Earendel, Genhis

Hello,
We've had a lot of requests to talk about map generation. It's difficult to talk about map generation without first explaining noise expressions. From time to time we need to talk about noise expressions anyway because they are a critical part of the game, but I don't think we've ever done a good job of explaining what they actually are at a high level. We will a closer look at planet mapgen again in the future, but for now this will introduce the basic concepts and act as a primer for later.

What are noise expressions?Earendel

The "expression" part

When making a game world in Factorio you need to decide what gets placed where. All you really have to work with is the X and Y position. The terrain generator can't know anything about what is already placed. Somehow you need some code that converts X and Y into the type of tile to place, and which tree...