Got Lakes (Various Worlds) Map Script 37.0

Version 29.0

New options for mountain clumps!

• Introducing Mountain Clumps (Full, Maze, Hollow, or Random): controls whether large clumps of mountains are full of mountains like the base game, carved into mountain mazes, or hollowed out completely! Carves mountain mazes by default. The effects of this option are more noticeable with higher mountain level and/or mountains set to Clustered Highlands.
• Introducing Thin Mountain Clump Edges: if enabled, uses thinner walls of mountains for Maze and Hollow mountain clumps.

Miscellaneous:

• The Snowball climate now allows all strategic resources to appear on tundra and snow. This allows horses, coal, and aluminum to appear in completely-frozen worlds.
• Updated menu items to show which option selections are closest to the base game.
• Improved responsiveness to Hill Level for most maps.
• Improved randomness of mountain passes, paths through ice, etc.

Spoiler New Mountain Clump Possibilities :

Full

Maze

Maze with thin edges

Hollow

Hollow with thin edges

Version 28.0

New options for land starts and water starts!

• Introducing Land Starts: controls how areas of land are assigned to major civs! You can assign all civs to the largest area (like Terra), divide up civs like normal, assign each civ to a separate area using areas that are most similar in size, or let the landmass decide what to do. And of course you can also randomize this option!
• Introducing Water Starts: controls how areas of water are assigned to major civs that start in water instead of land! Possible values are similar to those of the Land Start option. You can even choose to force all water civs to start on land!
• One example of what is now possible: choose Separate Areas for Land Starts with Sprinkles extras and a Pangea landmass, and all civs will start on tiny islands while the pangea is uninhabited! Note that you might want to exclude Kupe from this map for balance reasons.

Spoiler Land Starts on Continents + Sprinkles :

Largest Area

Standard

Separate Areas

Spoiler Water Starts on Seven Seas :

Largest Area

Standard

Separate Areas

Improvements to the Got Lakes start positioner!

• Added support for custom water starts! Now that Got Lakes fully-overrides water starts instead of using the base game's positioner, the chances of Kupe starting in water are much greater than they were before--even on maps that have no salty oceans! So go ahead and let everyone in the game play as the Maori!
• Added a possible 2nd attempt at placing civ starts, in case your choices of Land/Water starts happen to be too restrictive for the generated map. Largest area too small to fit all civs? Not enough areas for separate-area starts? Icy poles too close to the equator? No problem! Got Lakes will just make a 2nd attempt at placing civs. The 2nd attempt reverts civ placement to standard starts and relaxes constraints on how to place civs in order to maximize its chances of success.
• Fixed an elusive water start bug that sometimes removed a player from the game.
• Land starts now avoid plots that are within 4 tiles of another civ's start.
• Land starts now avoid plots that cannot host a city, such as passable wonders, oases, and geothermal fissures.
• Region assignment now de-prioritizes land areas that lack fresh water and water areas that lack deep oceans.
• Start positioner now prioritizes starts with rivers and coasts over starts that are near the edge of the civ's region.
• Improved handling of too-many civs assigned to an area.
• Improved handling of low-fertility terrain such as maps with all snow, tiny islands, etc.
• Added tie-breakers for comparing starting plots to avoid biasing starts towards the SW or NE corner of the map.
• Added a final scan of the entire map for eligible plots as a last resort to avoid a failure to place civs on the map.
• Got Lakes no longer attempts to modify terrain when desparately trying to place starts.
• Largest Area now ignores latitude constraints for globe maps (in case the largest area happens to be completely frozen).
• The Donut and Oval landmasses no longer attempt Largest Area land starts by default.

New options for controlling mountains, hills, and volcanoes!

• Removed World Age, which is now obsolete (see below)
• Introducing Mountain Level: controls the quantity of mountains only (not hills or volcanoes--see below!)
• Introducing Hill Level: controls the quantity of hills; default value is "Same as Mountain Level" so that you can still effectively control mountains and hills with the same option.
• Introducing Volcano Level: controls the quantity of volcanoes; default value is "Same as Mountain Level" so that you can still effectively control mountains and volcanoes with the same option. You can also set this to "Same as Hill Level" if you'd rather let hill level control the number of volcanoes.
• Removed Ageless Hills, which is obsolete. Instead, just set Hill Level to Standard and Mountain Level to whatever you want.

