Notes from the workshop
Devlog
Workshop notes from this season: what was built, what failed in interesting ways, what got decided after a long argument.
These are not press releases. They assume a reader who wants to know how the thing actually works under the page. If that is not you, the about page is the quieter door in.
·Phase 4.9 / 4.10 / 4.11·2 min read
A world that looks alive: climate, hydrology, biomes
Three sub-phases shipped together that take Iron Psalm from "angular tectonic plates with sharp boundaries" to a world that has weather, water, and biomes a deer could actually traverse.
- worldgen
- climate
- hydrology
- biomes
·Foundations·1 min read
Building the world before the game
Why Iron Psalm grows ten million years of geology, climate, and hydrology once at deployment, caches the genesis snapshot, and only then starts a single tick. The unfashionable choice and the reasons for it.
- design
- worldgen
- deep-time
·Phase 4.24·1 min read
Letting the world decide how much ore
Removing the last target-shaped knobs from worldgen. The world places as much ore and as many volcanic vents as its geology supports, up to a global ceiling; never more, sometimes less.
- worldgen
- geology
- ore