Shape terrain and cliffs in the Retold editor

By Yeebaagooon · retold

Learn how the Retold editor’s brushes, elevation tools and terrain operations fit into scenario construction.

By Yeebaagooon
created 28-Aug-2024

Welcome to the scenario editor. Today you will learn how to manipulate the terrain via the terrain and cliff tools. We will also cover brush settings and elevation.

Let’s start simple and paint some terrain. Across the top of the editor you will find the toolbar. Click on ‘terrain’ and a drop-down menu will appear. From here select the first option – ‘paint terrain’.

A new menu will appear, listing all the available terrain types in the game. Find one you like and click on it with the left mouse button.

You will notice your cursor has changed to a rectangular box. If you click on the map, the area of the rectangle (or the brush) will paint your chosen terrain to that square. If you click and drag, you will be able to pain the terrain as you move your move.

Painting the terrain with left click and drag

When you are painting the terrain you may want greater control over your brush. We can make it bigger, smaller and even change the shape by using the brush settings option.

Brush Settings

With the terrain selection box still open, click terrain on the top toolbar again and select ‘brush settings‘. Another box will pop up allowing you to change the properties of your brush. You can slide the scaler to change the size or click the buttons to change the shape. This is also possible via hotkeys:

Size: 1 – 0 for corresponding size
Size: - (smaller) and + (larger) (only with brush tool open)
Shape: Circle [ and Rectangle ]

Since we’ve mentioned brush size it is worth mentioning the terrain elevation tool.

Adjust elevation tool

Now you have a brush type selected, you can use the adjust elevation tool to fine tune the map height under your brush. You will notice a new box with a slider has popped up in the bottom left of your screen allowing you to alter the speed at which the elevation will change.

To raise terrain – press and hold the right mouse button
To lower terrain – press and hold the leftmouse button

Again, you can move the mouse with your desired button held to change the elevation over an area. Beware large elevation changes can distort the map.

The Cliff Tool

The cliff tool is slightly more complicated – as it will combine changing terrain type as well as terrain height. To open the cliff tool, you can either select the drop down from the terrain menu or click the cliff tool button on the toolbar directly.

This is what the interface looks like. You will notice that instead of choosing terrain names we can now choose pre-defined cliff types. If you now left click your mouse it will combine painting elevation and terrain to form an impassable cliff. Let’s look at the control panel and the options the cliff tool gives us in more detail:

Greek grass type cliff, painted with the left settings.

Options explained:

Paint terrain – With this option off the cliff tool simply changes elevation alone. Disable and the cliff will be painted as well.
Place embellishment – Puts down some relevant shrubbery/scenery items.
Remove nature objects – Removes tress/shrubs/grass etc.
Remove non-nature objects – Removes player objects
Apply elevation – Changes the elevation, not much point having this off
Apply smoothing – When off your cliff will be a vertical face, when off it is smoother
Use second edge layer – paints terrain on the outside of the cliff as well as the inside
Disable side layer – paints everything except the cliff terrain

The sample elevation tool

This tool is represented by a pipette button. It is useful for painting areas the same height.

With the tool open, right click a desired area to sample the height of the terrain. This saves the height of the terrain. Now if you left click and drag you will paint all terrain the exact same height that you defined with your right click. This is handy for smoothing areas, creating plateaus, or creating a cliff of the same height.

Illustration for The sample elevation tool: With the tool open, right click a desired area to sample the height of the terrain. This saves the…

The smooth and roughen tools

For further terrain manipulation, you can ask the game to smooth or roughen an area.
These tools are quite basic and potentially damaging. I certainly recommend experimenting with them in a blank map rather than using them on an area you have spent a long time crafting.

The copy and paste terrain tools

These are advanced powerful tools that are actually really easy to use. They appear to only be accessed from their respective icons on the editor ribbon menu, rather than as a dropdown. However this is because they are located under the edit dropdown menu rather than the terrain one.

Open up the terrain copy tool and then use the mouse to click and drag to select a rectangular area you wish to copy. The tool will not copy water, but has the ability to copy objects as well (preserving a lot of their properties), and it is this ability which makes the tool so useful and powerful. If you’re experimenting, this is best done on an area with terrain changes, elevation changes and plenty of custom objects. I’ve got an example below.

The results from terrain copy (left) to terrain paste (here), with multiple areas of cliff pasted across the map.

Source: Yeebaagooon · HeavenGames