New checkbox for limiting coastal expansion!

• Introducing the No Coastal Expansion checkbox: if enabled, replaces all shallow water that is not strictly coastal with deep ocean. Also prevents extra islands from expanding the coast of the main landmass. Useful if you enjoy crossing oceans before meeting other civs; however this does not guarantee that you will be totally isolated, even on island maps.

Spoiler Large Islands with No Coastal Expansion :

Expanded options!

• The following options have been expanded to include new values such as Very Low and Very High: Mountain Level, Hill Level, Volcano Level, Sea Level, Lake Level, River Level, Temperature, Tundra Level, Rainfall, Climate Granularity, and Grass/Plains Mix. Enjoy!
• A few donut fillings have migrated from Low/High values to Very Low / Very High as a result of this expansion.

New behavior for setting all Landmass options to None!

• Previously, setting all Landmass family options to None would result in a randomly-chosen landmass, but now you will get no landmass at all! Instead you get a world filled with islands based on your choice of Extras--enjoy!

Spoiler "None" Landmass with Sprinkles :

Miscellaneous:

• Snowball and Ice Age climates no longer lower sea level. Most of those effects are now attainable by setting Sea Level to Very Low.
• Removed the Oval landmass + Globe world wrap + Tilted Axis sunlight + Cropped icy poles easter egg due to a potential shortage of land. However, you can still crop the oval if you have Oval + Globe + Ice Age or Snowball climate + Cropped.
• Fixed some bugs in Sea Level responsiveness, particularly for clusters, the Inverted Extras landmass, and tectonic extras.
• The Clusters and Inland Sea landmasses now always use a polar fractal (improves chances of landmass having a reasonable shape).
• Mini Donuts (both landmass and extras) now supports a 3:1 map aspect ratio.
• Fixed some UI tooltips that I forgot to update last time.
• For those of you who like to tinker with Lua code, I have added some new switches and tunable constants to GotLakes.lua for an even more advanced level of customization!

Version 27.1

Includes some minor tweaks to match the September 2019 Update of Civ VI.

Version 27.0

New options to replace the climate shuffle:

• Introducing 4 new options to replace the 13 climates with 120 possible combinations!
  • Climate: Snowball, Ice Age, Standard, Greenhouse, Sandstorm
  • Biome: Arborea, Prairie, Standard, Wetland
  • Sunlight: Standard, Tilted Axis, Two Suns
  • Icy Poles: Cropped, Standard
• Introducing Biodiversity, which controls which terrain/feature combos are allowed on the map; by default, this automatically adjusts itself from Standard to Very High based on selected climate.
• Introducing 6 new checkboxes to override each terrain/feature combo controlled by Biodiversity (in addition to No Grass Jungles and No Plains Marsh):
  • No Desert Forests
  • No Desert Jungles
  • No Desert Oases
  • No Snow Forests
  • No Snow Oases
  • No Tundra Forests

Spoiler Climate minimaps :

Spoiler Screenshots :

Landmass tweaks:

• Added a new Seven Seas landmass, which is based on the new Seven Seas map script from the June 2019 update.
• Added a Fresh Lakes Landmasses checkbox: if enabled, turns all saltwater oceans/seas for any Lakes family landmass (Inland Sea, Inverted Extras, etc) into clusters of fresh lakes!
• What was formerly the "Lakes" landmass is now obsolete since you can get the same thing with Inverted Extras + Fresh Lakes Landmasses.
• What was formerly the "Salt Lakes" landmass is now the "Lakes" landmass.

Mountain/Volcano tweaks:

• Removed non-volcanic mountains from "continent boundaries" because Got Lakes already has enough mountains with its mountain patterns.
• Volcanoes no longer spawn on unreachable plots.

New donut fillings!

• snow: region + snowball + standard sunlight
• desert: region + sandstorm + standard sunlight (no longer region + tilted axis)
• volcanoes: tectonic extras
• volcanic soil: very high biodiversity + [tectonic extras OR tectonic-and-chains extras OR everything extras]

Miscellaneous:

• Disabled merging of river systems to prevent rivers from becoming too large/complex--this prevents the game from crashing on start, yet still allows a decent number of river plots and interesting river systems on the map.
• Fixed a bug that was causing maps with Kupe to fail on start.
• Fixed a bug that was causing maps with Kupe to start with fewer than expected players.
  
