Fantasy Planet Painter 2.0 is here! This is our biggest update so far: a completely rebuilt application, a new physical terrain system, richer rendering, layered painting, fantasy world layers generation, and a much more capable World to Beyond integration.
The Basics: From a Sketch to a World
In our earlier introduction to 2.0, we shared a first look at where Fantasy Planet Painter was heading. Now we would like to take a closer look at what you can create with this release.
Fantasy Planet Painter started with a simple approach to world-map creation: paint the broad shape of a world on a cell grid, and a procedural algorithm generates the details. A creator focuses on where continents, oceans, and mountains belong without having to draw every terrain detail.
That idea remains at the heart of 2.0. What has changed is how much more you can do around it. Heights can now have a physical meaning. Terrain can be built in layers. A painted planet can become an atlas of countries, cultures, settlements, and roads. And jump into very specific region of a world with additional details. After you are done experimenting with the shape, you can export the map and interactively play in Beyond All Reason.
A New Physical Planet
The new Physical World generator works with elevations measured in meters, and provides broader control of flexible height ranges, with 12 levels by default. This gives you finer control over the relationship between your painted terrain, the generated detail, and the sea.
- Continuous elevations: paint specific heights, from deep ocean floors to mountain peaks, with twelve customizable paint bands to keep everyday painting approachable.
- Independent sea level: explore how changing the water level reshapes your coastlines without repainting the whole planet.
- Planet size and relief: adjust the planet radius and the strength of its terrain, with procedural detail that takes physical scale into account.
- Seed control: keep a result you like or try a different realization of the same broad geography.
- Painted terrain alone: turn off the added procedural detail when you want to see the heightfield you have authored more directly.
- Terrain operations: set, add, multiply, reshape with a power curve, smooth, normalize, terrace, or invert elevations. Operations can target land, water, or the whole canvas, and work with selections; coast preservation is available where appropriate.
There are also (experimental) fourteen editable preset terrain recipes, including Volcano and Fractious, for exploring different starting shapes. Recipes combine a seed and density with editable generation instructions, can be previewed before applying them, and can be retained with a terrain layer. They are useful both as starting points and as material to paint over.
More Ways to Create Your World
A world can feel very different as an atlas, a globe, or a view looking across its surface. 2.0 expands the rendering tools so you can explore those differences without rebuilding your geography.
- Physical terrain colouring: elevation, slope, and climate views, alongside the familiar classic palettes. Latitude can influence the appearance of the land and polar regions.
- Terrain lighting: cast shadows, sky occlusion, adjustable sun direction and height, and shading exaggeration to bring out the shape of the landscape.
- A rendered 3D view: look toward the terrain from different distances and angles, with atmosphere, ocean, and volumetric clouds. Adjust cloud coverage and height to change the mood of a scene.
- Geographic guides: latitude and longitude grids, plus a kilometre scale tied to the size of your planet.
- Live previews: see updates while painting, with background rendering, progress feedback, and cancellation for longer renders.
- A clearer connection between canvas and preview: the viewport outline helps you keep track of the area you are looking at when working across projections.
The eleven map projections are the same Equirectangular, Mercator, Orthographic, Gall–Peters, Mollweide, Interrupted sinusoidal, Stereographic, Gnomonic, Icosahedral, Equal-area azimuthal, and Conical. Use them to compare the same world from different perspectives, or choose the one that suits your finished map.
Painting, Layers, and More Space to Experiment
The painting workspace has been rebuilt around a more flexible canvas and terrain layers, allowing a non-destructive workflow. This allows you to manage different features and separate terrain changes from exiting shapes, such as trying a different mountain range, or hiding a layer to compare different versions of your geography.
- Layer controls: add, name, reorder, hide, lock, and remove terrain layers. Transparent areas and the eraser reveal what is underneath.
- Direct and shaped painting: Point, Box, Circle, and Polygon tools for everything from a single cell to a whole landmass.
- Soft and blending brushes: shape transitions with Linear, Smoothstep, Quadratic, Cubic, Exponential, or Gaussian falloff.
- Two kinds of fill: fill a connected neighbourhood or replace matching heights across the canvas.
- Selections: isolate part of the map for painting and terrain operations, or move selected geography.
- Canvas transformations: raise or lower terrain, shift with wrapping or clipping, flip a map, and fill areas.
- Grid controls: resize, expand or shrink the canvas, and double or halve its resolution.
- Painting conveniences: zoom and pan, preview the brush footprint, and pick an existing height from the canvas.
- Undo and redo: revisit strokes and other changes through the history, with clearer handling of unsaved work.
Several of these tools grew through the 1.x updates. They now sit together in a workspace designed for the larger range of things a 2.0 world can contain.
Build a Fantasy World to Suit Your Terrain
Once you have a Physical World you like, world layers can develop it into a fantasy atlas. Choose the number of countries and settlements, the map detail, and a presentation style, then generate a world that follows your geography.
This can add biomes, rivers, lakes, countries, borders, cultures, religions, provinces, settlements, place names, and roads. Building the atlas leaves your painted terrain intact, and rebuilding can be undone if you prefer the previous result.
Different map presets let you explore different sides of the same world:
- Political: countries, borders, towns, rivers, and roads.
- Cultural, Religions, and Provinces: the people of the world, their beliefs, and its internal divisions.
- Biomes, Physical, and Heightmap: the landscape, climate zones, ice, and elevation.
- Temperature, Precipitation, and Population: climate and patterns of habitation.
- Goods, Trade, and Military: resources, markets, trade routes, and armies.
