@Chess YT I was pretty unsure initially, but then I remembered that I've seen FU or f/u used at work as short for follow-up quite a bit, which also caught me offguard at work the first time haha.
Are you going to make a video about swamps? I would really like to hear about the differences about swamps, marshes and mires, how do they form and the plants and wildlife that live in there.
2:35 I firmly believe that generators are great for removing _chores_ out of your worldbuilding process. Like, creating a river system for a small region, and making it have a historical significance or a specific shape? That's one thing. Having the need to create hundreds or thousands of generic river systems for the whole planet with several continents? Now that's a _chore_ that I'd rather push off to a generator software.
FU to the FU on river width: I'm not sure where the poster is located but many rivers in populated areas are artificially hemmed in, or have at least some of their river bed edited by humans, usually to make it narrower and less bendy, and therefore more fast-flowing and deeper. Sometimes it's very obvious (by stone embankments or the like) but even where it looks "natural", human activity has left a significant mark on river courses, often a few centuries ago (to get more arable land, to prevent floods, to increase shipping capacity, etc.) So depending on where this example comes from, the 7-8 meters might not be what the river would look like if no humans were involved.
Re: Wilbur. It's not exactly a river generator, it's a river calculator. It performs incisce flow and erosion operations on a grayscale heightmap. So as long as you draw your map in grayscale you can then put it into Wilbur and let it do all the hard work of calculating the paths of steepest decent and least resistance, then you can export and continue tweaking manually. I normally do 2 or 3 passes in Wilbur on my maps, and it has been an invaluable tool in my toolbox as a cartographer ever since I discovered it. I seriously don't think you should be so dismissive of it; when I first found out about it, all I could do was wish that I'd know about it 10 years sooner!
The thing about Wilbur to me is that river flow in real life really has no individuality to it. If you already know the topography of your world, there really is only one way the water can flow, so I wouldn't mind using it. The individuality is already applied when making the height map. Of course, you might not have the height map perfectly detailed, or maybe the way you want your rivers to be makes you want to change the height map a bit. In that case doing it yourself could still be a worthwhile effort! Though you could also throw in some individuality to the map even after using Wilbur, using it as a suggestion instead of an unassaible truth of your world XD
I can grayscale my heightmap, but It won't look as the noise generated heightmap that is shown on the Wilbur website. I mean, the gradient will be as Artifexian sugest: solid colors (I realize that I could "add" noise in Photoshop and then turn everything to grayscale, but I don't know if that would produce the result that Wilbur is expecting).
As someone that uses Wilbur I have to point out that it is extremely limited. It cannot handle huge files and as such you either have to use low, in my opinion, resolution files or extremely localized. Both of these options are bad because in the case of localized you don't get enough of the map to give you a correct calculation and in the case of low resolution, most rivers are sub 1km which you are getting, even at the resolutions i work at, a river should be here in this pixel and it should connect to one in this pixel... but what if there is a t junction of river pixels... well then it becomes a mess. If the river pixel isn't dark enough it is hard to judge as well... The other major issue is that it's hard to control what is the stream order of a given river is, in which case you are left with too high or too low for reality frequently. To most this is not an issue, but to me, I consider it to be... So while I like wilbur, it's got a lot of flaws for someone doing high detail work. And if you're doing high detail work and you have to go in and fix it manually anyways, what's the point of using it to begin with?
It really only cares about steepest descent, aka 'maximally downhill', but that has some complex scale dependencies due to the volume of water (steepest descent fir a trickle may be very different than steepest descent for a torrent due to the inertia and footprint differences whuch then get etched into the terrain by erosion, in a self reinforcing manner)
on a simplified level, it really is how the environment influences the flow, how it can continuously move downwards with the least amount of mechanical work. Nature is inherently lazy, if something happens on its own, that is because in total there is energy lost. The more energy is lost the easier it happens, ergo the steeper downhill, the faster the flow. faster flow influences the environment more and makes a river channel, therefore it almost always flows down in the steepest path (locally). If you put a water slide around and down the mountain, the steepest path locally WOULD be along the slide, although a direct path would be shorter.
