody atmosphere for the place and it provides a good obstacle to break up the landscape.

The river shapes are also a nice opportunity because they don’t need to follow the same sort of paths as water rivers. Water rivers typically need to end in a larger body of water otherwise it looks wrong and that’s almost impossible to do with how the mapgen works. Lava rivers on the other hand often appear somewhere, wiggle around, and then disappear into a hole somewhere else (making lava tubes). Also long ribbons of lava could represent other things like a tear in the landscape. It’s just a lot easier to make them look good and plausible.

As with the other planets, the exact mechanics, technology and production chains aren’t figured out just yet. I’m about halfway through doing first-pass elevation on all the planned planet types and that’s given me enough information to start planning the next version of Alien Biomes in more detail. Figuring out the tilesets is most of what I’m doing right now. There will be more information on that later but one thing that I’d like to mention is that I’m trying to avoid having most of the tilesets be recolours of each other. There will be a lot more base textures so each biome can have more of a unique atmosphere.