Hey everyone,
I’m stepping away from making Roblox games, and rather than let old projects rot in a private repo somewhere, I’m open-sourcing them.
I originally built this for a horror game I was making. A month ago, I switched to building that game in Unreal Engine instead, since Roblox hasn’t been kind to small, talented creators.
Anyway, I’ve since cleaned up the terrain gen system so it’s pretty easy to drop into your projects.
You can access the project on GitHub here!
Alternatively, if you’d like to access the uncopylocked place it can be found here.
Features
- Chunk-based terrain loading and unloading around players
- Parallel Luau Actor workers for terrain computation
- Configurable fractal noise height generation
- Smoothed terrain surfaces
- Underground cave generation
- Small randomly generated springs/water pools
- Forest and plains biomes
- Deterministic vegetation placement
- Trees, rocks, flowers, ferns, and other vegetation
- Optional ore and chest generation in caves
- Deterministic generation from a shared server seed
- Automatic creation of all runtime folders, events, and workers
Installation
All terrain code belongs inside ServerScriptService.Terrain.
The required asset folders belong directly inside ReplicatedStorage.
ServerScriptService
└── Terrain
├── Config
├── Runtime
├── Noise
├── TerrainGen
├── Vegetation
├── OreGenerator
├── ChunkWorker
└── TerrainLoader
ReplicatedStorage
├── Rocks
├── Trees
└── Vegetation
ChunkWorker should stay disabled. TerrainLoader clones and enables it automatically inside the generated Actor workers.
You don’t need to create anything in Workspace. The system builds these folders at runtime:
Workspace
├── Vegetation
├── OreChunks
└── TerrainWorkers
Once the scripts and assets are in place, hit Play. Terrain generates around each player automatically.
Configuration
The main settings live in ServerScriptService.Terrain.Config.
You can configure:
- Seed behavior
- Chunk size and region height
- Player view distance
- Worker count
- Terrain height and noise scale
- Cave depth and frequency
- Spring size, frequency, banks, and water depth
- Forest and plains biome distribution
- Tree, rock, and vegetation density
- Ore rarity and cluster size
Setting Config.Seed to 0 picks a random seed each server. A specific number gives repeatable terrain.
Chunk size and region height need to stay multiples of the terrain cell size.
Springs and caves
These are separate features:
- Springs are the small surface water pools scattered through the generated terrain.
- Caves are the underground spaces carved with three-dimensional noise.
Both can be adjusted independently in Config.Spring and Config.Caves.
Optional ore generation
Ore generation stays inactive when ReplicatedStorage.Ores is absent.
To use it, add:
ReplicatedStorage
├── Ores
└── Chest
Each ore model needs a matching entry under Config.Ores.Definitions. The chest model is optional.
Public API
The main TerrainGen module exposes:
TerrainGen.ComputeChunk()TerrainGen.ApplyChunk()TerrainGen:GenerateChunk()TerrainGen:UnloadChunk()TerrainGen:GetNearestChunk()
So if you want to build your own streaming system instead of using the included player-based loader, you can use the generator directly through these.
Notes
- Generated runtime folders don’t need to be included in your place.
- Models can include an optional
OffsetVector3 attribute for placement correction. - Obviously, very large chunks or view distances will increase generation time and memory usage.
Feedback and contributions
Bug reports, improvements, and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.
If you end up using this system in your game, I’d love to see what you make.
