Tuesday, June 24, 2025

How to worldbuild habitable-Venus

If you're worldbuilding science-fiction, you start with a height map. If your world has a hydrocycle, you then set the ocean.

Said ocean is water, in habitable worlds. Your frigid moons - think Titan - take methane and other hydrocarbons; hints exist that some exoplanets maintain permanent lava seas. I've been pondering carbon-dioxide for water-poor planets but that takes some legerdemain, so we'll ignore that.

Anyway, here's Seed of Worlds in 2021. He started with a random heightmap, from Torben since (summer 2024) updated. This looks like classical heightmaps, without tectonics - think, Starflight (or Venus). Also there's a "biome" option.

SeedOfWorlds didn't like the "biome" so saved the Mercator Greyscale of his map, to feed into a climate generator. That would be Agatha Mallett's SpaceCalc. She is aware that this assumes no axial tilt nor eccentricity nor regular occultations but again, Venus also has none-of-the-above. More-serious might be effects of surface gravity, air pressure, and air composition. But if your world isn't 1/5 oxygen, 4/5 inerts, and 0% CO2 at 1 bar sealevel then it may as well be Venus, so see above. What you do is start here, then say "this is springtime".

The above will work with terraformed planets, which got their oceans from the H'riak and/or sentient colonists - like Paul Birch, over Venus. If you want a world which got its oceans the natural way, your heightmap needs tectonics. You might consider drawing these lines on your generated map - maybe you got lucky and some mountain-ranges turned out long and thin. Otherwise: ProcGenesis; or, Kenny Pirman's World-Synth.

Thomas ten Cate tried some worldbuilding but he seems to be redesigning around a cylinder, for code reasons. Shh nobody tell him about ballistics.

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