Terra Firma
Terra Firma 1.0 Released
Today Terra Firma graduates from early access to full release with the release of version 1.0, which will be the final update to this free version. It's been a long road to get here- I've been developing Terra Firma for 7 years now, and everything so far has been done in my spare time between my full time job, family and other commitments.
A special thanks to everyone for playing, giving your support and feedback- it wouldn't have made it this far without you. Your enthusiasm for it has kept me working on it even when it seemed impossible to achieve the vision I had with the time I had available. A shoutout to all those people who have refuted the dozens of times someone has proclaimed the game dead- it ain't so!
I'm thrilled to announce that as of 2025 I'm finally able to work on this project as my full time job, and Terra Firma 2, a sequel that's jam packed with amazing features and improvements will be released later this year. See you all then!
Terra Firma 2 coming 2025!
I'm excited to announce that Terra Firma 2 is in full time development and will be releasing later this year. This will be a paid sequel to Terra Firma containing many exciting upgrades such as
- Temperature variations, with snowfall, ice and glacial erosion
- Rainfall editing and variations, allowing deserts, rainforests and everything in between
- 16 different biomes with plants and animals based on rainfall and temperature with completely redone visuals
- Different types of rock with different erosion characteristics
- Loading and saving worlds, importing and exporting worlds to various formats, including a minecraft exporter
- A campaign mode featuring 40+ worldbuilding challenges
- First person and flying camera modes
- Improved water simulation producing more coherent rivers and floodplains
amongst innumerable other improvements.
It's been a long road to get here. I've been developing Terra Firma for 7 years now, and everything so far has been done in my spare time between my full time job, family and other commitments. I'm thrilled to announce that as of 2025 I'm finally able to work on this project full time, and will continue to do so after the launch of Terra Firma 2 to support and grow the game we love.
A special thanks to everyone for playing the free version of Terra Firma. Without your support and feedback the game wouldn't have made it this far and there wouldn't be a Terra Firma 2. I appreciate everybody's patience with the glacial pace of updates when working on this part time, and I'm ecstatic to be able to give it my full attention now.
Terra Firma 2 coming 2025!
I'm excited to announce that Terra Firma 2 is in full time development and will be releasing later this year. This will be a paid sequel to Terra Firma containing many exciting upgrades such as
- Temperature variations, with snowfall, ice and glacial erosion
- Rainfall editing and variations, allowing deserts, rainforests and everything in between
- 16 different biomes with plants and animals based on rainfall and temperature with completely redone visuals
- Different types of rock with different erosion characteristics
- Loading and saving worlds, importing and exporting worlds to various formats, including a minecraft exporter
- A campaign mode featuring 40+ worldbuilding challenges
- First person and flying camera modes
- Improved water simulation producing more coherent rivers and floodplains
amongst innumerable other improvements.
It's been a long road to get here. I've been developing Terra Firma for 7 years now, and everything so far has been done in my spare time between my full time job, family and other commitments. I'm thrilled to announce that as of 2025 I'm finally able to work on this project full time, and will continue to do so after the launch of Terra Firma 2 to support and grow the game we love.
A special thanks to everyone for playing the free version of Terra Firma. Without your support and feedback the game wouldn't have made it this far and there wouldn't be a Terra Firma 2. I appreciate everybody's patience with the glacial pace of updates when working on this part time, and I'm ecstatic to be able to give it my full attention now.
Patch notes 27th August 2024
- Fixed issue on some AMD cards that was crashing the display driver, which resulted in crashing the game and potentially also causing a Blue screen of Death on windows
- Fixed a couple of rare but general crashes
- Fixed issue where game would crash rather than displaying information message when OpenGL version is not high enough on extremely underpowered computers, very old computer or computers without hardware graphics support
Terra Firma 0.3 Released!
Are you frustrated by your landform's inability to keep the shapes you so carefully crafted for it? Disappointed when your towering piles of dirt slump into gentle, featureless mounds? Yearning for something harder, more durable, something rock solid?
Today your prayers have been answered! Your terraforming activities are now enhanced with the power of stone. Watch lava flows solidify into Igneous rocks, or place sedimentary rocks made from thousands of years of accumulated sediment. Mountain chains, towering cliffs, deep gorges, mesas amongst innumerable other formations are now available for you to craft and explore.