• Fixed a bug that was causing the Start Position option to interpret "Legendary" as Random.
• Fixed the ordering of map options so that Start Position and Resources come first.
• The Pangea landmass no longer attempts to shift land to the north or south edge of the map.

Version 26.3

Fixed map initialization to avoid using native random numbers for any game that starts with two or more human players. This ensures that all players in a multiplayer game see the same map.

Note that in order to make this fix, I had to apply the following changes:

• MP maps can no longer choose Random for the World Wrap option.
• MP maps can no longer adjust map size based on climate selection (no height reduction for Ice Age Cropped, for example). Instead of reducing height, Got Lakes will generate as if the poles extended beyond the original height.

Version 26.2

Adds support for the Civ VI Antarctic Late Summer Update.

Also adds compatibility with coastal flooding mods such as Nere's Inland Flooding and Climate Change. See what happens when a Lakes map becomes flooded!

Version 26.1

Custom map sizes such as the ones from YnAMP, Larger Worlds, and PerfectWorld now respect regional world wrap as well as climate-based grid size adjustments.

Version 26.0

Added a new Connected Seas checkbox: if enabled, connects all saltwater seas into a single network of oceans. Recommended as a balance fix for multiplayer games that have coastal civs on land-heavy maps.

Spoiler Connected Seas: Off vs On :

Spoiler Screenshot of GS map with Connected Seas :

Miscellaneous:

• Capped mountain fractal granularity at 5 regardless of map size (fixes bad fractal results for larger-than-huge maps).
• Fixed some edge-cases in random path generation (mountain passes, paths through ice, connected seas, etc).
• Volcano placement now avoids map edges.
• Civ starts: reduced fertility score of tiles that are adjacent to multiple volcanoes.
• Reverted min/max GS floodplains cluster sizes to match the base game.

Version 25.2
Problem: Got Lakes likes to create mountain passes, but for some reason the Terrain Builder doesn't completely remove volcanoes from the system, resulting in phantom volcanoes on flat or hilly terrain.

Fix: Got Lakes now prefers removing regular mountains over volcanoes when creating mountain passes. This results in mountain passes that go around volcanoes instead of through them. So now this issue won't happen unless you have a wall of volcanoes cutting-off a part of the map.

Version 25.1
Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused forests, jungles, etc. to replace floodplains (caused a shortage of floodplains, and possible corruption of volcanoes)
• Volcanoes now respect the No Coastal Mountains option.

Tweaks:

• Added volcanoes, fissures, etc. to major-civ start plot calculations.
• Doubled the frequency of volcanoes.
• Doubled the frequency of geothermal fissures.
• Reduced minimum size of floodplains group from 4 tiles to 2 (allows floodplains to fit into smaller areas); Wetlands climate reduces this to 1, while Sandstorm reverts this back to 4.

Version 25.0
Adds support for Civ VI Gathering Storm!
Also continues to support Vanilla and Rise & Fall.

Version 24.0

Changes to Landmasses:

• Removed Extras (obsolete / produced many undesirable maps)
• Removed Tiny Islands (islands too small for early exploration / districts)
• Added Clusters (formerly Extras + Clusters)
• Added Mini Donuts (formerly Extras + Mini Donuts)
• Added Noodles: a few large ring-shaped fractal continents, and possibly some dangling strands here and there
• Added Snake (formerly Extras + Tectonic + Fractal Ranges)
• Donut: high sea level now turns land into shallow water
• Maze: improved sea level responsiveness
• Inverted Extras: fixed a river-shortage bug

Improved mountains and tectonic extras:

• Increased mountains and hills for most mountain patterns
• Improved distribution of hills
• Uncanny Valleys: improved responsiveness to world age
• Improved consistency of number of hills/mountains generated for each mountain pattern. Note that Winding Canyons and Everything still produce more mountains and hills than other patterns.
• Increased size of tectonic islands
• Fixed a sea level responsiveness bug with tectonic islands

New Extra: Sprinkles - covers the world with tiny fractals (formerly the Tiny Islands landmass)

New Option: Tundra Level: adjusts the amount of tundra on the map (a setting of Low is equivalent to the amount of tundra produced by the previous version of Got Lakes).

