Reference

The systems behind the world

Four ideas turn a number into a landscape you can store and replay. Back to the generator anytime: Open the generator →

• A seed → a whole world

  A tiny hash function turns each (x, y, seed) into a repeatable pseudo-random number. Smoothly blending those numbers on a lattice gives value noise — a landscape that is random-looking but perfectly reproducible: the same seed always regrows the same world.

• fBm octaves = detail

  Fractal Brownian motion sums several layers ("octaves") of noise: each layer at double the frequency and half the strength of the last. One octave is smooth hills; add octaves and you get coastlines, then ridges, then fine texture. That is the Detail slider.

• Run-length encoding

  A voxel row is mostly long stretches of the same block. Instead of storing every cell, store each stretch as one (block × count) pair. A row of 30 cells might become 4 runs — the same information, a fraction of the storage. Chunks of a world compress the same way.

• The fixed timestep

  If physics advanced by however long the last frame took, a fast and a slow machine would drift apart. Engines accumulate real elapsed time and step the simulation in fixed sizes, carrying the leftover to next frame. Same inputs, same result — the determinism that lets a replay or a shared room stay in sync.

These are the same techniques a real voxel engine uses — just small enough to watch. Generate a world →