Question how to make terrain and world map like Valheim?

Hi i'm a bit of a semi newb i've dabbled in making my own small games over the years and now am just starting on a larger project I want to do, I'm pretty new to unity.

I was wondering if anyone knows what kind of resources I would need to make terrain and a world map similar to the one in Valheim, it doesn't have to be randomly generated, but it has pretty much exact style I want to go for, but im at a bit of a loss at where to begin.

 

Where you always begin! Blank scene, lay down a terrain, then start looking for placeholder google image assets to help you flesh things out, make some terrain features, iterate, replace, make some props, get some props from the asset store, etc..

Keep in mind something like just the terrain alone in Valheim probably represents thousands if not tens of thousands hours of dedicated work by people who professionally know how to produce environments and props, working from a cascade of initial concept art, pre-production design, iterating on design and look, playtesting, etc..

I'm not saying this to discourage you but rather to give you a reasonable set of expectations of what you can come up with if you spend (for example) 1 hour working on this, or 10 hours working on this, or 100 hours, etc.

 

I think the OP was also maybe highly likely and mostly referring to the ability to manipulate terrain during runtime, because Valheim devs have said most of their assets are from packs (not made by them), but of course, they have stylized it to make it their own.

What is intriguing is the method they used to create their terrain manipulation. I read that it is not a true voxel-like terrain manipulation because you can't create caves (think of NMS, minecraft), and that it is manipulating heightmaps.

I would also be interested in knowing if they used an off-the-shelf solution or if they implemented their own.

 

Perhaps it's just stock Unity terrain. Nothing preventing you from modifying heightmaps in realtime there.

 

They use a very specific technique that you can reverse engineer just by using their debug mode (been a while can't remember if that's what they call it). But you can move around with the camera away from the player and see what is going on.

They use a single very low res mesh for the entire world. And a dynamic grid of meshes close to the player. They then push down the low res mesh in the shader in a circular pattern of sorts with the center area being lower and rising to where it roughly aligns to the high res mesh edges. There are huge gaps but their dense fog and low view distance let them blend it in fairly well. But you can totally see the hard popping in of the high res where it meets the low res, it's very noticeable especially once you know the approach.

The same functionality of Valheim using Unity terrains would be non trivial, even without the procedural generation.

 

Tens thousands working hours to make the procedural generation in Valheim? By professionals that know already how to do it? And this only for the terrain?
No offend but if you do think so you really don't know what you're talking about.

Procedural terrain generation is a very common and well documented technique that is fairly easy to implement. Moreover the technique used in Valheim rest on a very basic perlin noise algorithm which is the straightest way to the point for this purpose.
Finally, it exists already tons of tutorial and plugin that do most of the job for you and as Valheim team used assets pack for their probs, they did the same for a lot of their environment programming (ocean, weather) as a normal and pragmatic smart indie team would do.