TerrainForge

0.1.x

0.1.0

29 October 2026 · Installed through the account app

The first PREVIEW release. Node-based terrain for Unreal Engine 5.8: build a terrain as a graph, preview any node live, compute it on the GPU or the CPU, and import it as a World Partition landscape with paint layers, rivers and lakes. Or start from a real place. TerrainForge is a paid plugin, free during the preview. Everything runs inside the editor; it starts no other program.

Added

Graph & nodes

• A terrain graph editor. A node library with search, a graph canvas with validation, a node inspector, and undo for every edit. Terrain Definition assets live under Add → Automation Forge → TerrainForge.
• 94 node types in nine groups. Generate (noise, gradients, imported heightfields), Select (height, slope, curvature, aspect, relative height, occlusion, rock and soil maps), Shape (warps, blurs, terraces, curves, upscale detail), Layer (a seven-layer stack and 24 blend modes), Simulate, Landforms, Water, Color and Export.
• Erosion and geology in metres and years. Particle erosion with sediment transport, stream power with deposition and deltas, hydraulic, thermal, talus and wind erosion, glaciers with U-shaped valleys and cirques, rockfall and scree, gullies, valley fill, snow with avalanches, and a folded, faulted rock volume that erosion exposes.
• Landforms you place. Mountains, winding mountain ranges, ridgelines drawn in the layout view, canyons, volcanoes, craters, island outlines, dune fields, plateaus, lava flows and rock strata.
• Your own data. Import a heightmap or mask (PNG, TIFF, RAW or R16) as a source node, up to 16 per definition. Save and open a whole graph as a portable JSON project with its sources.
• Named outputs. Any node output can be exported as its own 16-bit map, including normal and ambient-occlusion maps for materials.

Preview & GPU

• Live previews. Select a node and the 3D Terrain viewer shows it, at a coarse size first and then in full, with drainage water if you want it.
• GPU compute, built in. Blur, flow accumulation, particle erosion (with the rock volume), scree, and the parallel droplets of Hydraulic and Weathering run on a DirectX 12 GPU. The default policy, Auto, uses the GPU where a node has a kernel and the CPU elsewhere. A kernel that cannot run falls back to the CPU on its own.
• Measured speed. On an RTX 5080 Laptop GPU, a full 4033 build of the 4 km alpine preset took 79 s with Auto against 233 s on the CPU alone. Other machines differ.
• Builds that reuse work. A build runs the passes Base, Geology, Detail, Water and Maps, and reuses every pass whose inputs did not change. Results are the same for any number of CPU threads.
• Memory you control. Working-memory and GPU-memory budgets, a node cache, spill to disk, and an estimate of a build's memory before you start it.
• A Build monitor. Per-node progress, the device each node ran on, memory, time left, the maps written, and the last 12 builds of each definition.
• Takes you keep. Every build is saved as a take that is never overwritten: 16-bit heightmaps, paint weights that sum to 255, slope, aspect, flow, wetness, deposition, snow and moisture maps, biome and PCG masks, water outlines and meshes, a preview and a validation report.

World & landscape import

• Import as new level. A take becomes a new World Partition map with the landscape, paint layers and layer infos, a generated landscape material, engine water bodies for lakes and rivers, and a sun, sky and fog. It never writes over an existing map.
• Large maps. Output sizes from 1009 to 16321 samples. The editor imports up to 8129 samples, with Nanite up to 4033, and a memory guard refuses an import that would not fit.
• Headless import for the largest maps. The TerrainForgeImport commandlet builds the landscape one streaming proxy at a time. A 16321 take with 8 paint layers and 56 water bodies imported with a peak of about 7.7 GB in our test, editor start-up included. -VerifyLevel checks a saved map against its take at every vertex.
• Export bundles. Bind take files to Landscape layers, PCG masks or textures, validate them, and write a Terrain Export Bundle asset with the textures, layer infos and hand-off files.

Rivers, lakes & biomes

• Water three ways. Draw rivers with per-point widths and branching junctions, place lakes at a chosen level, or let drainage route rivers and fill lakes from the terrain.
• Water-shaped terrain. River channels sized by their discharge, floodplains and terraces, lake shores with beaches, rocky benches and reed shelves, a sea level with cliffs and beaches, and a hydrology fix that makes every basin drain.
• Biomes. Temperate, arid and alpine biome presets turn height, slope, moisture, snow and water into paint layers and PCG masks. Treeline and snowline can follow the map's relief.

