Using the previously generated maps I’ve tried to outline some biomes:

The north pole would be near the top of this map, and the equator would be near the bottom. Cold biomes such as tundras and taigas dominate the north, foresty temperate biomes occupy the center, and hot biomes are scattered across the south. Among the hot biomes most are dry such as deserts and savannas, and a few hold more moisture such as the subtropical forest and the rain forest.

There’s also some sense of dropping temperatures as elevation increases which allows instances of taiga (purple) to appear on temperate or southern mountain tops. Tuning this calculation allowed for snow covered mountains to appear fairly far south (well, technically they were mountains with a “polar desert” at their tops, but you get the point).

Pretending that biomes are a combination of elevation + rainfall + temperature is a huge oversimplification, but the resulting biome map is overly complex. I don’t think I’ll need to consider [m]any more variables to make interesting terrain. In fact, I need to trim down the list of biomes. I got far too excited reading about biomes on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome. I had barely heard of any of these biomes until today.

Currently displayed:

Polar desert - white

Tundra - pink

Taiga - purple

Mountain forest - dark green

Broadleaf forest - bright green

Temperate steppe –the remaining greens are hard to tell apart, so i’ll skip them

Grassland savanna

Tree savanna

Subtropical forest

Rainforest

Arid desert - orange red

Xeric desert/shrubland - orange

Semiarid desert - yellow

Cold ocean - dark blue

Temperate ocean - blue

Tropical ocean - cyan

Who will make the cut? I’m not sure. At a minimum I’d like:

a few types of forest: pine, broadleaf, something tropical

desert or wasteland of some kind - perhaps interchangeably used as sandy beach in tropical areas

a very cold biome

some grassy plains

salt water and fresh water (maybe)

Next up: flora! and a new visualizer for the world generator that can show forests