New materials
Igneous and sedimentary rocks have been added, both with different physical properties and which erode in different ways, vastly increasing the range of landscapes that can be created. Rock layers stack on top of each other allowing erosion to sculpt complex and varied environments.
A new, streamlined and more powerful editing interface gives more options when terraforming.
New lighting model and shadows
A brand new lighting model has been developed, most notably with the addition of shadows. Watch the sun rise and the day progress across your worlds.
Topographic map view
Gain new insight into the contours of your landscapes with the topographic map view.
If you'd like to stay more up to date on development, contribute feedback and ideas, and discuss the game, the discord server is the best place to do so: https://discord.gg/8XVEgABE
v0.2.6 Released
The engineering department has toiled diligently to bring new, unparallelled levels of realism and control to your terraforming activities. Marvel at the way that rivers mazily meander on their way to the ocean, building up the land before overflowing their banks and changing course in ceaselessly unending permutations. Watch the water flow over your terrain accurately and at never before seen speeds, the accumulated force of quadrillions of drops of water relentlessly grinding mountain ranges into nothing as they sink beneath the ocean before your eyes.
Anisotropic adjustment
Changes have been made to the water simulation to make water less inclined to artificially flow in the four cardinal directions and more likely to follow the contours of the land. Previously many rivers would emerge flowing unnaturally straight towards one of the four sides of the map. This was especially noticeable flowing over land that was formed from lava flows and in river deltas near the ocean. Thanks to the players who gave feedback on this, especially VDOgamez who first reported the issue in the steam forums.
New Sedimentation Modelling
The way that rivers build up land from sedimentation has been reworked with separate small particle and large particle erosion and sedimentation taking place. These separate effects allow rivers to build levees which significantly alter the behaviour of rivers, especially in low-lying flood prone areas. Where rivers would previously form one uniform, very flat delta with identical flow across it, rivers now properly wind their way to the ocean, periodically overflowing their banks and changing direction as a different area is built up. Thank you to players on the discord who contributed to the new simulation, especially Radnugget for their insight into river levee formation.
Stability Fixes
Improvements have been made to the stability of the water simulation, which amongst other things, allows the addition of two new speeds (1000 years and 2000 years) to the simulation, allowing up to 4 times the rate of erosion as previously.
Coming Soon
Development is well underway on the campaign mode of the game, which will be announced and in beta in the coming months.
New version Beta now available
It is my pleasure to share with you the exciting news that your terraforming abilities will soon be significantly enhanced. Content yourselves no longer with the damp, moist, irrigating powers of water, or the stale and dry control of the height of land. Today you will wield the power of Hephaestus himself as molten lava pours forth from your fingers across the landscape at will, forming blazing rivers of fire that annihilate everything in their path. Observe the ancient battle between fire and water anew as the lava slows, cools and eventually becomes new foundations of earth, as is the fate of all once our brief spark dims and leaves this world.
Release 0.2.5
Now available using beta branch on steam. Will be released in 1 week, assuming no major breaking bugs
- Added lava
- Basic support for different types of rock that can erode at different speeds
- Fixed bug with key presses occasionally becoming stuck
Next Update
The addition of lava has made some properties of the water simulation that are suboptimal more pronounced, especially the tendency of water to flow the four cardinal directions rather than smoothing following the contours of the land. This will be addressed soon in a small update, as well as some other updates to water behavior.
Discord Server now live
If you'd like to get more involved with the game, Terra Firma now has a discord server where you can discuss the game, give feedback, learn about upcoming development and brainstorm ideas for what should be in the game.
v0.2 released
Animals
Various animals now appear on the game, including deer, ibex, bears, rabbits, crabs and crocodiles- you'll have to zoom in quite far on the map to see them. Different animals will appear depending on the different biomes that are present, whether it's plains, forest, coastal, swampy or ocean. The number and variety of animals will be continue to increase giving you more reason to experiment with the landscape and will make coming features such as variable rainfall, variable temperature, snow and ice a lot more impactful.