Maps & GIS

• A map in the editor. Search places offline or online, paste coordinates or map links, show relief, see which elevation source covers a square best, and see the landscape components and streaming proxies a square becomes. Quick 3D shows a square at about 30 m before you import.
• Discover and import real terrain. Ten elevation sources (France ×2, Switzerland, the United States, Norway, the Netherlands, England, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Copernicus and Terrain Tiles worldwide), ESA WorldCover land cover and 14 OpenStreetMap feature sets. Import the elevation plus up to 15 masks into a new graph or an existing one, for squares from 500 m to 50 km.
• Fast once downloaded. A 4033 import with 12 masks takes 2 to 3 seconds from cached data on a 24-thread CPU. Downloading usually takes longer and depends on the providers.
• Attribution recorded for you. Every import stores each dataset's source, licence and credit line in the definition. An export of OpenStreetMap vectors (gis_vectors.geojson) writes the ODbL notice beside it.
• No accounts or keys for data. Every elevation, land-cover and OpenStreetMap source is public. Optional map layers from Esri, MapTiler, Stadia, Thunderforest and Mapbox take your own key.

Level projects

• Check location. Test a square against a requirement profile: each requirement is covered by real data, partly covered, or replaced by a generated fill. The verdict is ready, ready with fills, or not recommended.
• Create level project. Build a 1 m level grid at 2017 or 4033 samples from the checked data and its fills, in about 5 seconds at 4033 from cached data on a 24-thread CPU. Undo restores the previous graph.
• The game_level profile. Elevation and eleven land requirements, painted into eight layers (Snow, Rocks, Scree, Meadow, Wetland, Soil, Forest, Water) with drainage water.
• Your own profiles. JSON files in <Project>/Config/TerrainForge/GISProfiles, or in folders you add in the settings, add profiles or replace a shipped one.

Agents & MCP

• TerrainForgeToolset, a free Apache-2.0 companion plugin: 44 typed MCP tools over the editor's own API, from presets and graph edits to builds, GIS, level projects, export and level import, with eight native agent skills.
• Blueprint and editor scripting. The subsystems and the preset library are callable from Blueprint and editor scripts.

Presets

• 18 presets. Two eroded alpine presets (4 km at 4033 and 8 km at 8129) and 16 more: alpine ridges, layered and authored canyons, coastal and volcanic islands, placed mountains, dunes and mesa, a weathered massif and canyon, alpine materials, drawn river water, a crater lake, branching and widening rivers, talus breakdown and a wind-worn desert.
• A preset picker with thumbnails, from the Content Browser, the Start from preset toolbar button, Blueprint or the toolset.

Compatibility

• Unreal Engine 5.8, Windows (Win64), editor only. TerrainForge turns on the engine's Water and Procedural Mesh Component plugins.
• A DirectX 12 GPU (Shader Model 5 or later) for GPU compute. Without one every node runs on the CPU.
• Internet only for the map and GIS. Graph editing, previews, builds and imports work offline.
• TerrainForgeToolset 0.1.0 pairs with this version.

Known issues

• Builds do not survive an editor restart. A build stops when the editor closes and cannot be reconnected. Build again.
• Seam normals after a headless import. Normals on streaming-proxy seams can differ by up to 106 of 255 on steep slopes until the editor's next edit-layer merge. The engine blends them at runtime.
• Slow water saves. Each water body takes 3 to 70 seconds to save during an import.
• Plain first materials. The generated landscape material uses flat layer colours, and water uses the engine's default materials.
• Edge streaks in biomes. With the default moisture setting, Forest, Meadow and Soil can streak on smooth slopes near the map edges. moisture_wetness: mfd removes them; the alpine presets use it.
• A busy OpenStreetMap server. The public Overpass server is shared and is sometimes busy. Imports wait and retry, and say so in their notes. You can add your own server in the TerrainForge GIS settings.
• UK and Netherlands datum. Elevation there is placed to about 2 m and 1 m, because the national datum grids are not applied.
• A preview. File formats, settings and saved data may change between versions. Keep backups.