Fractal Terrains 3 - elevations, low-laying areas, and a few other questions

[Floyt]

Hi everyone,

since you guys seem knowledgeable about (among other things) Fractal Terrains, I'm hoping to get some insight here into how to get FT3 to do what I want

First off, great program - I could sit all day and just generate worldmap after worldmap... and working on a globe but being able to take images in whatever projection is simply invaluable!
However, since I'm after an as-realistic-as-possible map to inform a novel plot, there's a specific issue that I'd like to iron out.

Using an Earth altitude range and Earthlike climate params, on a Wilbur Multiridged base, I can't get any landmasses with large, low-laying areas. Altitude tends to rise quickly from sea-level, up into the 500-1000m range, and generally towards some central mountain range. If I get plains of any size, they are altiplanos - 1-2k in altitude, which restricts the range of climates there. Not a Bangladesh or Congo Basin in sight! I've tried to address this in various ways:

- global altitude lowering: eats a lot of what few low areas there are, and pops up random lakes everywhere; clearly a bit too brutal for the purpose

- had high hopes for the "Remap Altitudes" tool; but it does weird things. E.g., remapping altitudes of 0-8000m on an exponent 2 curve (basically the last example in the documentation of the feature) should result in keeping coastal areas flatter, then give a more rapid rise towards the summits, right? But what it seems to do is apply unexplained huge negative offsets - a spot with +500m elevation is suddenly a hole of -300m. I don't see how that can happen at all with the curve specified, as no negative remaps should be possible. What am I doing wrong here?

- the "Expand land in offset" tool appears to do exactly zip, even when run at huge values (1000). No expansion into the continental shelf nor flattening of inland areas is visible. Is that tool functional? [edited: alright, just figured out that it only works on selected areas, hence Select All is necessary for global use. - Doesn't seem to extrude into shelves though, so prob. not that useful here]

So, any tips about what to do here?

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A couple of smaller questions, if someone knows about this:

- is the "random amount" in the Word Settings/Rainfall a random addition to the base value only, or can it also act as a reduction? Even with a base of 100 and a random amount of 300, I have yet to have any deserts appear on any map (unless I artificially suck all the rain out of a specific area)
(oh, and a bug: the "Drier" icon lowers temperature, not rainfall)

- does the climate generation take coriolis, wind & ocean currents into account? Just wondering whether I should do a post-production pass to get rainshadow deserts etc., or whether the program SHOULD be able to find these and I'm just not setting up the parameters right

- is the river generation tool in any way connected with the "Incise flow" tool? I was hoping to have rivers come down gorges cut by Incise flow, but they seem to calculate their paths somewhat differently.

Thankee!