As someone who's taken a fluid dynamics course, I can 100% second the point that fluid dynamics are tricky as all hell. I was a 78% average student in university. Most of my pure physics classes I was averaging somewhere in the upper 80s. I walked into my fluid dynamics final exam with 12%. Thankfully, university courses are massively biased toward the final exam results, and I'd actually managed to wrap my head around the core concepts that I just wasn't getting the day before the exam and managed to salvage a passing grade. And THIS was the course on pipe flow. Nice, easy to measure pipes with no air/water surface interfacing, no erosion, etc. That stuff makes pipe flow look like a basic statics/dynamics class. (The basic physics stuff where you learn what "force" is, etc)
There is such thing as a gradient of a function, that gives you the direction of the largest change, or in this case, the direction of the steepest ascent. The opposite of that is the direction of the steepest descent, which is directly outwards for any point on a cone. So if it is winding around the cone, it does not really care about going down, as it isn't taking the direction of steepest descent
@Artifexian, I just want you to know, that as much as I love all the fantastic depth and artistry of these videos, your slightly-unhinged-looking "Edgar, Out." at the end of the video is generally the best part of my day. No matter how rough the day, no matter what I'm doing, I always feel compelled to smile. So, thank you for that.
In my worldbuilding I had one border marked as a definite mountain range and wall which only changed when the mountains moved south (magic system). Another border is more nebulous and only has a physical feature component in tradition but otherwise is merely loosely marked, blurred line.
Another thing that you might mention is that glaciers can do very strange things to rivers. The example that comes to mind is the Columbia river in Washington State; there is a large seemingly inexplicable bend in the river, but it comes from the river going around the now non existent glacier then the river carving through the mountains that rose up around it. Look up Nick Zentner's youtube channel, it's full of really neat geographical info.
I like generators up to a point because, for example this river one, it's going to be (or supposed to be) more scientifically accurate than I am. For me, I like to have a world and have it be scientifically accurate, and from there I can put in cities, cultures, and so on. So I don't like planet generators, because they don't take tectonic plate action into account (ergo you don't get continents when you tell an algorithm to 'generate me a random height map and make 70% of its surface covered in water', because then you get a random height map, and the computer will cover that map in water up to a certain height). So what I do like is, take a random height map with no water, draw some tectonic plate boundaries and plate movement directions, then run a tectonic plate movement program on it, and then raise the water level. This way I don't need to draw in a computer (keep in mind not everyone is artistically gifted/ practiced at using a computer to draw) and I can take my map, now scientifically accurate, (tweak it a little if I want,) add in my winds, ocean currents and climate zones, and then decide the cultural significance of the features of my map. And if I don't like the result, I can tweak it some more at various stages of this process, or start over. To give an example, I'm currently working on a world that magically got a whole load of water added to it somewhere in the past - so sea levels rose by a significant amount, and that had an effect on all the creatures and cultures that live on the planet. I guess maybe what I'm showcasing here is that the planet in itself isn't the most important thing for me to build - I can go "it's 5% larger than Earth but equally dense and has 2 moons", and I like my worlds to be scientifically believable up to a point (tides are different with 2 moons, go figure. How does that affect the floating mountains?), but my focus is the people living in the world and what they do with it (and I'm bad at drawing in the computer) so generators are fine for me as long as they do give me that scientific accuracy (love me some plate tectonics).
On the height path thing: I think technically it wouldn't be so much that it takes the most direct route (which, in effect, is usually true) but rather that it takes the route of steepest descent. It wouldn't take the sideways spirally path on that cone because there is a direction that's steeper. So it's not just that it Must Go Downhill qualitatively, and the direction which it chooses to do so is the most direct route. But rather, that it must go downhill *as steeply as possible* quantitatively.
The river is effectively performing a gradient descent computation, the water is always attempting to loose as much potential energy as possible _right now_ , it has essentially no ability to look into the future so as far as each water particle is concerned the steapest descent is the best path to remove its energy. It will always go through the highest gradient path (some fuzziness here because of momentum and sediment transport/erosion/deposition). This is often called "the path of least resistance". (Edit: after looking this up, the path of least resistance may or may not mean this, I suggest you investigate it yourself)
I think there is a right way to use a generator. For instance, for river generation, I'd suggest first sketching out a river you'd like to have, and then subtly fiddle with the topology until such a generator ends up generating something that roughly follows your vision, but it'll additionally have some physical plausibility added on top. I.e. don't compromise your vision for the sake of the generator. But you can use it to refine your result.
