# World Orogen

> Procedural planet generator — free, browser-based, no signup required.

World Orogen generates realistic procedural planets shaped by tectonic plate simulation, erosion, and climate modeling. It runs entirely in the browser using Three.js and requires no installation, account, or payment.

## What it does

- Generates unique terrestrial planets with realistic continents, mountains, ocean trenches, and volcanic islands
- Simulates tectonic plates with convergent, divergent, and transform boundaries
- Applies glacial, hydraulic, and thermal erosion to carve fjords, river valleys, and talus slopes
- Simulates seasonal climate: wind patterns, ocean currents, precipitation, and Köppen classification
- Creates hotspot volcanism with drift-trail island chains (like Hawaii)
- Allows interactive editing — select multiple tectonic plates for batch reshaping with visual preview before rebuild
- Import your own equirectangular B&W heightmaps (Earth, Mars, hand-drawn) onto a 3D globe with automatic climate simulation
- Import a painted map whose colours are uplift rates and erodibilities (with a legend JSON) and solve it with stream-power erosion into terrain with real rivers, divides and drainage basins; export class, uplift, erodibility, drainage, slope, basin and overlay maps
- Show each class's typical and divide hillslope angle before solving, so a legend's uplift rates can be read as terrain rather than as numbers
- Annotate a painted world with an overlay layer of forests, settlements, roads and coastlines, drawn as a texture over the globe and the map, where one mark property pins or roughens the shore
- Export a window of the planet as Unreal Engine landscape tiles — per-tile 16-bit heights at 255*N+1 vertices, an 8-bit weightmap per paint layer, and a manifest that records the scale, the window in degrees and the projection, so the game engine side never has to guess metres-per-pixel

## Who it's for

- Worldbuilders creating fantasy or sci-fi settings
- Game developers who need heightmaps for Unity, Unreal, or other engines
- Tabletop RPG players building campaign worlds (D&D, Pathfinder, etc.)
- Fantasy/sci-fi authors designing believable planets
- Artists and hobbyists who enjoy procedural generation
- Educators teaching plate tectonics and planetary science

## Key capabilities

- Multiple views: terrain, satellite biome, Köppen climate, heightmap
- 26 detailed inspection layers (geology, atmosphere, ocean, climate)
- Export high-resolution equirectangular maps up to 65,536px wide
- Shareable planet codes — copy a compact code to reproduce any planet exactly
- Works on desktop and mobile browsers
- No build step, no dependencies to install — pure ES modules

## URL

https://orogen.studio/

## Technical details

- Built with Three.js (WebGL), vanilla JavaScript ES modules
- Fibonacci sphere meshing with Voronoi tessellation
- Braun-Willett stream power erosion, Barnes et al. pit-filling algorithm
- Dual-model precipitation (advection simulation + zonal heuristic)
- Fully client-side — no server, no data collection