Trees and Mountains

Here we are moving into the next layers and adding further detail onto the map. I won't be telling you how to make a map look nice, of course, as that isn't the purpose of this tutorial.

You'd better start stretching your other hand for this extra special addition as you will be holding the shift key down every now and again. Now, I'm not going to be telling you how to use an auto-tile, because if you can't handle those, you really shouldn't be reading this part of the tutorial, I'd have to direct you over to our Hotkey Tutorial. Although it is focused on RM2K, the majority of the mapping related hotkeys are still available. First of all, let's place down some mountains in the 2nd layer. There's nothing difficult about doing this, I wouldn't have thought. Make it so you have enough room to put a clump of trees in front of it and behind it and try and make the mountains in a generally horizontal shape more than vertical, as this will be more suited for what I am going to show.

You should have something like this after making the mountains. That's pretty simple stuff, and so will the next step be. Go to the third layer and then add a clump of trees (Using the tree auto-tile) so that they very slightly overlap the front of the mountains. Don't be afraid to make the trees as interesting as you like by using the shift key, but I'm not going to do anything special, just some simple trees that cover the area nicely.

Now that that's done, we want some trees to be behind the mountains. This is where it starts to get a bit harder and certainly more time consuming. Well, get your shift-key finger ready, because we are going to be holding it down for a bit. Whilst holding down the shift key, in the 2nd layer mode, also hold down right mouse button and drag over a certain section of your mountains that you would like to overlap the trees that will go behind it. After doing this, you can let go of shift, but don't fiddle with the box you have selected.

Now switch to the 3rd layer and paste that selection of yours into an out of the way place, like the sea; don't worry, it's only temporary. In the second layer, draw some trees behind the mountains, but make sure that they don't affect the parts of the mountains you haven't copied; otherwise you'd just have an annoyance to deal with.

Your mountains will look a bit different now, but don't worry. A couple more steps and it'll all be tickerty-boo. Of course, we will have to use the shift key once again. This time, go into the 3rd layer and, whilst holding shift, select the entire area of the mountains that you can put in the out of the way place. Then place that over where it used to be before it was changed by the trees, like so:

And then finally you can just remove the mountains over the sea. This should make it so the trees are in front of and behind the very same mountain range. Of course, as an optional extra, you could also make those tree clumps attach by using more of the old shift key. It's not very difficult at all. Just apply the same principles shown here to the trees instead of the mountains. By putting trees just slightly over the mountains, you can make the world map look far more detailed without actually cluttering the map. And that's not all, it actually does have a practical use for if you want to make hidden cave locations! By replacing one of the mountain tiles with the mountain cave tile (by using the shift key), you can then cover them over with the trees, making them impossible to see on the world map. This would of course be found by perhaps gaining a map somewhere in the game or forking out £10 on a strategy guide for your popular amateur game.

 

Snow Covered Areas

Now that the mountains, the trees, grass and coastlines have been addressed, we can move on to the snowy areas; the part of the tileset I consider to be the biggest pain to create. This is probably the hardest part of the chipset, so pay close attention, but also remember that I won’t be going into as much detail about the fundamental steps involved, as I have already explained the majority of them previously. Let's first start off with the corners of a new clump of land, ideally with tundra in the middle.

And then join up the dots, using the lowest layer that is possible to make it work correctly, as you will need to use the next layer above it for the icy cliffs and then hopefully have something spare for other objects without needing to use events.

Fill in the rest of the land and you'll be ready to start adding snow and ice over cliffs.

To make the cliff edges covered in ice, you select the next layer above what you have used to make the previous cliff edges (The ones next to the tundra), which, if you do it in the best possible way, means you can use either the second or third layer. That way you can put trees and other extras on the third layer without replacing any of the cliffs or using as many events. You should end up with something like below, although I haven't gone over all of the cliffs:

Now that those are done, we can add some snow to go with it. With the cliff edges that I have left untouched, I can add some snow that reaches and slightly overlaps the edge of the land mass. There are some cliffs on the tileset that are used specifically for this purpose. Find them and replace the current cliffs with them (Using the same layer as was used before on these particular tiles). This will again give you more options to add other things over these. You can also add to it by creating a section of where you would like your snow to cover, as shown below.

We must now return to the auto-tiles and select the snow tile. In a spacious area like the sea, draw a shape from the auto-tile that will provide the necessary snow tile pieces to finish off the snow clump on the map. Here is how my piece would appear.

By using the shift key and selecting the specific snow tiles that you need from the map, you can add them piece by piece onto the land so that the snow clump looks like it attaches to the rest of the map in the way as the normal snow tile does. Keeping them on the second layer would be the most suitable place for them, for the reasons I keep stating.

We're almost done here now. But the cliff edge should be over the snow mass here. It doesn't make too much sense, but it looks better. Just put that on the third layer instead of the second layer. That final change should make all the difference, as you can see below, since it no longer looks like there is any ugly overlapping going on.

That concludes this part of the tutorial and the final section of what I consider to be the tricky parts of the tileset. Of course, none of this will mean a lot if you have no idea what makes a world map a world map, so the next and final section is none other than:

Lore of World Map Design