Hi developers,

We’re feeling aquatically awesome enough today to release some water-related updates. We’ve also fixed the bugs reported in the last terrain release thread (thanks for reporting!) and will soon move the new terrain features out of Beta. For now, everyone can enable these new features from the File → Beta Features menu.

Sea Level

It has always been challenging to create level water across an entire map, especially for maps containing islands or archipelagos. No longer! Using the new Sea Level tool, you can create a consistent water level across any area you’d like. If you’ve accidentally flooded your map or want to work on some sub-surface terrain, we’ve also provided the ability to evaporate all the water in a selected volume. You are Poseidon - command the sea!

Layer Cake

The Heightmap/Colormap Importer creates terrain in a thin sheet. This is a good representation of the information present in the heightmap but has some unfortunate side effects (players can swim through water and fall off the world). We’ve now implemented a planned upgrade, allowing imports to be layered. Layered imports can be used to add depth to oceans and then (by switching or removing the colormap) adding a consistent floor to the map. We’ve also added a color mapping for Air (255,255,255) so you can create sub-surface features like caves.

Bigger and Better Brushes

By popular demand, we’ve doubled the maximum size of brushes. All brushes now have a max dimension of 64 voxels. BE WARNED - using a 64 voxel brush with iterative actions (Grow, Erode, Smooth) will be very slow.

We’ve also made the brushes more flexible, allowing diameter to be set independently of height (on the Cube and Cylinder brush) and allowing you to choose a brush pivot point (i.e. how the brush arranges itself around the cursor). These both add to the precision of editing terrain features.

One other small but convenient item… we’ve restored the hotkey for material selection. Pressing ‘Alt’ and clicking acts like an eyedropper, selecting the material you’re hovering over in the UI.

None of this would have been possible without the incredible work of @24RightAngles, @ArmyOfCorgis, @wengawenga, and @St4rst0n3!

Please give us your feedback and feature requests for the future of Terrain below!