Rivers & Bridges

Hi folks!

This is another update that got a bit bigger than I expected! Let me tell you about it.

Districts

You can now place "districts" in your world. Districts let you create and define areas within your world.

Districts work a little like monster zones in that you paint them down onto the ground. Once painted, you can select them like any other object to modify them. Note that they are only selectable while the Terrain action bar tab is active; they're hidden (apart from their effects on the map) in all other modes.

Currently, there are three kinds of districts:

Normal Districts:

Normal districts are very simple. They let you mark down a region and give it a name, which optionally can be made visible on the map when you're looking at that part of the world. You can also give them a description, if you want!

You can also recolor the ground within the district, including adding or removing grass within that area.

These simple district types can often be useful for delineating small villages, for changing the ground color to make farms, or just for general organization.

As an "advanced" option, you can also mark a normal district as an obstruction, basically turning it into one large invisible wall which will prevent your players from entering! If you're showing the district's title you can also change the title's size, placement, and color from the advanced options page of its information window.

Flat Districts:

Flat districts are very much like normal districts, with one exception; the area inside the district has its ground completely flattened. This is great for making larger towns where you want the area to feel more urban, with all the buildings built precisely on the same level.

Once a flat district is created, you can then select it and raise it up or down (within limits!), as well as modify how smoothly it blends out into the naturally undulating terrain outside the district. Note that the game will try to keep things working approximately sensibly; if you use flat districts to make steep cliffs, the game will try to treat those cliffs as barriers and stop players from walking up and down them. If you want that to work differently for a particular flat district, you can overrule the game and tell it whether or not to allow players to walk on its sides or even on its top.

As with normal districts, flat districts can optionally have their ground recolored, and have grass added or removed, however you wish!

Lake Districts

Moving on from flat districts, lake districts let you paint down areas of water. As with flat districts, lake districts are always approximately flat, but will build a small lip of land around the body of water, and will fill it with water.

If you wish to make rivers that flow downhill, you can connect multiple lake districts together at different altitudes, and the water will automatically connect up, even making waterfalls if the change in height between districts is high enough!

As with flat and normal districts, lake districts can optionally recolor their ground, and they can also change the color of water inside the lake district!

There are a lot of advanced options for lake districts; play around with those to see what else you can do!

By default, lake districts will mark their water areas as obstructions to players, and if their sides are steep then those will be marked as obstructions as well, but as above you can override both