- Emblems and Points of interest: heraldry and places worth a journey.
You can also switch individual overlays on and off to create your own combination. Changing what is shown does not regenerate the world, so you can move between a political map and a climate map while keeping the same underlying geography.
For your own landmarks, named world locations let you mark locations and retain their names and coordinates as you change projection. A useful way to start making the world yours is to name the first island, mountain, or city that catches your imagination.
A World with Many Styles
World layers come with fifteen presentation styles: Atlas, Parchment, Ink, Climate, Ancient, Political Atlas, Clean, Cyberpunk, Dark Seas, Gloom, Light, Monochrome, Night, Pale, and Watercolor.
Each changes the colours, lettering, and linework while keeping the geography in place. The same world can become a restrained reference atlas, an old parchment chart, a dark ocean map, or a softer illustrated view. You can explore the styles without committing to a new generation of the world.
When it is time to share your work, export the terrain and visible world layers together as an image, or take the world layers out separately as vector SVG or transparent PNG. Vector exports include shapes and outlined lettering, with optional legend and scale, for further composition in a drawing application.
Save and Share Your Worlds
The .fpp2 document format keeps terrain layers, physical elevations, sea level, seeds and generation settings, named places, and the generated atlas with its presentation. It is the format to use when you want to continue developing a 2.0 world.
Your existing .planet files still open. Legacy export is also available for older workflows, including the bridge to World to Beyond. That export flattens the visible terrain into the original nine height categories, so keep a .fpp2 master to preserve the new layers, places, and atlas.
Other import and export options include:
- Heightmap import: greyscale images, colour-to-height mapping, and Terrain-RGB elevation data.
- 16-bit heightmaps: take continuous terrain elevations into other terrain tools and game workflows.
- Painted map images and text: exchange the underlying grid as an image or in the classic text format.
- Rendered PNGs: export Physical and Legacy views up to 8K on the long edge, and Flat Land views up to 4K.
- Drag-and-drop opening: bring an existing world into the painting workspace.
The rebuilt interface also brings a more adjustable workspace, scrollable palettes, canvas navigation, and built-in help for the main workflows.
Flat Worlds and Familiar Favourites
Physical Planet is the new focus moving forward, but the other ways of making maps remain part of the app.
- Legacy preserves the original generator and its nine height categories, eleven projections, and eighteen themes. It is there for returning projects and for anyone who enjoys the original approach.
- Flat Land is a useful choice for bounded maps rather than whole planets. It offers 2D and relief views, eight themes, and controls for erosion, hydrology, inland lakes, and the water plane. It can take your work in a different direction when you are thinking about a single landscape or a game map.
Experimental Steam Achievements
We are also adding experimental Steam achievements to bring a little extra fun to using the app. They celebrate creative milestones and encourage you to try different tools, views, painting techniques, and worldbuilding possibilities.
Alongside them is a curated set of achievement illustrations with a stylized look. We hope these small rewards adds a bit more reward to your journey as you explore and create. They are also useful to guide you what to try next.
Achievement support is experimental in this release, and we welcome feedback if an unlock does not behave as expected. Some milestones are tied to capabilities beyond the current public build, so the achievement list will continue to develop with the app.
World to Beyond: A Rebuilt Map Studio
The free World to Beyond DLC now arrives alongside 2.0 with a rebuilt GUI for creating maps for Beyond All Reason and other Spring/Recoil games. The major road block from previous teaser is the now fully integrated map format generator, getting rid of third-party dependencies.
The earlier exporter centred on turning a planet into a map. The new studio workflow gives the other parts of that map their own space: resources, vegetation, water, scenery, and the final output.
Its seven stages cover the complete project:
- Source: begin with a painted planet or a procedural map, choose a generation scheme, and set the map size.
- Terrain: tune height range; procedural sources offer terrain styles, themes, generation controls, erosion, previews, and playability readouts. Imported heightmaps and ground textures provide further ways to bring in your own material.
- Metal: place resources in a dedicated painting workspace, with automatic placement and brush controls including softness and symmetry.
- Grass: grow vegetation from terrain rules, then paint over the result to refine its coverage.
- Water: adjust the water appearance and judge it against a live coastline sample.
- Features: use generated scenery or import
.obj, .gltf, and .glb models. Set scatter rules and paint a separate placement mask for each model—for example, trees along a ridge and boulders near the shore—and preview where they will land.
- Output: build a complete
.sd7 map archive, including terrain, textures, resources, grass, water settings, and scenery, with progress feedback and cancellation.
There is also a real-time 3D viewer for inspecting the terrain, water, vegetation, scenery, resource spots, and start positions before compiling the archive. It currently requires OpenGL 4.3 support and will not work on macOS. And if you are patient enough to read till this line - there are more interactive ways to inspect and play with your map coming in future updates!
Studio projects can be saved as .w2b files, retaining settings and painted channels so you can return to a map over several sessions. Custom model files remain external references, so keep those assets with your project.
Whether you want to turn an unusual planet into a battlefield or just use W2B as a really easy utility to assembly a fully functional BAR map, there is a lot of freedom here.
Availability
- Free for existing owners: 2.0 is an update to Fantasy Planet Painter, with the free World to Beyond DLC releasing alongside it.
- Windows first: macOS is coming later; we will share more when it is ready.
- Updated pricing: the price for new purchases has already changed to reflect the app's progress. Regional prices are shown on the Steam store.
- The current build is released with the hope that you could try the new features early on - it may contain many features that we have not tested thoroughly - expect follow-up updates to address rough corners.
References