Need some advice on biomes and rivers
This is my second world/continent map, and i can't seem to get the hang of proper biome creating.
I would really appreciate some advice on nudging my rivers and mountains around to make it more realistic. Thank you!
Hello, I'm still a novice, but I'll try to give some advice. Whenever I want to figure out biomes, I look at this post by waldronate. I find the image helpful in getting a general idea of where biomes go. As for rivers, there's a whole big thread about it here. If you want to get really in depth, there's also the Climate Cookbook. I hope you can find something useful in these links.
Thank you! I've done some research on tectonic plates and mountain formations, and i know the basic rules of rivers, they move downhill and come from springs or rain. (excluding magic ofc) but those links really helpOriginally Posted by sapphireLight
Hello, I'm still a novice, but I'll try to give some advice. Whenever I want to figure out biomes, I look at this post by waldronate. I find the image helpful in getting a general idea of where biomes go. As for rivers, there's a whole big thread about it here. If you want to get really in depth, there's also the Climate Cookbook. I hope you can find something useful in these links.
My questions would be mostly a matter of scale and projection.
How large is this map top to bottom? You show what appears to be icy conditions at the top and bottom, suggesting a map that stretches from pole to pole (roughly 10000 miles). That makes the central continent roughly 5000-7000 miles high and 9000-10000 miles wide: a huge continent, much larger than Pangaea. Air currents can only carry clouds so far, making the interior a desert drier than the Sahara. It would also a massive monsoon, that would cause enormous seasonal flooding along the tropical coasts. Not a fun place to live...
The projection also matters (assuming a globe). Stretching a sphere onto a plane distorts things; the kind of distortion varies based on the selected map projection. It's an important decision to make for a whole-world map.
One final thing is the rivers. Some of them split as they head downstream. Gravity-driven rivers never do that sort of thing except for the last few percent of their length and then only if there is a significant delta (yes, there are maybe seven cases in the world where a river does a split into two separate and divergent channel, but those cases are stable for only a few hundred years at most and rarely carry any significant amount of water).
As an aside, a river splits in its delta because the delta is effectively perfectly flat, which forces the river lose energy and to drop some of the sediment that it is carrying; this sediment begins to fill the river channel to the point where it can't contain all of the water and the water overflows the natural levees that form during floods. The old channel will usually silt up and disappear soon when that happens. It is this moving of channels back and forth that creates the delta in the first place and is also the force that keeps it flat because when a part of the delta sinks under its own weight, a new channels splits into that low area and begins to fill it with sediment.
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