How to edit area around tiles

[Chris20000]

Okay , thank you for instructions above I can give that a try, what if I wanted to create a small number of mountain islands outside the map but have the area mostly be water only, from what you mentioned below everything would be gone wouldnt it? I think one the problems with the big moon shaped island is when I zoom out of the island I see the larger moon shaped island and think why would people not settle on it, you know what I mean

 

[SkyRyu]

Yes, deleting has instructed would make it all water. Basically what you'd want to do is make a 4096x4096 resolution, grayscale, 16 bit image (.png or .tiff) for the Worldmap. The center 1024x1024 is the buildable area so you can ignore that part. This is more complicated has you'd have to know how heightmaps work and how to use a raster graphics editor (I use GIMP). =More info like this on the Wiki=

The idea is simple tho, darker gray means lower terrain and towards white means higher terrain. This is why I said it's a bit of trial and error to make things look right. The way I edit the heightmap manually means when I import it to the game its already smooth, but you'd need a decent monitor to tell the different shades of gray apart. A trick you could do is make the islands you want in the editor, then export the heightmap and simply position those images has a layer into your worldmap heightmap with your graphics editor of choice.

Also keep in mind that the outside terrain will not be has detailed, so its best to not over complicate the terrain out there, which is why I recommend that a novice simply makes an island in the middle of the sea. The crescent island is just something I think looks nice at eye level in the map, you shouldn't be able to see behind it ingame, I would make a more complicated looking thing, but it would look worse. I've tried many versions of my map that I have not published while making it trust me lol.