I have since tried out the suggested tool and come to the conclusion that it's not so easy. This river generator is a bit too jank and a lot too slow to make a lot of subtle iteration feasible. Would take a different kind of generator to accomplish that
Regarding rivers, just because a river is now straight doesn't mean that it's always been straight. A river has an ultimate course, but over time it gets more wavy, and those waves get pinched off, giving us oxbow lakes that evaporate. As the lake is created, the river returns to something close to its local median. Tracking what this might be is complicated. Everything that Edgar has said is correct and in no way contradicts what you see in the real world. It may be that we live in a cycle where rivers north of the equator are on an opposite cycle to those south of the equator as far as erosion goes. I doubt it, but it's at least feasible and testable. Water wants to go "down", but the easiest route to "down" varies, thus you need to include confounding factors like prevailing winds, geology, and a host of other factors, and all those shift over time. I sometims think that people forget the effect of time.
Relating to sinking rivers: I have recently read about the Donauversickerung (Danube Sinkhole). Here the Danube flows underground through caverns and reappears later as a tributary of the Rhine river. Approximately 155 days of the year the upper Danube disappears and ends up not in the Black Sea, but in the North Sea. The first time the river sunk underground was in 1874 and in the future, the current headwater of the Danube will be completely captured by the Rhine. So while the process of stream capturing is not completed the same river can have two drainage basins (the two estuaries are ~2000km apart). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube_Sinkhole en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_capture
So, in defense of generation tools, I would say that some worldbuilding aspects should be done by hand, whereas some things are best made using tools. It depends on the amount of calculations involved, as opposed to more artistic input. It's a spectrum, so where you draw the line may differ from where I would. Edgar seems to be one the far end of the "by-hand" side of the spectrum, and that's a valid opinion, whereas I'm closer to the middle of the bar. For rivers, I think that erosion and flow tools like Wilbur do a brilliant job of simulating realistic and beautiful river systems, giving a conworld an extra layer of believable complexity without a ton of tedious work. You still have to make the world to begin with (either just the coastlines or the entire topography), and you still need to learn how to use the tool well to achieve the best results. And I would say that the default options are best for rivers that you don't have a plan for already; if you have strong ideas about how a specific river needs to flow, then you will need to adjust the settings of your tool, or perhaps adjust the local topography of your world in order to accommodate the river systems that you want to produce.
"you can generate everything" except ocean currents accurate to my world.... i've redone them so many times using artifexian's video but it's not specific enough for my poor adhd brain to understand. i wish i had money to pay someone to do that part for me because there's other aspects of my world i REALLY want to get to, but i can't create without a working climate.
@Honey Dragon Try to ask for suggestion in a worldbuilding comunity. I shown my map with ocean currents to one on Facebook once, and it came back with suggestions that I took as corrections for the currents, and the results were fantastic. Other people, turns out, are the best "generators".
Me making fun of Artifexian's use of FU, day 2 Artifexian: Deltas always have a protrusion at the coastline. Me, who wanted straight coastlines with deltas: FU-
Deltas do not always have to have protrusion, but they will rarely have straight coastlines. Sometimes you get a river that long ago emptied into a small bay and over time has filled that bay with its delta, these can still have a somewhat concave shape.
As per the question about major/minor ridges I would just use the height of the ridges. If you have a tall mountain chain ie the Rocky Mountains that would split your basins up then look at the next highest feature to split up further, the Appalachians would come next in our example keep going to your desired level of detail see link for example en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watersheds_of_North_America#/media/File:NorthAmerica-WaterDivides.png
Don't hope for it. He has never been consistent with the promises he makes, unless he's working on several videos at the same time. I remember when he covered Resonant Orbits. He mentioned a list of transneptuian-style orbits, but he only worked on the resonant ones and then moved on to other things.
How does lava work? I presume its similar but is there anything more to it? What happens if lava meets a water river; do the lava continue down the water's valley (perhaps rerouting the water?)?
I am currently building a very rainy town, around 1800-2000mm annually. The town has its microclimate: the surrounding area receives quite less rainfall than the town. 20km away, the rainfall reduces to 1500mm per year, and it gets reduced to 1000-1200mm per year at around 50km away. How can I create this microclimate? Does anyone have any suggestions?
Maybe something like the rainy side of a rain shadow? I think he's mentioned it in a video, but basically moist air is blown towards high elevation, typically mountains, causing it to cool quickly and cause it to rain. (Note: the rain shadow is on the other side of the mountains where the moist air never gets to.) This is basically what causes the Pacific Northwest like Seattle and Vancouver to get so much rain. Maybe your town could be the place with the highest elevation at the foot of some mountains near a large body of water, and thus gets more rain than other towns?