Visuals
Visuals have gotten a big overhaul. All models for trees have been redone, as well as new textures for ground and grass areas, new textures for river areas as well as sand in coast areas. The terrain rendering has been improved with occlusion shading added to give highlight variation in terrain relief. V-sync has also been added as an option in the settings menu.
Camera
The camera has been changed from an orthographic projection to a perspective based camera. The old camera displayed everything on screen at the same scale, which changed as you zoomed in. This led to crashes and poor performance when looking down hills at certain angles. The new perspective camera has varying levels of detail depending on how far away things are, and smooth transitions in between the various levels of detail. The terrain detail loading system has been completely rewritten to happen asynchronously in parallel, avoiding lag that could happen when the camera was zoomed in.
Minor Changes
- q/e keyboard shortcuts to rotate the camera
- Fixed crash affecting recent AMD cards with certain driver versions (Radeon 500 Series, Radeon 600 Series, Radeon Vega, others)
- Fixed rare crash when graphics card could not be determined
- Fixed bug where trees could float above the terrain
- Fixed bug with trees flickering or disappearing on some AMD cards and integrated graphics devices
- Innumerable other small changes and fixes
Debugging
Verification and performance tests have been added to the startup of the game. This both helps with debugging issues when users report crashes, as well as enabling performance settings to be customised depending on how powerful the computer is. A new debugging interface which collates all the different debug options has been added, as well as a custom profiling interface with tracing aimed at ensuring constant 60fps performance.
What's next
This update contains a lot of foundational work that was required to progress the game from what was essentially just a tech demo. Future updates building on this will be smaller and more frequent. Most likely upcoming releases will focus on new biomes as well as systems need to support them like temperature, varying rainfall, ice and snow.
New version Beta now available
Next Update Information
When I released the initial version of Terra Firma it was the most minimal, hacked together version of my vision for the game that I thought people could get any fun out of. The feedback has been amazing, far beyond my expectations for essentially a tech demo that I assumed only family and friends would play. The first release had a lot of shortcomings technically that have required a decent amount of rework to progress the game. Let's dive into what has been improved and what's coming for the next release.
The most important change is to the camera system. The current camera uses an orthographic projection, which makes everything the same size no matter how far away from the camera it is. The camera scale is changed as you zoom in and out, but there is no perspective- if you look downhill the trees at the bottom will be the same size as those far away. You can actually crash or vastly slow the game by looking downhill at the wrong angle and overloading the level of detail that is rendered. An orthographic camera makes a bunch of things about moving and zooming the camera easier but adding animals required a lot more care for how the game looks at close zoom levels, so it had to go. We now have a proper perspective camera with varying levels of detail depending on how far away things are, and smooth transitions in between. There is a lot of complexity behind this and it's been the majority of the work since the first release.
Looking downhill like this was not previously possible
The visuals have been given an overhaul- while not the focus of this update, the tree models have been replaced, all textures replaced with new textures for the river areas and shore areas too, making everything a bit nicer. It wouldn't do looking at that hideous grass model that we had before when you're watching animals running around.
A lot of work has been put into changing how the world updates. Whereas previously everything was running on a single thread, a whole new system to update the world using multiple parallel threads is now implemented. This will allow the game to smoothly generate and update loads of animals, befitting the scale of the game where you can zoom from kilometers in to individual trees. There are alternate debug views in game to monitor what the threads are doing, how they are communicating and how quickly the game is rendering to get as close to smooth 60fps as we can.
Everything running smoothly at 60fps
Debugging a dropped frame
Finally what all this has been working towards: being able to see creatures running around! This has been the focus since the first update as it really adds an extra dimension to playing around with the simulation. Already there are effectively different biomes such as forests, plains, swamps, rivers, lakes, the shore and ocean but there is very little to distinguish them. The different biomes will be inhabited by different animals giving you more reason to experiment with the landscape and will make coming features such as variable rainfall, variable temperature, snow and ice a lot more impactful.
I'm hoping to release the update before the end of the year. Thank you all for your feedback, testing and patient support so far. Rest assured that despite the occasional lack of communication this is being continually worked on- however with this major work soon to be completed I'll be able to release more regular, smaller updates.