## Terraforming

The land occupied by a coaster can be terraformed. The terrain is a grid of height points that can be raised or lowered. By default a coaster track does not have any terrain at all (flat land).

### Terrain Settings

Before the land can be terraformed, a few settings have to be made in the Terrain Settings which can be found in the Scenery Menu. The Terrain Settings are broken up into 3 basic sections, Mode, Land and Water. The Mode section right at the top determines the general appereance of the terrain. If the terrain is disabled, no terraforming can be done and the land will be entirely flat (default). The terrain detail determines the size of the terrain grid. The higher the detail level, the higher the polygon count and the more accurate you can modify the land. Any settings within the Land and Water section can be changed at any time. Changing the Mode settings will remove, reset or resample the Terrain Structure. Therefor it is recommended to set these options at the very beginning before doing the terraforming.

The Terrain Settings

The Land and Water settings make it possible to choose which textures should be used. A lot of predefined settings for Land and Water are available that will suit the beginners needs. I.e. Simply click Grass to set the Land texture to an included grass texture. Custom made textures can be applied by clicking on browse. All textures must be either 128 x 128, 256 x 256, or 512 x 512. While a texture of 1024 x 1024 is a valid size, it is not recommended. Only high-end video cards with a lot of video memory will be able to display these textures.

Ground is the texture that represent the coloring of the ground itself.
Repeats determines how many times the Ground texture is repeated across the entire terrain.

Detail is the actually detail of the ground. It is basically a gray scale light map.
Repeats determines how many times the Detail texture is repeated across the entire terrain.

Water is the texture for the liquid. This can be any liquid really, but commonly is water.
Repeats determines how many times the Water texture is repeated across the entire terrain.
Reflection is how much of the track, sky, terrain is reflected in the water texture. The value determines how much the actual Water texture shows through the reflection. A value of max means that no water texture will show through giving a very unrealistic perfect mirror effect. A value of off means that the water texture will show through entirely leaving nothing of the reflection itself.
Waves controls the wave strength of the water.

### Terrain editing

If a the coaster contains a terrain, terraforming can be done by switching to the 3D-view and selecting the 1x1, 3x3 or 5x5 terraforming edit mode from the menu or by clicking on the corresponding toolbar buttons. The terraforming edit mode toolbar buttons are not visible by default. The toolbar can be customized by choosing Customize Toolbar... from the Windows menu. The terraforming mode determines the affected size of the area the user can alter. To change the height of a piece of land, drag the area with the mouse. By holding the shift-key while dragging, the area will be leveled first.

Editing Terrain

The Water level is right under height zero. To get the water visible, the land has to be lowered under zero. It is recommended to first layout the coaster track and do the terraforming at the last step.