@@voodoolilium It is already at the foot of a mountain, but according to my reading, rainshadows can extend several hundred kilometers, so rainshadow along can't be the only reason for this microclimate. Large body of water is a very interesting option, but from my research, Ya'an. China receives 2000mm of rainfall around a 200m wide river. Vegitation could also be a factor. Plant transpiration can cause rain, think Amazon rainforest.
there could be a word class (which is more or less the same as genders) that includes rivers. I mean, Dyirbal has a gender for "women, fire, and dangerous things," so anything is possible :P (The other genders in Dyirbal are for animate things and men, edible fruits and vegetables, and other.)
@@antimatter_nvf Someone else said he took it down because of an error he accidentally included in it. It was pretty small, imo, but it was getting a lot of attention and he didn't want to give the wrong impression by leaving it in. I'm guessing he's going to edit that section and repost it? I don't know what his plans for it are
@@voodoolilium yeah he accidentally said that historically there’s only been men and women which is incorrect, and insisting there’s no 4th person isn’t too right either
@@Alice-gr1kb Yeah, I was pretty active in the comments before he took it down haha. I forgot about the fourth person thing. Though, from what I understand that's more an issue of terminology than anything else, but yeah, it probably deserves some more in depth explanation, given that a number of languages use that term.
Haha. You could probably change the rivers your group has already encountered and maybe you could subtly change the ones they have seen. I don't know how geologically aware your group is, but I probably wouldn't notice.
@@isabela8214 I’ve already mapped out all the national borders based on rivers and stuff and the players have seen the map Next world I build tho is gonna have good rivers
Off topic question: someone knows what happened to the video on pronouns? Not the first one but the one that came out a day or so ago with a thumbnail like "there is no 4th person, their is just boring" or something like that.
@@Oddn7751 I mean, it takes time to refilm and re-edit, even if it's just a tiny portion. He might also be doing further research. In the same circumstances I probably would, just to be on the safe side you know?
"we're just hitting go" Someone try to make this then. I don't think it's as easy as you think it is. Making a galaxy with realistic star systems, planets (read: no fractal terrain!!!), Biology, ecosystems, societies, fully fleshed out languages, etc. Human Creativity is far from dead because there are so many areas where some algorithmic generator will produce not only generic or deeply unsatisfying but obviously incorrect results. If you don't have some universal super powerful AI then don't assume a generator will think of everything.
Oh... FU here means “follow up”.
Yeah, that took me a while to figure out too.... hahaha
@Chess YT I was pretty unsure initially, but then I remembered that I've seen FU or f/u used at work as short for follow-up quite a bit, which also caught me offguard at work the first time haha.
@Chess YT i thought it was a play on "kung-fu" lol
I thought he just despised rivers
I've watched dozens of PragerFU videos without figuring that out. TIL
Are you going to make a video about swamps? I would really like to hear about the differences about swamps, marshes and mires, how do they form and the plants and wildlife that live in there.
2:35
I firmly believe that generators are great for removing _chores_ out of your worldbuilding process.
Like, creating a river system for a small region, and making it have a historical significance or a specific shape? That's one thing.
Having the need to create hundreds or thousands of generic river systems for the whole planet with several continents? Now that's a _chore_ that I'd rather push off to a generator software.
FU to the FU on river width: I'm not sure where the poster is located but many rivers in populated areas are artificially hemmed in, or have at least some of their river bed edited by humans, usually to make it narrower and less bendy, and therefore more fast-flowing and deeper. Sometimes it's very obvious (by stone embankments or the like) but even where it looks "natural", human activity has left a significant mark on river courses, often a few centuries ago (to get more arable land, to prevent floods, to increase shipping capacity, etc.)
So depending on where this example comes from, the 7-8 meters might not be what the river would look like if no humans were involved.
Re: Wilbur. It's not exactly a river generator, it's a river calculator. It performs incisce flow and erosion operations on a grayscale heightmap. So as long as you draw your map in grayscale you can then put it into Wilbur and let it do all the hard work of calculating the paths of steepest decent and least resistance, then you can export and continue tweaking manually. I normally do 2 or 3 passes in Wilbur on my maps, and it has been an invaluable tool in my toolbox as a cartographer ever since I discovered it. I seriously don't think you should be so dismissive of it; when I first found out about it, all I could do was wish that I'd know about it 10 years sooner!
The thing about Wilbur to me is that river flow in real life really has no individuality to it. If you already know the topography of your world, there really is only one way the water can flow, so I wouldn't mind using it. The individuality is already applied when making the height map.
