Veloren - Big Community, Bigger World

Veloren is an open-source multiplayer action-adventure RPG voxel game that is written in Rust.

In terms of content and gameplay, it is inspired by games such as Dwarf Fortress, Cube World, and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

The Veloren community has been incredibly good with generating documentation for the project with a comprehensive "Owner's Manual" available with content for both for players and contributors alike.

It boasts an impressive number of stars on its GitLab repository and an even larger number of stars on the GitHub mirror .

Procedural Generation

How are mountains and rivers generated?

The simplified version is that each chunk (area of the map) slowly "rises" while water "flows" over the land and carves out paths. The result of this is that we see mountains growing and and rivers cutting their way through the map in a more realistic/natural looking form than you may see with other techniques.

Only after the baseline of mountains and rivers are formed are things like caves, structures, and towns fitted to the landscape in a way that makes more sense than more traditional random placement of such items you may observe in other games with procedurally generated maps.

If you're wanting to dive even deeper into the generation specifics, Veloren mountain and river generation uses techniques described in the scientific paper Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion (Guillaume Cordonnier, Jean Braun, Marie-Paule Cani, Bedrich Benes, Eric Galin, et al.)

Tags: Open Source