Question how to duplicate and seperate terrain files?

I want to duplicate a terrain that I created and I want the changes I made to that terrain to not be mirrored on the original terrain and of course vise versa. The normal procedure for other objects does not seem to work for terrain so a quick explanation of how to do this would be appreciated.

 

Unless you made a duplicate of the terrain BEFORE you made changes, its not possible that i know of. Maybe im misunderstanding due to the limited info.

If you take a terrain from one scene and place it in a new scene, nothing will be mirrored, as they are 2 seperate scenes. So maybe you need to create seperate scenes.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by before you made changes. Do you mean to the original? Because that would be useless and if you mean the duplicate, I don't see any problem I just need to know how.

I've built a scene with a terrain and terrain asset and copied all three, so it's a new scene, it still mirrors changes. I've also created a new scene and copied in the terrain with same result.

Searching online there seems to be years of confusions surrounding how to do this, but it seems like an obvious need for several reasons.

For Example:
A scene before after an event, such as the passage of time, a war, a disaster or just simple progress, so whatever. Before and After. You don't want to make a new terrain from scratch.

A terrain that you want to build for all 4 seasons and paint with spring, summer, fall and winter colors. Again, nobody wants to build a new terrain to do that.

I put this question up over the weekend, hopefully someone will come back on Monday and tell me to "click" something and this nightmare will be over.

Edit: According to this thread you basically have to cheat Unity in order to accomplish this? Why would that be the case? https://answers.unity.com/questions/25335/duplicate-terrain.html

Also now I realize I should should be posting this in Unity questions I guess? I don't know since questions is a tag here.

 

I read the post you linked, it does seem to be an odd problem. Hope you get an answer. However i can say, one of the answers posted is the exact way i do it, and works:
"I also found another solution (the last two answers weren't working for me). Instead of duplicating my terrain asset in Unity, these are the steps I took."

• Close Unity
• Go to the folder that holds your Terrain.asset
• Duplicate that file (so the .meta file isn't created)
• Paste that file where you want it to be
• Open Unity (now it'll create a .meta file that is specific to the new terrain)
• Drag your .asset into your scene and VOILA!

 

@warthos3399 Appreciate the replies. I was afraid this would create an additional level of jank in my project, however it seems like judging by my google searches, discord inquires, and forum query that I don't have a legitimate method to do something that to me seems like something that anyone who makes terrain would demand as a basic feature.