Of course, you might not have the height map perfectly detailed, or maybe the way you want your rivers to be makes you want to change the height map a bit. In that case doing it yourself could still be a worthwhile effort! Though you could also throw in some individuality to the map even after using Wilbur, using it as a suggestion instead of an unassaible truth of your world XD
I can grayscale my heightmap, but It won't look as the noise generated heightmap that is shown on the Wilbur website. I mean, the gradient will be as Artifexian sugest: solid colors (I realize that I could "add" noise in Photoshop and then turn everything to grayscale, but I don't know if that would produce the result that Wilbur is expecting).
As someone that uses Wilbur I have to point out that it is extremely limited. It cannot handle huge files and as such you either have to use low, in my opinion, resolution files or extremely localized. Both of these options are bad because in the case of localized you don't get enough of the map to give you a correct calculation and in the case of low resolution, most rivers are sub 1km which you are getting, even at the resolutions i work at, a river should be here in this pixel and it should connect to one in this pixel... but what if there is a t junction of river pixels... well then it becomes a mess. If the river pixel isn't dark enough it is hard to judge as well...
The other major issue is that it's hard to control what is the stream order of a given river is, in which case you are left with too high or too low for reality frequently. To most this is not an issue, but to me, I consider it to be...
So while I like wilbur, it's got a lot of flaws for someone doing high detail work. And if you're doing high detail work and you have to go in and fix it manually anyways, what's the point of using it to begin with?
It really only cares about steepest descent, aka 'maximally downhill', but that has some complex scale dependencies due to the volume of water (steepest descent fir a trickle may be very different than steepest descent for a torrent due to the inertia and footprint differences whuch then get etched into the terrain by erosion, in a self reinforcing manner)
on a simplified level, it really is how the environment influences the flow, how it can continuously move downwards with the least amount of mechanical work. Nature is inherently lazy, if something happens on its own, that is because in total there is energy lost. The more energy is lost the easier it happens, ergo the steeper downhill, the faster the flow. faster flow influences the environment more and makes a river channel, therefore it almost always flows down in the steepest path (locally). If you put a water slide around and down the mountain, the steepest path locally WOULD be along the slide, although a direct path would be shorter.
@@jonasgajdosikas1125 Pretty sure we just said the same thing, but I like your wording better
I love your videos, so much so that I'm using them all to create my own universe with a friend!
I’m doing the same!
Dang you have friends that would do that with you?
I’m doing that too. I wish I had someone to do it with thought. Especially with my three habitable planets
May I ask: do you use this universe for something? Or do you just create it for the sake of creating?
@@ArkinMC :(
As someone who's taken a fluid dynamics course, I can 100% second the point that fluid dynamics are tricky as all hell. I was a 78% average student in university. Most of my pure physics classes I was averaging somewhere in the upper 80s.
I walked into my fluid dynamics final exam with 12%. Thankfully, university courses are massively biased toward the final exam results, and I'd actually managed to wrap my head around the core concepts that I just wasn't getting the day before the exam and managed to salvage a passing grade. And THIS was the course on pipe flow. Nice, easy to measure pipes with no air/water surface interfacing, no erosion, etc. That stuff makes pipe flow look like a basic statics/dynamics class. (The basic physics stuff where you learn what "force" is, etc)
There is such thing as a gradient of a function, that gives you the direction of the largest change, or in this case, the direction of the steepest ascent. The opposite of that is the direction of the steepest descent, which is directly outwards for any point on a cone. So if it is winding around the cone, it does not really care about going down, as it isn't taking the direction of steepest descent
@Artifexian, I just want you to know, that as much as I love all the fantastic depth and artistry of these videos, your slightly-unhinged-looking "Edgar, Out." at the end of the video is generally the best part of my day. No matter how rough the day, no matter what I'm doing, I always feel compelled to smile.
So, thank you for that.
In my worldbuilding I had one border marked as a definite mountain range and wall which only changed when the mountains moved south (magic system). Another border is more nebulous and only has a physical feature component in tradition but otherwise is merely loosely marked, blurred line.
3:07 also the river might be around 30 metres before human intervention
Another thing that you might mention is that glaciers can do very strange things to rivers. The example that comes to mind is the Columbia river in Washington State; there is a large seemingly inexplicable bend in the river, but it comes from the river going around the now non existent glacier then the river carving through the mountains that rose up around it. Look up Nick Zentner's youtube channel, it's full of really neat geographical info.
I love that you're doing these follow-up videos and addressing comments and questions from past videos.
