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Terra Remake

"I see Earth! It is so beautiful!" - Yuri Gagarin

The Earth, 3rd planet of the Sol system, is for now the sole habitable planet known to man.

Atmosphere : yes
Surface gravity : 1g
Recommended size : 120 km
Files size : 2048 x 2048

This is a recreation of Earth in Space Engineers. This planet was generated from real data to get geographic features as close from the real world, as it is possible ingame. As 70% of the surface of our planet is covered in water, and water mods have greatly improved over the last years, it has been designed with water mods in mind.

It is a remake of Terra and TerraAqua, the original mod can still be found here : https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=857927916



This planet is not a direct upgrade of the old Terra/TerraAqua planet. It is a full remake, its assets have been remade from the ground up with better tools than I had years ago, to fix some core limitations of the original.

=> Fully remade heightmap
The old planet had a bumpy surface, as its heightmap was encoded on 8-bits, meaning altitude relative to sea level had to be rounded up or down to the nearest hundred of metres. The new heightmap is encoded on 16-bits, allowing a much greater accuracy (better than metric) when it comes to altitude.

=> Ocean floor mapped
The heightmap now extends below sea level, all the way down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Shallow seas have a minimal depth of around 30 metres which should still fit most ship designs, but oceans can exceed a depth of 1 km, allowing deep submarine action but making sunk ships much harder to locate and recover.

=> Remade biome map : biomes now are closer to life
The old planet had hand-painted biomes. The new planet adapts a real biome map for improved biome placement on the planet.

=> New and remade major rivers
Although nothing but a strip of ice, major rivers are great natural landmarks. Rivers have been completely redrawn and are more numerous than on Terra



=> Advanced ore map
The current map for ore placement is a basic vanilla one. The planned ore map will place more strategic resources in regions where they are, or were, abundant, making the control these specific regions much more strategic in multiplayer.

=> Spiders in Australia
No worries mate, that's planned !



The planet can be created ingame like any other planet, so long that this mod is enabled. You need admin powers on the current save to perform this action, which you have by default if you created it.

1- when creating a new save, or editing an existing save, enable this planet
2- launch the game
3- press Shift + F10
4- select "Planets" on the top-right box
5- select TerraRemake on the list
6- set the size to 120 km with the bottom slider (recommended, default value is 19 km)
7- select "Spawn"
8- click where you want the planet spawned



This planet has been designed for water mods, otherwise the seas will be empty.

Currently Jakaria's is the best available. Link here : https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2200451495&searchtext=

To enable water on the planet, stand near it and type the following commands :
/wcreate
/wradius 1.03705

To make a ship float, you must use pressurised volumes as a buoy. Piercing this volume and allowing the air to escape, will make the ship lose buoyancy and eventually sink.



(massive thanks to Kill3rCat the Ironfist [D-2-506])

In Space Engineers, planets do not orbit a star. Instead, the "sun" rotates around the entire map at an infinite distance. By default, its axis or rotation isn't centered on the equator of planets, keeping some parts of the planet in a darker angle than they should normally be.

It is possible to correct that, by modifying the settings of the sun. You will need to directly modify your game save files for that.

1- find the save files at userdirectory/AppData/Roaming/SpaceEngineers/Saves/(number)/your_savefile
2- open Sandbox.sbc in a text editor
3- find the lines BaseSunDirection and SunDirectionNormalized (use Ctrl-F) and replace the values by :
<BaseSunDirection x="0" y="0" z="1" />
<SunDirectionNormalized x="0" y="0" z="1" />
4- open SANDBOX_0_0_0_.sbs
5- find the lines SunAzimuth and SunElevation and replace the values by :
<SunAzimuth>0</SunAzimuth>
<SunElevation>0</SunElevation>
6- DELETE SANDBOX_0_0_0_.sbsB5 (unreadable if you open it with a text editor) in the savefile directory.
7- load your saved game. You'll have a format update message, press ok. It will recompile the missing SANDBOX_0_0_0_.sbsB5 then proceed to load the saved game
8- enjoy TerraRemake with the sun in the right direction :D

Note : you do need to change that for every saved game using Terra. It affects every planet.



Q : why a full remake instead of updating the old planets ?
A : updating to a new heightmap would have broken most saves using it, putting most constructions underground. I didn't want the remake to take anything away from the old one.

Q : will you leave the old version available ?
A : yes ! Link here : https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=857927916

Q : how did you paint the geography ?
A : I didn't, doing it by hand would be madness. I took a high-resolution heightmap and biome map of the planet, then converted it from equirectangular to cubemap.

Q : why was the old version 8-bit ?
A : the program I used to convert the heightmap into a cubemap now outputs files in 16-bit as opposed to 8-bits only when I made the original Terra. Hence, no loss in precision this time.

Q : which programs did you use to make the planet ?
A : Gimp for most of the editing, and Bixorama 6.1 to convert the map into a cubemap

Q : how big were the maps you used ?
A : the heightmap was 21600 x 10800 pixels, compressed to 8192 x 4096 which is the target size for a 2048 x 2048 size. The biome map was smaller at 7200 x 3600 pixels, keeping a great accuracy.

Q : how deep are the seas ?
A : for a 120-km planet, the minimal depth is around 30m or 12 large blocks, which should be enough for most surface ships (the largest tankers in the world have a draught of 25m). That's for the seas at a continental plateau, oceans are much deeper, I measured a depth of 1800m at the Mariana Trench.

Q : are some man-made structures visible on the map ?
A : the Suez Canal and Panama Canal are dug to allow ship travel.

Q : are you serious about spiders in Australia ?
A : why not ? I still need to figure out if mob spawning can be restricted to select biomes.

Q : can I make and publish a custom version of the planet ?
A : yes ! If you publish it, please put the link of the original in the description.