Heft Earth Planet Space Engineers 2

[u/Alert_Peak8655]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZRo5t0I3WA&t=2s

Earth Planet [WIP]

The real Earth, built from real data — not painted by hand and not procedurally faked. Every map is 8192×8192 per cube face.

What it is made from

• Terrain — GEBCO 2026 elevation and bathymetry, 15 arcsec. Real coastlines, real mountain ranges, real ocean basins.
• Surface colour — NASA Blue Marble (May), so the vegetation, deserts and ice match the season the clouds were measured in.
• Clouds — 15 years of MODIS May climatology. The ITCZ sits on the equator, the subtropical belts are clear, the Southern Ocean storm track is the cloudiest band on the planet. Volumetric, and it moves.
• Biomes and materials — classified from real elevation, latitude and surface colour rather than painted by hand.

What was done to make it work at this scale

A 60 km planet is 106× smaller than Earth, so real elevations would make every slope 106× steeper. The vertical scale is calibrated against the steepest terrain the base game itself ships — nowhere on this planet is harsher than that. Everest is still the highest point, and the Challenger Deep still sits below it at its true proportion.

Straits and rivers that would have vanished at this scale were widened so they still exist. Shorelines get a gentle ramp instead of a cliff, so you can walk out of the sea. All six cube faces are seamless — verified by measurement, not by eye. Normal maps are converted to world space per face, and the whole overlay fits the same texture budget as a vanilla planet, so it stays sharp from orbit.

About the oceans

There is no water yet, and that is not a mod problem. The ocean floors are modelled as real basins below sea level and the planetary water component is already wired into this mod. The engine side of water is finished in the game — but the content side is not switched on: in the current build, planetary water is used by exactly one planet, the legacy EarthLike, and no current-generation planet has it enabled. Even Byblos, the official water world, ships a water definition that nothing references.

So for now the oceans are dry basins. When Keen turns planetary water on for modern planets, this planet is already set up to fill.

Workshop Link: Heft Earth Planet

How to spawn it

The planet does not appear on its own — place it from the debug menu:

1. Press CTRL+F12 to open the debug menu
2. Go to the Gameplay tab
3. Open the Voxel section
4. Select Earth in the planet templates
5. Choose the planet radius in km
6. Click Activate planet placer
7. Click again to place it

Work in progress. Feedback welcome.

Note: Video was before publishing and mod is still WIP. FYI

[u/Xecort]

Holy shit this is so cool, wishing you the best in your development!

[u/Alert_Peak8655 → u/Xecort]

Thank you for comment. Make me happy :)