WorldSeed

A planet that has a history

Each planet starts as a molten sphere; material cools and solidifies into rafts. You control the trajectory of your world. Add millions of years of plate tectonics during an ice age or create a greenhouse where plants flourish and mountains erode. Watch it all play out or scrub through it with the player.

When it's finished you have a planet with real mountain ranges, rift valleys, river systems, lakes, deserts and forests, and a reason for every one of them.

Tell the story

Each phase is split into epochs, add more, increase the length or turn all the dials up and see what happens

Make the map

The Studio turns the baked planet into maps:

• Parchment-style maps with painted symbols, rivers, lakes and coast lines, in flat or globe form.
• Names for continents, seas, ranges, deserts, forests and lakes, in several styles, all editable.
• A latitude/longitude grid, a compass, a scale bar, a legend, a title, even coffee stains.
• Paper from clean white to old and worn; relief you can turn up or down.
• Export PNG pictures up to 4x, and 16-bit heightmaps for Blender and game engines.

What's in 0.1.0

• The whole planet builder: presets, four steps (Origin, World, Weather, Bake), a time-lapse replay, four quality levels up to a 1024-per-face Ultra bake.
• The Studio: flat and globe parchment maps, objects and names, PNG export.
• Heightmap export. Everything saves itself; your planets are folders you can copy and keep.

What's coming

0.1 is the beginning. Planned: more projections and export formats (GIF, OBJ, GLB, STL), ice and glaciers, hotspot island chains, sediment and erosion refinements, a guided tutorial and, for 1.0, walking around the world you made.

Requirements

• Windows 10/11 or Linux, 64-bit
• A graphics card with OpenGL 4.5 (most from the last ten years)
• 8 GB of memory for Standard; 16 GB or more for the Ultra bake
• The Windows download brings its own Java; nothing to install

Help me make it better

This is an early version with rough edges. There is a Feedback button (F9) in the Free playtest quest that records a note, a category and a screenshot into a file in your WorldBuilder folder. If something breaks, send me the crashes folder from there. Tell me what you wanted to make and couldn't.

App state, Events, Screenshot, and Feedback Message are collected during feedback but only leaves your device when you send it, all files are in the crashes folder where you can review them before sending.

Credits

Built on open work: LWJGL, Dear ImGui, JOML, Java and Temurin, the IM Fell English fonts, MELLE's map tiles, Kenney's cartography pack and ambientCG's paper textures (CC0), and a long list of papers and documentation.

AI Disclosure

This was made with the assistance of AI coding tools. AI is trained on the open source work of others and as such this project will always remain free, Maps and images created with this program do not use AI and are free to use in whatever project you like.

All generated content is free to use for whatever project you are making, credit is appreciated.