I like generators up to a point because, for example this river one, it's going to be (or supposed to be) more scientifically accurate than I am.
For me, I like to have a world and have it be scientifically accurate, and from there I can put in cities, cultures, and so on. So I don't like planet generators, because they don't take tectonic plate action into account (ergo you don't get continents when you tell an algorithm to 'generate me a random height map and make 70% of its surface covered in water', because then you get a random height map, and the computer will cover that map in water up to a certain height). So what I do like is, take a random height map with no water, draw some tectonic plate boundaries and plate movement directions, then run a tectonic plate movement program on it, and then raise the water level. This way I don't need to draw in a computer (keep in mind not everyone is artistically gifted/ practiced at using a computer to draw) and I can take my map, now scientifically accurate, (tweak it a little if I want,) add in my winds, ocean currents and climate zones, and then decide the cultural significance of the features of my map. And if I don't like the result, I can tweak it some more at various stages of this process, or start over.
To give an example, I'm currently working on a world that magically got a whole load of water added to it somewhere in the past - so sea levels rose by a significant amount, and that had an effect on all the creatures and cultures that live on the planet. I guess maybe what I'm showcasing here is that the planet in itself isn't the most important thing for me to build - I can go "it's 5% larger than Earth but equally dense and has 2 moons", and I like my worlds to be scientifically believable up to a point (tides are different with 2 moons, go figure. How does that affect the floating mountains?), but my focus is the people living in the world and what they do with it (and I'm bad at drawing in the computer) so generators are fine for me as long as they do give me that scientific accuracy (love me some plate tectonics).
Heh. I answered the question referenced at 4:36, and using my training and experience as a geologist, my sciencey answer was "Pretty much up to you."
On the height path thing: I think technically it wouldn't be so much that it takes the most direct route (which, in effect, is usually true) but rather that it takes the route of steepest descent. It wouldn't take the sideways spirally path on that cone because there is a direction that's steeper.
So it's not just that it Must Go Downhill qualitatively, and the direction which it chooses to do so is the most direct route. But rather, that it must go downhill *as steeply as possible* quantitatively.
The river is effectively performing a gradient descent computation, the water is always attempting to loose as much potential energy as possible _right now_ , it has essentially no ability to look into the future so as far as each water particle is concerned the steapest descent is the best path to remove its energy.
It will always go through the highest gradient path (some fuzziness here because of momentum and sediment transport/erosion/deposition). This is often called "the path of least resistance". (Edit: after looking this up, the path of least resistance may or may not mean this, I suggest you investigate it yourself)
I think there is a right way to use a generator.
For instance, for river generation, I'd suggest first sketching out a river you'd like to have, and then subtly fiddle with the topology until such a generator ends up generating something that roughly follows your vision, but it'll additionally have some physical plausibility added on top.
I.e. don't compromise your vision for the sake of the generator. But you can use it to refine your result.
I have since tried out the suggested tool and come to the conclusion that it's not so easy. This river generator is a bit too jank and a lot too slow to make a lot of subtle iteration feasible. Would take a different kind of generator to accomplish that
Regarding rivers, just because a river is now straight doesn't mean that it's always been straight. A river has an ultimate course, but over time it gets more wavy, and those waves get pinched off, giving us oxbow lakes that evaporate. As the lake is created, the river returns to something close to its local median. Tracking what this might be is complicated.
Everything that Edgar has said is correct and in no way contradicts what you see in the real world. It may be that we live in a cycle where rivers north of the equator are on an opposite cycle to those south of the equator as far as erosion goes. I doubt it, but it's at least feasible and testable.
Water wants to go "down", but the easiest route to "down" varies, thus you need to include confounding factors like prevailing winds, geology, and a host of other factors, and all those shift over time.
I sometims think that people forget the effect of time.
"Fluid Dynamics are just tricky as all hell"
Someone's seen the Navier-Stokes* equation before. 😅
Sounds like someone hasn't seen the navier-stokes equation. :P
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations
@@Royvan7 crap, that's what I meant, I just misremembered at 2am.
I appreciate the follow up videos you do. They're almost always going a bit deeper into the topic than the original videos which I like.
Relating to sinking rivers:
I have recently read about the Donauversickerung (Danube Sinkhole). Here the Danube flows underground through caverns and reappears later as a tributary of the Rhine river. Approximately 155 days of the year the upper Danube disappears and ends up not in the Black Sea, but in the North Sea. The first time the river sunk underground was in 1874 and in the future, the current headwater of the Danube will be completely captured by the Rhine. So while the process of stream capturing is not completed the same river can have two drainage basins (the two estuaries are ~2000km apart).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube_Sinkhole
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_capture
Thats insane.
