What's New
Three big leaps for the landscape of Novus Terminus: First Flags today: the terrain now flows naturally between biomes, the ocean looks and moves like a real body of water, and the grass system has been supercharged to cover the entire map at seven million blades.
No more cliff faces between biomes. Previously, grassland could slam straight into a mountainside with a near-vertical wall. Now there is a smooth progression: flat meadows roll into gentle foothills, which rise into a rocky alpine shoulder before the mountain walls begin. The map has also doubled in size to give everything room to breathe -- more space for your settlements, more coastline to explore, more forested valleys to expand into. Grass now respects the slope of the terrain, too: it grows on gentle hillsides but stops where the ground gets too steep, so you never see blades poking sideways out of a cliff.
The ocean is alive. Waves roll in with varied height and direction -- broad swells from the open sea layered with smaller cross-chop and ripples that make the surface feel organic rather than tiled. When sunlight passes through a wave crest, you can see a subtle turquoise glow from the inside. At the shoreline, white foam builds up where the water meets the land, and a rhythmic swash of surf advances and retreats across the beach. Look closely and you will notice that the sand itself changes: the strip closest to the water darkens and turns glossy as each wave washes over it, then slowly dries between swells. It is a small detail, but it makes the coast feel genuinely alive.
Seven million blades of grass. We rebuilt the grass system from the ground up with a new approach that renders bushels of blades rather than individual ones. The wind now flows consistently across the entire world -- the same breeze that pushes the ocean waves also sways the grasslands, which gives the landscape a wonderful sense of unity. Grass fades smoothly into the distance over about a hundred metres, so there is never a visible pop-in boundary. Forest areas get a darker shade of green to distinguish them from open meadow.
Behind the Scenes
The ocean uses a wave model called Gerstner waves -- the same maths behind many AAA ocean systems, but we kept things lean with five carefully tuned wave layers instead of a full simulation. To prevent the waves from looking repetitive, each layer gets a subtle random time offset that keeps the pattern from ever quite repeating. The wet sand effect reuses the same oscillation formula as the surf, so the darkening stays perfectly in sync with the approaching water. On the grass side, the big performance win came from a biome texture that tells the grass where it is allowed to grow. Blades that land on desert, water, or mountain tiles simply vanish before they are ever drawn, so we do not waste a single frame on invisible grass.
What's Next
Wildflowers are sprouting in the meadows -- expect poppies, buttercups, and more colour in the fields very soon.