The good/bad thing of using Earth as a model is that the shortcomings of the simulation become pretty apparent. The biomes are all over the place: A huge Gobi Desert, a very green and lush Australia, an American Sahara… and that’s just terrain generation; Human migrations tend to go in very weird directions, In this case humans arrived to Australia almost right away by sea, skipping most of Asia and Europe…

Of course, this is not to say that these events couldn’t have happened in real life. Although they feel highly implausible. Also, the game can’t really simulate ice ages (as of yet), so there’s no way to simulate a land bridge migration from Asia to America, not to mention that humans seems to be extremely reticent to the idea of migrating through Siberia… Totally understandable, I would say.

Anyway, I’m not going to fuzz to much about it. It will take a lot of work to do justice to the real planet Earth, and that is also far beyond the scope of 0.3.2. Nevertheless, I will have to make some adjustments to the goals for the next version; I said before that I would not spend time working on an map editor for the game but my experiences with the importer and with the tools I used to create the heightmap make me think the game will actually benefit from having an in-game editor after all. So that’s what I’m going to work next. I haven’t finalized the details but I hope to be able to speak more about my plans for the editor next week.