Springs and valleys

It's been quite a while since the last post - real life has unfortunately rather dominated things recently and will probably continue to do so for quite a while. But I'm still tinkering with the planets when I can.

I've been working on refining the river simulation at the regional level, in particular making springs a bit more realistic. These are little rivers that flow into the main rivers, delivering the additional flow that the main rivers pick up in each tile. Previously, they were just random. But I thought it would make more sense if I could space them out a little so they flow into the main rivers in a more realistic way. To do this, I create imaginary zones around the rivers and start streams at the edges of these zones, spaced a bit from each other. That looks something like this:

All the rivers and springs here are shown the same shade, so it looks a bit overwhelming, but you can see in the more isolated sections how the springs flows nicely into their rivers. (The pink bit is a river valley.)

I've also enhanced the way that all rivers, including springs, carve the land beneath them, especially around mountains. That gives us pleasingly rugged landscapes like this:

There is still a lot of ironing out to do with this. I am thinking of implementing a simple hydrolic erosion system so that the shapes of the mountains interact more meaningfully with the valleys carved out by the rivers. That might mean I can make the mountains themselves a bit simpler, as the rivers will be doing more of the work of making the highland areas crinklier.