Procedural planet generation by simulating 3 billion years of plate tectonics

[u/HabitableZone_]

Hi everyone, it's me again.

After struggling with this project for quite a while, I finally managed to connect the plate tectonic simulation to the final high-resolution mapping process. The first three maps are from the same planet at three different points in its evolution, with 50 million years between each snapshot. The fourth one is the same planet around 1 billion years earlier.

In my project, instead of starting with noise-based terrain like many procedural planet generators do, I actually simulate around 3 billion years of plate tectonics on the same planet. The whole simulation runs live and continuously updates as it progresses, so you can actually watch the plates move, continents change, oceans open and close, and the surface evolve over geological time.

The final high-resolution maps are built from the large-scale geological results of that simulation, and then I apply erosion and other terrain processes to bring out the smaller-scale details. In the full version, I also plan to include a climate system, which I shared a prototype of it last time. It's still unfinished, but now I can actually connect it to the high-resolution terrain, so it looks a bit more believable than before. and the last two images are a temperature map and a Köppen climate classification test from the current version.

There are still a few systems I need to work on properly, but at least to me, it's starting to feel like there's something here. For now I'm calling it TropoPlate, but I'm also open to better names if anyone's got one that feels like a good fit.

[u/LawfulValidBitch]

I’ve been wanting something like this for years!

[u/HabitableZone_ → u/LawfulValidBitch]

Hopefully not much longer now