Also, something something reality is always stranger than fiction.
OMG?? I'm in the video?? °-°
I did not expect you to answer my comment! aaah!
So, in defense of generation tools, I would say that some worldbuilding aspects should be done by hand, whereas some things are best made using tools. It depends on the amount of calculations involved, as opposed to more artistic input. It's a spectrum, so where you draw the line may differ from where I would. Edgar seems to be one the far end of the "by-hand" side of the spectrum, and that's a valid opinion, whereas I'm closer to the middle of the bar.
For rivers, I think that erosion and flow tools like Wilbur do a brilliant job of simulating realistic and beautiful river systems, giving a conworld an extra layer of believable complexity without a ton of tedious work. You still have to make the world to begin with (either just the coastlines or the entire topography), and you still need to learn how to use the tool well to achieve the best results. And I would say that the default options are best for rivers that you don't have a plan for already; if you have strong ideas about how a specific river needs to flow, then you will need to adjust the settings of your tool, or perhaps adjust the local topography of your world in order to accommodate the river systems that you want to produce.
My heart skipped a beat when you showed my comment! I love your channel and your content! Thanks for addressing it :)
"you can generate everything" except ocean currents accurate to my world.... i've redone them so many times using artifexian's video but it's not specific enough for my poor adhd brain to understand. i wish i had money to pay someone to do that part for me because there's other aspects of my world i REALLY want to get to, but i can't create without a working climate.
Do you have a list of all the generators you know to be good?
@Honey Dragon Try to ask for suggestion in a worldbuilding comunity. I shown my map with ocean currents to one on Facebook once, and it came back with suggestions that I took as corrections for the currents, and the results were fantastic. Other people, turns out, are the best "generators".
Me making fun of Artifexian's use of FU, day 2
Artifexian: Deltas always have a protrusion at the coastline.
Me, who wanted straight coastlines with deltas: FU-
Deltas do not always have to have protrusion, but they will rarely have straight coastlines. Sometimes you get a river that long ago emptied into a small bay and over time has filled that bay with its delta, these can still have a somewhat concave shape.
As per the question about major/minor ridges I would just use the height of the ridges. If you have a tall mountain chain ie the Rocky Mountains that would split your basins up then look at the next highest feature to split up further, the Appalachians would come next in our example keep going to your desired level of detail see link for example en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watersheds_of_North_America#/media/File:NorthAmerica-WaterDivides.png
what happened to the world building videos? i need the one of different oceand-land ratio
Don't hope for it. He has never been consistent with the promises he makes, unless he's working on several videos at the same time. I remember when he covered Resonant Orbits. He mentioned a list of transneptuian-style orbits, but he only worked on the resonant ones and then moved on to other things.
Would the same equations apply to rivers of a different liquid, like lava or liquid methane?
I would guess if the liquid has simular viscosity as water. it will behave simular.
Thank you for answering my question. Great Video :)
Great video.
"as long as your rivers are doing realistic things"
me making high fantasy worlds: swing swong you are wrong
How does lava work? I presume its similar but is there anything more to it? What happens if lava meets a water river; do the lava continue down the water's valley (perhaps rerouting the water?)?
Is what you are trying to say with the direct downhill stuff just gradient descent?
Water follows the locally most direct downhill route.
Bird Foot Delta: what am I dogshit to you people
Best example of this type of Delta is the Mississippi River Delta
I feel like the generators for rivers is a little different to others, as it puts the rivers where they’d be in real life.
I am currently building a very rainy town, around 1800-2000mm annually. The town has its microclimate: the surrounding area receives quite less rainfall than the town. 20km away, the rainfall reduces to 1500mm per year, and it gets reduced to 1000-1200mm per year at around 50km away. How can I create this microclimate? Does anyone have any suggestions?
Maybe something like the rainy side of a rain shadow? I think he's mentioned it in a video, but basically moist air is blown towards high elevation, typically mountains, causing it to cool quickly and cause it to rain. (Note: the rain shadow is on the other side of the mountains where the moist air never gets to.) This is basically what causes the Pacific Northwest like Seattle and Vancouver to get so much rain.
Maybe your town could be the place with the highest elevation at the foot of some mountains near a large body of water, and thus gets more rain than other towns?
