Raising moat without leaving artifacts

by WarLord_Designs

This tutorial will show designers how to raise moat without leaving the imperfections that usually occur when using the 1000 stone trick.

The moat tool can only be used on the lowest terrain height, which puts a limit on how and where it can be used; this quick guide will show designers how to raise it with minimal effort but does require prior knowledge of the 1000 stone trick.

As you can see in the diagram, the moat tool has a tendency of leaving dirty patches…


When trying to raise moat you need a strategy to get the required results, as you can see in this picture failure to do so leaves rather ugly results.

With that said, let’s start this tutorial.


I’ve divided the moat into single tiles to make things easier. Naturally it’s going to be rare when you have a practical use for a square chunk of moat but never fear this technique works well for irregular shapes as well, for demonstrational purposes a square is much easier to divide so let’s go with that.

We need a starting point and this is where the first tip is needed:

Never choose a tile on the edge of your moat, otherwise you will stamp dirty ground and have issues as the previous image showed.


As the yellow tile suggests I’ve gone ahead and chosen the inner most tile, let’s go and stamp that with a stone…


Done, but it’s produced dirty edges right in the middle of our moat! Again, as stated above never stamp these tiles and instead go for ones which have no dirt.


I tackle this using the same way I play minesweeper: look at the surrounding 8 tiles and stamp the ones which are not dirty, The ‘X’ indicates the dirty tiles while the ticks are where I’ve stamped.


We now have 3 tiles stamped and something nice has happened. 2 tiles on the edge of our moat are no longer dirty so while we have the opportunity lets go and stamp those. We need to get the “L-shaped” area of dirty tiles to become clean so they can be stamped however, the easiest way to make this happen is to stamp the clean tiles on the other side of them.


If a dirty tile is stuck between 2 clean tiles it will become clean itself.

As this picture illustrates the once dirty tiles have now disappeared, allowing us to stamp them. We can also stamp a couple of tiles on the edge. That’s basically it. You may have to temporarily add some moat around the edge to stamp some of the stubborn corner tiles but eventually you will have a perfect mass of moat which can be raised to any height you wish.


The possibilities are endless, hopefully this will give designers a chance to create large lakes, rivers and creeks in places where the river tool was either too blue or out of place.


Now that you’ve read this tutorial leave some feedback and make a request for the next one, we’re open to suggestions and will take anything on board.

Thanks for reading,

WL_D

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