JUNO - The Strength and Patience of the Hill

Now that we have a map, flat as it is, we need to add some topography before we can talk about water ways and eventually vegitation. All things that will then lead us to find the right places for villagest and civilizations and such. Luckily our old firned Tectonics.js can help us out there as well. Because it not only pregenerated our map but also figured out where mountains were likely to form and likewise depressions. It’s generated like a heat map out of the site. As seen here:

JUNO the topographical heat map

We can put this into Wonderdraft and use it guide us in adding some topography. So I’ve done that and added some terrain symbols for mountains and hill areas. None of this is permanent just something to remind us where the high elevation is supposed to be and the low. But the output from Wonderdraft is already looking pretty great.

The basic topography of JUNO

The next step is water. Rivers form usually from water starting at a high elevation and flowing to lower elevations. This is of course sometimes going to be North to South, but we really need to be looking at where our mountains are, high elevation, and where our lakes are, low elevation, and ultimately the ocean, the lowest elevation there is. So that will get us past most of the common errors with map making, that being having rivers that somehow come out of the ocean and flow up mountains. The other thing we should remember is that water is always joining and rarely splitting. So that means that little rivers merge to become big rivers, and when water leaves a lake it will usually do so at a single point, that being the lowest edge of the lake. Using those rules as the guide we our first pass on the water ways:

Now with Rivers!

That’s enough for today, and we’ll finish up next time with some discussion on climate and foliage.

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