@@voodoolilium It is already at the foot of a mountain, but according to my reading, rainshadows can extend several hundred kilometers, so rainshadow along can't be the only reason for this microclimate. Large body of water is a very interesting option, but from my research, Ya'an. China receives 2000mm of rainfall around a 200m wide river. Vegitation could also be a factor. Plant transpiration can cause rain, think Amazon rainforest.
Could u make a vid on how to do climates in a tidally locked planet? One similar to Earth?
I think he did a section on it in another climate video
@@Nosirrbro he did but very briefly and it wasn’t with the köppen climate scale. I’m asking for something more specific
God dam it UA-cam where was my notifications!
I need to discover how much precipitation there is in the area first, just don't know how.
what kind of real world enviroment is closest. start from what it has. then go from their.
Dude, you look exactly the way I imagined you would! I have a question if you don't mind. Are you Welsh or Irish?
He’s Irish :D
hello there
I wish this was a Geography channel....
Ooh so that's what 'FU' stands for...
Fur ivers
Water cares about the _locally_ most direct downhill route.
What was up with the video notification i got a few days ago that was deleted.
He took his follow-up on pronouns down. I believe that’s because he made a mistake, and didn’t want to misinform more people.
But the real question is: Is there a "river" linguistic gender?
there could be a word class (which is more or less the same as genders) that includes rivers. I mean, Dyirbal has a gender for "women, fire, and dangerous things," so anything is possible :P (The other genders in Dyirbal are for animate things and men, edible fruits and vegetables, and other.)
Also, where did the "there is no 4th person and singular they is boring" video go??
@@antimatter_nvf Someone else said he took it down because of an error he accidentally included in it. It was pretty small, imo, but it was getting a lot of attention and he didn't want to give the wrong impression by leaving it in. I'm guessing he's going to edit that section and repost it? I don't know what his plans for it are
@@voodoolilium yeah he accidentally said that historically there’s only been men and women which is incorrect, and insisting there’s no 4th person isn’t too right either
@@Alice-gr1kb Yeah, I was pretty active in the comments before he took it down haha. I forgot about the fourth person thing. Though, from what I understand that's more an issue of terminology than anything else, but yeah, it probably deserves some more in depth explanation, given that a number of languages use that term.
what about a delta like the one near bordeaux?
It aint a delta. It's an estuary
the river video coming out 3 months after I finish my world and have people exploring in it so I’m stuck with poopooshitty awful rivers
pain
Haha. You could probably change the rivers your group has already encountered and maybe you could subtly change the ones they have seen. I don't know how geologically aware your group is, but I probably wouldn't notice.
@@isabela8214 I’ve already mapped out all the national borders based on rivers and stuff and the players have seen the map
Next world I build tho is gonna have good rivers
@@reptilesarecool6739 ah. Well, we all have bad world aspects lol.
I just noticed your name and I think it's cool
@@isabela8214 thank you lmao
I finally have the opportunity to redo all the rivers so I am hopping on that
i read the thumbnail as "Furvivors" lol
I like using Minecraft to build my world maps after I get a rough idea for them. Any thoughts on that?
That must take awhile
@@isabela8214 Yeah XD I still haven't finished one
Where did the inclusivity FU go?
furiver
Am I the only one who likes his videos buts isn’t a world built?
Off topic question: someone knows what happened to the video on pronouns? Not the first one but the one that came out a day or so ago with a thumbnail like "there is no 4th person, their is just boring" or something like that.
Eat your cereal
That's it, the US is calling the amazon gay now
Is there anyone like me, who are not doing any world building.
you doesn't mentioned the geoid.
What happened to the pronouns FU?
He took it down because of a mistake he made, so other people aren’t misinformed by it.
@@felipevasconcelos6736 But why not put it up a revised version?
@@Oddn7751 he might at some point; who knows
@@Oddn7751 I mean, it takes time to refilm and re-edit, even if it's just a tiny portion. He might also be doing further research. In the same circumstances I probably would, just to be on the safe side you know?
@@voodoolilium true
"we're just hitting go"
Someone try to make this then. I don't think it's as easy as you think it is. Making a galaxy with realistic star systems, planets (read: no fractal terrain!!!), Biology, ecosystems, societies, fully fleshed out languages, etc. Human Creativity is far from dead because there are so many areas where some algorithmic generator will produce not only generic or deeply unsatisfying but obviously incorrect results. If you don't have some universal super powerful AI then don't assume a generator will think of everything.
Wazzzzzzaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa???????????????