I learned how easy it is to make a planet terrain generation program. All you really need is a recursive function that marks a tile as "land" and keeps on adding land in all four directions until it hits a random threshold.
Here are some of the planets it was able to make:
Now the generator adds forests (marked as '^') and mountain ranges (marked as '#'), as well as polar ice caps (marked as '*'). I was debating whether the forest or the mountain ranges get the carrot symbol given that it resembles both a mountain and a tree.
I would include deserts, but it would be much trickier since they need to be placed where they make sense.
I used the planet generator and town generator to make a solar system generator. It generates a random amount of planets with different climates: Lava, Rock, Forest, Desert, and Ice. The latter three can have towns in them. The former are just barren.
Here is a sample output:
I would also like to include name generation using any of these algorithms, but I also have a game that I'm working on.
I've created a town generator, so I decided to include it with the planet generator, and a planet will have a number of towns (marked as 'X') and a randomly generated layout for each town.
The output for all the towns along with the planet map is way too big to screenshot, but I do have a sample output on Pastebin.
https://pastebin.com/C5H2AQgk