WIP - World Creation (Mat'am)

[mwagner]

Thanks Pixie! I'm gonna look into those (I was actually just about to start googling plate tectonic simulation software.)

In the mean time I went old school and drew all over one of my daughter's toy balls (she won't miss it). It helped me wrap my mind around the movements to see them in 3D, everything gets weird around the 60 degree mark when it translates to paper.



(Assuming I drew everything correctly) I noticed that things moving parallel and perpendicular to the lines of latitude stay pretty clean. It's when the movement is at an angle that it gets funky. So here's a what I'm looking at in regards to the movement on the boundaries.



So based off those movements I broke my boundaries into Converging (blue), Diverging (Green), Lateral (Yellow), and I am not really sure (Pink). It's the I'm not sure category that I obviously have the most questions about.



Since, Pixie has given a lot of new reading to look at I'll let you guys throw some more advice at me while I peruse this stuff. And Seriously, thanks a lot guys!

[mwagner]

Alright, I've been doing a lot of reading and looking at plate maps and plate vectors (I've even played around with GPlates but that thing is more complicated than an evening or two can clear up) and it looks like for the 'weird' boundaries on my map speed is going to be important. So I arbitrarily assigned speed to my plates. Plates 2, 4, 7, 9, and 12 are my 'slow' plates, plates 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 11 are faster and plate 1 is the fastest (like australia). So this should do some interesting things to the boundaries. Plate 7 is now diverging everywhere, except its lateral movement against 12 (its not moving fast enough to keep up with plate 6). Plates 2 and 5 are now diverging as are plates 9 and 10 for the same reasons. Plate 4 is now diverging along its entire boundary with 1 and 3. and plates 6 and 8 are now 'keeping up with' plate 3 so there's no significant affect on that boundary. The small boundary between 4 and 2 is still confusing to me but its small and under water so I'm not super worried about it at the moment.

Giving me this:



Which led to this:

[jshoer]

I am going to have to follow your project, since I've considered similar things occasionally. I did a pseudo-simulation world generation once on an alien planet without plate tectonics, but I haven't yet done plates.

Here's an idea to put in your back pocket: an easy way for you to kill the north-south symmetry without doing a whole lot of re-work to your existing plates is to redefine where your poles are while you're in a spherical projection and then re-project back to your preferred rectangular projection.

[mwagner]

So I think I'm pretty happy with my plates and the land forms on it. (unless anyone still sees any glaring errors) so I've gone ahead and thrown some elevation on it in preparation for biomes. I think it looks pretty good.


I've also sketched in currents (totally guessing on them based on a couple of wikipedia articles),....


and the global winds to see my "wet" and "dry" regions.


and as far as the north/south thing I think I like that the world is south 'heavy' it kinda makes it different from earth, since we're north 'heavy'

[mwagner]

Since a couple people have said they plan on following this to see how it goes, these are the threads I'm looking at for biome and climate information.

Facubaci's Climates and Biomes WIP
Azelor's The Köppen–Geiger climate classification
Geoff's Climate Cookbook
Pixie's Climates, applying Geoff's Cookbook Tutorial
Groovey's WIP Thread
mbartelsm's Biome placement in a fantasy world

[mwagner]

After following Alezor's climate tutorial I've changed my global currents, but something about it seems off to me. Would love to have some feedback. I think that I don't have good transitions from hot to cold.

[mwagner]

redid the elevations to add more levels in preparation for the biomes.

[Charerg]

Well, here's my take on the currents:



Colours:
Red=Warm
Green=Neutral
Blue=Cold

It's largely the same as you version, but there are a few places where I did things a bit differently. For example, in the Southern hemisphere, I think in the westernmost Arctic-Equatorial "channel" the water flows from the Arctic. The orientation of the channel suggests this, and also there must be at least one "cold channel", because water does not pile up (in your version all the channels flow from the equator towards the arctic).

[mwagner]

Thanks Charerg! That helps.
So I'm currently following Azelor's climate guide.
I've gotten a little lazy and have only done one map, mainly because a) I'm a little lazy this week, b) I am really only looking for generalities for overall climate (cold/warm/warmer/hot, wet/wetter/dry) and not specifics so I figure this should still get me what I want. If that sounds like a bad idea let me know and I'll get over my lazy streak and go back and do two seasons.... (i might still do that anyways)

Here are my pressure systems:


My winds:


Temperature:


And my Wet/Dry Regions:

[mwagner]

Re-did the pressure and winds maps so I have one for the beginning and middle of the year.

January


July