Spoiler Tundra Level :

Improved major-civ starts:

• Replaced the naive "split the world into one rectangle per civ" algorithm with "divide the biggest/best continents between civs" for island maps and maps with cropped climates. No more getting screwed-over by starting in/near a large ocean!
• Added logic to prevent assigning a civ to a region of the world that has no valid starting spots.
• Inland tiles next to coasts are no longer ignored for certain maps.
• Added logic to avoid starts on snow or featureless desert
• Added logic to avoid starts that have no fresh water (river or unfrozen lake).
• Simplified fertility scoring to make other aspects of civ-start positioning more effective.
• Starts near wonders are no longer avoided explicitly, but just have a lower fertility score. This makes other aspects of civ-start positioning more effective.
• Improved starts for the Everything mountain pattern

Miscellaneous:

• Increased shallow water for tectonic extras
• Added a UI options on/off switch to GotLakes.lua. You can use this to avoid having to click though the new-game menu. Instead just save your changes to GotLakes.lua and ignore the Advanced Options--or if you're already in a game, then just click Restart!
• Fixed a cliff-removal bug that randomly caused Got Lakes to not notice that some of the map was unreachable.
• Fixed an impassable-tile-removal bug that prevented Got Lakes from forming a pass along the edge of the map for certain maps.
• Fixed an off-by-one index bug in fractal land generation.

Spoiler Screenshots :

Version 23.1
Fixed an ice-removal bug that was causing Got Lakes to replace ice with impassable water tiles, resulting in unreachable sections of the map.

Also, Got Lakes now uses major/minor version numbers (major for new/updated features, minor for bug fixes and compatibility updates). Not sure why I didn't start doing this earlier...

Version 23
Improves climates and more!

Improved Climates:

• Got Lakes now uses interpolated climate fractals to produce gradual latitude transitions--as opposed to the base game's flat latitude sandwich with a hint of variation fractal. This allows the poles and equator to "creep into" the temperate band in ways that might not be obvious until you've explored a good chunk of the map. Note that tundra and snow might still be mostly straight for temperate and warm maps.
• Ice Age Full and Tilted Axis Full now have partially-thawed snowy regions, thanks to the above-mentioned gradual latitude transitions. Are you brave enough to settle on the dark side of a tilted axis?
• Rebalanced all climates to use a roughly-even mix of plains and grassland for temperate terrain.
• Added a slight bias towards grassland (instead of plains) for hills, and a slight bias towards plains (instead of grassland) for flat land.
• Added the possibility of marsh on plains.
• Normalized the granularity of terrain/feature factals for all climates.

New options:

• Climate Granularity: controls the granularity of all climate fractals (deserts, grass/plains, tundra/snow, tilted poles, jungles, forests, marsh, and ice).
• Grass/Plains Mix: controls the balance of grass versus plains.
• No Grass Jungles: if enabled, replaces all grass under jungles with plains
• No Plains Marsh: if enabled, replaces all plains under marsh with grass

Improved Major Civ Starts:

• Fixed a bug that caused civ-start failure for maps with more than 22 players
• Added awareness of reefs when choosing starts for R&F maps.
• No more forced coastal starts for any maps.
• Added a bias towards starting with fresh water access and a larger bias towards starting on rivers.
• Various fixes and tweaks to improve starts for all maps

Miscellaneous:

• Increased the size of islands/lakes for the Clusters extra; size now scales with map size.
• Improved scalability of mini-donuts with map size (increased size of mini-donuts for larger maps).
• Fixed a bug that was causing river patterns to flow in unintended ways, resulting in river patterns looking too similar.
• Added method overrides to minimize interference from other mods.

Spoiler Climate Granularity :

Spoiler Grass/Plains Mix :

Spoiler Improved Climates Example: Ice Age Full :

Old (v21)

New (v23)

Spoiler Improved Climates Example: Tilted Axis Full :

Old (v17)

New (v23)

Version 22
Now Supports Custom Map Sizes!

• Tested against Yet (not) Another Maps Pack and Larger Map Sizes.
• Custom map sizes will always wrap east-west, however you can still toggle latitude bands with the World Wrap option.
• "Cropped" climates with World Wrap = Globe will treat custom map sizes as if they were already cropped. In other words, climate has no effect on the height of custom-size maps.
• For larger-than-huge map sizes, I recommend using a system that has at least 4 GB of video memory. Please allow a few minutes for Got Lakes to generate such maps.

