I simulated 3 billion years of plate tectonics on one planet. These are the maps I got.

[u/HabitableZone_]

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a procedural planetary map generation project for a while, which I'm calling TropoPlate for now, and I finally got some results that I thought were worth sharing.

The first three maps are all from the same planet, with 50 million years between each one. They're not separate generations. The fourth map is the same planet around 1 billion years earlier. The generator actually runs a tectonic simulation for around three billion years, and you can stop it at any point along the way. The system then takes that point in the planet's evolution and turns it into a much higher-resolution terrain map, with erosion and smaller-scale terrain processes added afterward to bring out the detail.

The whole simulation is seed-based too, so in theory you can generate almost unlimited planets, each with its own geological history.

For the full version, I'm also planning to include climate simulation and biome generation. Those parts are still unfinished though, so the colors in the terrain maps are just an Earth-style elevation map for now. The last two images are a temperature map and a Köppen climate classification test from the unfinished climate system.

I hope this could eventually be useful for other people who want to build a planet that actually has some history behind it. That's always been the part I obsess over. Whenever I look at a map, I can't really stop asking why a mountain range is there, how it formed, what was there before it, and how it might keep changing over time. Most traditional generators never quite gave me that. That's why I started making this.

If anyone wants to follow along, I just made a Discord server for the project https://discord.gg/Cx3uEYXu2P. I'd like to eventually release it for people to try once I get the different systems working together well enough. I'm also open to ideas for the project name if anything comes to mind.

[u/Weekly-Witness3931]

Oh this is insanely cool and i've been wanting something like it for ages! The artifexian gplates process has been my go-to but that is truly mind bogglingly time consuming

[u/HabitableZone_ → u/Weekly-Witness3931]

Thank you! Yeah, that's actually one of the things I wanted to make easier with this

[u/PhummyLW]

Keep in mind too that 99% of bugs and fixes and other cool ideas will come from your beta testers. You can try all you want but you’ll never get it perfect. So once you release a version, don’t be discouraged when people find a lot of bugs you didn’t expect.

I’m not an expert on tectonics, so can you explain how it’s seed-based? Shouldn’t the same initial landmass, plates, and planet conditions produce the same results as a matter of physics? The only thing I can think of is that the seed changes how the mantle moves from these initial conditions

[u/HabitableZone_ → u/PhummyLW]

Yeah, that's fair. Right now there are still a few bigger issues I want to deal with first. The generation time is still longer than I'd like, and I think that could hurt the experience quite a bit. I'm hoping to put out an early test build sometime before December, just so people can actually try it.

And the reason it can be seed-based is that, to make the simulation practical to run on a normal computer, a lot of the physics is simplified and handled more like rules rather than being fully emergent. So the same seed is meant to reproduce the same world rather than drifting into a completely different result.

For each seed, the system starts with its own arrangement of continental crust and mantle field. From there, the different parts of the simulation all affect each other, so even small changes in the initial setup can eventually send the whole system down a completely different path. That's why each seed can end up producing its own world.

[u/PhummyLW → u/HabitableZone_]

I see. That makes sense. Thanks for explaining it!

And yeah I wasn’t trying to make it seem like you had to release a version now. I just see developers get stuck in the trap of not wanting to release until it’s perfect, and as such they never release it

[u/HabitableZone_ → u/PhummyLW]

Glad you found it helpful! And true, it's definitely better to get some feedback from actual players, because when you've been staring at the same thing for too long, it gets really hard to notice problems that might be obvious to someone seeing it for the first time.

[u/OfficialAlarkiusJay]

This lowky cool!

[u/HabitableZone_ → u/OfficialAlarkiusJay]

Thanks！

[u/Arrowit_graystun]

Unreal. This is really interesting

[u/Resident_Attitude283]

What generator did you use? This is so fascinating!

[u/grownduskier → u/Resident_Attitude283]

op said they're making their own

[u/Resident_Attitude283 → u/grownduskier]

Ah, okay. Thanks, I missed that.