How do I Climates/Rainfall/Temperature

[waldronate]

If you don't like the shapes in Fractal Terrains, you can edit them ( Tutorial for Cartographer’s Guild offers some suggestions ). FT has some severe limitations in its climate model, but it's still useful for what it does.

An important starting point to getting that level of detail for your climates is getting that level of detail in rainfall and temperature (to a first approximation, climate type is equal to a table with temperature on one axis and rainfall on another - http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/climateinfo.gif has the table that FT uses). Temperature is very approximately related to axial tilt and altitude, modified by the effects of ocean and air currents (it's those last two that FT is missing). Rainfall is very approximately related to water temperature, distance from water bodies, and air currents to carry the moisture (again, FT falls flat on the air currents stuff).

If you can get the basics of your terrain laid out, http://www.cartographersguild.com/re...y-climate.html offers some suggestions for getting the rest of it.

[Paramenides]

Awesome. Thank you so much for the resources. I'll give FT another shot (because it is really useful when I'm not being picky). It just looks like FT just needs to have a lot of tweaking done in order to get it to look alright.

[waldronate]

It just looks like FT just needs to have a lot of tweaking done in order to get it to look alright.

I've learned a lot over the last 13 years since FTv1 hit the shelves.