Velora
Click a planet to fly to it. Scroll to zoom the system.
Extras
Download textures
Maps are baked from this planet with the current settings. Equirectangular, seamless left to right.
Free for personal and commercial use. Credit to openbench.fun is welcome. The zip includes a README.
One number, one world
Everything above is drawn by a single shader running on your graphics card. There are no textures, no models and no photos. The seed is fed through a hash, and every decision that follows asks that hash for its answer. Type the same seed on any device and the same world turns up, down to the last island.
Continents
The ground is layers of 3D noise, each one twice as fine and half as strong as the one before, bent a little by a second noise so coastlines wander like real ones. A separate ridged noise rises only over high ground, which is what raises mountain chains out of continents instead of out of the sea floor. The closer you zoom, the more layers are added, so detail keeps appearing instead of blurring.
The sea level slider doesn't change the terrain. It moves the waterline over the same relief, so you can drain an ocean world into a dry one and watch the old sea floor become a continent.
Climate
Every point gets a temperature from its latitude, minus a penalty for altitude. Moisture follows bands like on Earth: wet at the equator, dry in the desert belts around 30 degrees, wet again further out. Warm and dry turns to desert, wet turns to forest, cold turns to ice, and cold seas freeze over into pack ice.
Light
Mountains are shaded from the slope of the terrain at pixel size. Oceans reflect the sun as a sharp glint and the sky at grazing angles. Clouds are lit from the sun side, shade their own undersides and cast shadows on the ground. Rings throw a shadow across the planet and the planet shadows the rings. The glow at the edge is a short march through a thin shell of air that turns orange where sunlight crosses it at a low angle.
Export
The texture maps come from the same material code as the picture on screen, rendered straight onto a flat map in strips so even the 8192 by 4096 size runs on modest graphics cards. Heights are packed into two bytes per pixel and written out as a real 16-bit PNG. Normal maps are computed from neighbouring heights, one pixel apart, so they stay sharp at every size.
Solar systems
The Solar system button grows a whole star system from the same kind of seed: a star, four to seven planets, and worlds that suit their distance from it. Hot ones near the star are lava and desert, temperate and ocean worlds sit in the middle, and ice and exotic worlds orbit far out. Click any planet to fly to it, and the same planet can be exported as textures.