Snowy rocks & transition tilesets (Patreon)

Here’s some snowy terrain transition testing. I think the snowy rocks turned out well. The snow layer is hand-painted so it took a while to do all the variations.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on tilesets, transitions, and terrain particles (like the dust that vehicles kick up).

At the moment the problem I’m facing is getting tilesets to place and transition properly for the next big version of alien biomes. Normally Factorio tile placement is controlled by 2-4 terrain properties or "dimensions" (elevation, moisture, temperature, and aux). I need more terrain properties in the next version but that means I’m now placing things in higher level dimensional spaces (rockiness, mineral grey-yellow balance, etc).

For tile-dimension placement I tried to go for more of a natural ‘influence bubble’ style approach that uses point centres instead of boxes, but so far that isn’t going very well. Tile-to-tile transition faces can end up at weird angles and that allows some tiles to touch other tiles that they shouldn’t, e.g. grey terrain touching red terrain.

I have a plan to fix it, which is basically going back to n-dimensional boxes, but that’s easier said than done. It ends up as some confusing 12d geometry that’s really hard to plan for and visualise. I can’t even show you a useful picture of it because a 2d slice of the 12d space just ends up looking like a meaningless voronoi diagram. Hopefully you’ll like the snowy terrain picture instead.