MultiLayer Generation

[JensFontys]

Hi Godot people!

Im new to godot (or any real gamedev in that sense) and I'm trying an voxel blocky approach. I got pretty far in generation, and movement etc, but i keep getting stuck at the idea of creating a DEEP world with multiple different layers. (eg. top grass, dirt, stone, ore generation in stone, deepstone, etc) I tried doing a graph approach but that doenst really work out for me. now i tried this demo from zylann themself and im still none the wiser on doing multiple layers or blocks at multiple places. Will there be someone that is going to do tutorials? If i get better at this I'll definitely try doing so. Thanks for reading and I look forward to any response! <3

[Zylann]

Doing multiple layers shouldn't actually be difficult, if all it takes is deciding of which thing goes at which height.

If you know how to determine ground height, then that's one layer. You can repeat the process by calculating any other layer from there by subtracting either constants values, or more noise to get some variations. Then instead of testing if you're above or below ground level (first layer), then you do that multiple times for every layer.

Here would be a basic way of doing that with if statements, you check from bottom to top:

var ground_height := noise_stuff();
# `depth` variables can be constants that get higher and higher the deeper you go, maybe slowly changing based on biome or whatever
# `variation` could be either 0 or a slight 2D noise
var dirt_height := ground_height - avg_dirt_depth + dirt_variation
var stone_height := ground_height - avg_stone_depth + stone_variation
var deepslate_height := ground_height - avg_deepslate_depth + deepslate_variation
var bedrock_height := ground_height - avg_deepslate_depth + deepslate_variation

if y <= bedrock_height:
    bedrock
elif y <= deepslate_height:
    deepslate
elif y <= stone_height:
    stone
elif y <= dirt_height
    dirt
elif y == ground_height:
    grass
else:
   air

(this is not code to copy paste, I didnt test it, it's only to illustrate my point)

Now there could be optimizations I suppose. For example you could find for the current column of voxels in your chunk which layers intersect, and then only do those instead of checking them all for every voxel. I don't have examples of that though.
Graphs can do this by chaining Select nodes.

Regarding ores, you could either do them with cellular/spot noise, filtered out by your layers, or treat them as structures like trees and use the same technique to place them.

Unfortunately I don't plan to do whole tutorials on every aspects of terrain generation, it can get really complicated (and some things are quite difficult to do with the current pipeline), and I'm doing other stuff of my free time. I do some examples when I experiment on some things or make specific features but otherwise you have to find things out.
Note that you can also ask on the Discord server if someone else can help as well.

[JensFontys]

Thank you so much, ill look into this. I didnt know there was a discord, ill look into that aswell. thank you for your time