Introducing Everything Rivers and Everything Mountains:

• Everything Rivers: randomly chooses either Simple, Detailed, Branchy, or Snaky for each river that it creates!
• Everything Mountains: randomly combines all six of other mountain patterns into a patchwork of tectonic chaos!

Improved Simple Rivers:

• Simple rivers no longer flow into lakes unless the landmass is Lakes.
• Simple rivers now only have one mouth per river for all landmasses except Inland Sea.
• Simple rivers now only have one source per river for the Inland Sea landmass.

New Fillings for the Donut Landmass:

• Fresh Lakes: set Lake Level = High
• Shallow Water: set Lake level = Low
• Ice: set World Wrap = Region and play a Cold climate

Miscellaneous:

• Fixed some mountain fractal logic that was using the wrong RNG
• Fixed an outdated log message for Truly Abundant Resources
• Renamed landmass and climate options for clarity
• This mod is now enabled by default.
• Updated and improved menu descriptions for various options.

Version 21
Introducing River Patterns!

• Added a Rivers option with four distinct river patterns: Simple, Detailed, Branchy, and Snaky.
• Added a River Level option to govern rivers. Also governs oases, but only to balance out floodplains. This is Standard by default, which is significantly more rivers than the base game.
• Various fixes and enhancements to allow for "smarter" rivers with more intricate flows.

Improved lakes:

• Added a Lake Level option to govern lakes. This is Standard by default.
• The Rainfall option no longer controls lakes.
• Rebalanced lake levels to make low, standard, and high lake levels a bit more distinguishable from each other.

Miscellaneous:

• Added a No Coastal Ice checkbox (off by default). When enabled, Got Lakes will remove any ice that is adjacent to land.
• Added a No Reefs checkbox (off by default). Enabling this may improve in-game stability; I recommend this for your next game if you've ever encountered a CTD while exploring a Rise and Fall map.
• Reduced reefs for Rise & Fall maps with Region world-wrap (for improved game stability).
• Added reef awareness to the start-plot system.
• Extra islands will no longer touch the "main" islands from Archipelago, Island Plates, Large Islands, or Tiny Islands landmasses.
• Reduced polar ice caps for temperate climates to match base-game maps.
• Adjusted latitude bands for the Sandstorm climate to match other warm climates, and to allow deserts closer to the equator.
• Fixed a bug that prevented natural wonders from checking for features such as ice or forest.
• Fixed a bug that allowed land tiles to become surrounded by mountains and ice.

Spoiler River Patterns :

Simple (updated in v22)

Detailed

Branchy

Snaky

Everything (added in v22)

Spoiler Misc Screenshots :

Version 20: a minor update that supports both the Rise and Fall expansion and Vanilla.

Version 19: a minor update to add support for the Rise & Fall expansion's base-game patch.

Version 18
Resource Mod Compatibility:

• Added compatibility with resource mods! Tested against Truly Abundant Resources, Resourceful, and Sukritact's Resources. Note: Got Lakes still has overrides for ResourceGenerator:__ValidLuxuryPlots() and ResourceGenerator:__ScoreLuxuryPlots().
• Added support for setting the Resources option to Plentiful or Truly Abundant! Requires the Truly Abundant Resources mod.
  
• Added a new option called Scrambled Land Luxuries to toggle Got Lakes' original rebalancing of of land luxuries. This option is OFF by default.

Improved Mountains:

• Rebalanced tectonic extras: replaced some mountains with flat/hilly land.
  
• Improved world age support for tectonic extras.
  
• Added an Ageless Hills option that forces hills to be the standard world age.
  
• Added a Remove Coastal Mountains option.
  
• Scattered Crags: redesigned for better responsiveness to World Age
  
• Inverted Extras: new lake formations for Scattered Crags and Clustered Highlands.
  
• Improved randomness for all types of mountain ranges.

Miscellaneous:

• Rebalanced the distribution of lakes for the Lakes landmass when Extras = None.
  
• Improved edge-case handling for the start positioner.

Spoiler Screenshot of Got Lakes + Resource Mods :

Version 18

Version 21