BetterContinents

🗺️ Better Continents

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> "The Allfather did not carve the Tenth Realm in a single stroke. With hammer and chisel, the jagged peaks were raised, deep fjords torn open, and ancient oceans poured into the abyss. Take up the chisel, Viking, and shape the continents to your will."

Better Continents is a total procedural and bitmap overhaul of Valheim's world generation. It gives world builders, server administrators, and cartographers complete control over terrain generation—allowing you to replace or augment vanilla landmasses with custom heightmaps, bespoke biome layouts, precision spawn placements, and intricate multi-layered noise.

Whether you want to import a real-world map of Earth, recreate Middle-earth, sculpt realistic mountain ranges, or carve an unforgiving archipelago for a hardcore survival campaign, Better Continents makes it possible.

What's new in 0.10.7

🏔️ Per-Biome Procedural Height Noise (Selective Mountain Jaggedness)

• The Problem: Previously, running Heightmap Override All = true meant every meter of terrain elevation was sampled strictly from static PNG pixels. At 4 m or 8 m per pixel, mountains lost all of Valheim's natural jaggedness—appearing as smooth mounds or clay pyramids unless heavy offline micro-gully synthesis was baked into massive 16k textures. Conversely, disabling Heightmap Override All slapped procedural octave noise indiscriminately across the entire world, corrupting town squares, harbors, and canals.
• The Solution: Better Continents now supports runtime procedural height noise gated strictly by biome:
• Lowlands, Meadows, Plains, Towns & Canals: Remain 100% faithful to the PNG heightmap (zero procedural noise).
• Mountain & Deep North Biomes: Automatically blend Valheim's multi-octave alpine fractal noise, couloirs/micro-gullies (10 m and 2.5 m frequencies), and slope tilt. Configured via Mountain Noise ([01 BetterContinents.Global], console bc g mn <scale>, default 1.0).
• Mistlands Biomes: Synthesize stepped terrace crags and sharp ridges, configured via Mistlands Noise ([01 BetterContinents.Global], console bc g msn <scale>, default 1.0).
• Altitude Attenuation: Smooth altitude fade guarantees coastal and low-lying elevations are completely untouched by procedural mountain jitter.

🚫 Location Exclusion Mask (no_spawns_mask.png / nospawns.png)

• Precision World Spawning: Allows map authors to designate protected regions (town centers, roads, player settlement zones, historical ruins) where random location candidate placement (burial chambers, sunken crypts, goblin camps, boss altars) is strictly prohibited.
• Non-Consuming Candidate Rejection: Unlike binary Skip Default Locations = true (which nukes all locations globally), the exclusion mask transpiles ZoneSystem.GenerateLocationsTimeSliced to return non-matching biome signals for excluded pixels. The candidate point fails without incrementing the location placed counter—allowing the game engine to cleanly retry and place the quota of dungeons elsewhere on eligible terrain.
• Explicit Pins Preserved: Manual pins loaded from locationmap.png remain completely unblocked.
• Usage: Drop no_spawns_mask.png (or nospawns.png) into your world directory, or configure Location Exclusion File under [06 BetterContinents.Maps]. Non-black pixels mark excluded areas.

📐 Detailed Bake Meshes (32-bit Float Positions & Normals)

• Full-Precision Proxy Geometry: Switched the default proxy merge geometry format (BakedProxyMerge) to uncompressed 32-bit float positions and normals (VertexLayout.Plain).
• Maximum Visual Sharpness: Delivers razor-sharp silhouette edges, pristine geometric planes, and smooth normal shading across dense baked towns and custom structures while retaining high-efficiency background GPU draw calls. (Optional compact half-precision format remains available via BC_SHADOW_PROXY_FORMAT=compact).