Settlements and Provinces
The next step is probably the second most important, and one I should probably have partially automated. Open up the
settlements.bmp that is found in the input folder. It looks like input.bmp with the size of the real map, and now it also has minor rivers painted on it (gray). The purpose of this file is to mark the location of every major settlement in your world.
1 pixel = 1 settlement = 1 province
The goal is to fill the map with just the right amount of dots to make as large or small province as you want.
There are a few hard color codes used here as well, they are :
RED (255, 0, 0) : Marks a settlement spot. A (land) province will be created around here.
YELLOW (255, 255, 0) : Marks a MAJOR settlement spot. This is identical to a red spot for now, but it will receive certain bonuses in later steps. Typically there should be zero or one in each dejure kingdom.
BLUE (0, 0, 255) : Marks a water node. A (sea) province will be created around it.
CYAN (0, 255, 255) : Marks a river node. A (major river / inner sea) province will be created around it.
GREEN (0, 255, 0) ; Marks a wasteland node. A regular land province will be created around it, but it will be ignored by most steps, and will not generate a ruler.
BLACK (0,0,0) : Completely optional a this stage. Will be marked as impassable terrain.
Just like for rivers, these colors need to be exact, and anything that doesn't fit is ignored.
Since the map terrain and rivers are already painted on the settlements.bmp, that makes it rather easy to determine where yoy think a settlement should grow. Typically alongside rivers, coastlines, and mountain passes. It takes a lot of trial and error, and a lot of rework to get it right and I doubt an automated tool would do much better than a human here.
Here is an example of WIP :
Once I'm done I can run "4 - Make Provinces Map.bat"
Near the end there might be some warning messages like "X pixels could not be assigned". This generally means you have forgotten to put some settlements on an island, or you have some weird geography that makes some bit of land unreachable by any of your settlements. So the program doesn't know which province to assign to these land pixels to. You can either go back in settlements.bmp and add some settlements, or edit provinces.bmp directly to attach them to a province yourself. This might be prefereable if you want a province to be made of several small islands, something the tools do not manage well currently.
Common mistakes include forgetting to add any water nodes, placing water nodes on land, or settlements in the sea.
At the end I get this provinces.bmp
Not too bad !
But it needs a few manual corrections.
First, the point where major rivers and seas merge almost always looks wrong. Usually the river "spills" into the sea, like here.
Secondly, the provinces in the south, near the desert look kind of wrong, because I didn't put any settlements in the middle of the desert. What I want to do here is put a wasteland province.
Making a wasteland and calling it peace
To create a wasteland province, you simply add a pixel in settlements.bmp, just like for a regular province, but with a
pure green color instead of red.
This can be done retroactively, just be sure your pixel is inside the province and that there isn't another.
Lastly, it could be a good idea to add impassable mountains and mare incognitum manually at this point, although it can be hard to know exactly where they would make the most sense. I find it is better to open the map in-game to take note of which province borders look like they should not be passable.
For now I will forget about impassable mountains and just add a wasteland to the south. I picked the color yellow, because, like, sand.
It looks like this :
Final Notes
You might notice that the MakeProvinces creates a provinces.bmp both in input and output folders. I made the tool make a copy in the input folder because I found myself overlaying it constantly when editting other files.
If you run it multiple times you might also notice two things :
- First it creates a backup of the previous file in the input directory. This is because with manual editting being nearly mandatory, it would be a shame if those changes were tragically lost to a misclick... (that absolutely did not happen to me).
- Secondly you'll notice that even though they are randomly generated, the provinces do not change color when the tool is re-run. This is rather important because it makes it easier to just add a settlement or 2, rerun the batch, and merge the provinces.bmp manually. If the colors were completely changed you would have to throw everything away from that point, which was how the old version of the tools worked.
Another thing to note is that after you are finished with rivers.bmp and settlements.bmp, you should probably run "1 - Make Terrain Maps.bat" again. This program actually uses info from those 2 files in a few cases.
- Rivers running through the desert will automatically create patches of grassland around them
- Rivers running through mountains will lower and flatten the terrain immediately beneath them, so it looks more natural and they are less likely to flow upwards
- Settlements in deserts will create patches of grass and palm trees around them, to make it look like there's an oasis of sorts at that place.
- Settlements in mountains will also lower and flatten the ground around them so the little houses look less distorted in-game.
Getting it into the game already
There are still many steps to go, but at this point we can skip them and witness the glory of our map running into the game.
Let's run "6 - Make Provinces Setup.bat"
It will generate a ton of new files. Just copy the whole content of the output folder into this empty mod :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yuce8oknw0doqqe/LNL TestMap mod.zip?dl=0
Launch the game with this mod active.
And it's aliiiive :
