Regional plants, wildlife, ground, and ordinary buildings

Earth content has three independent regional channels. Ecological geography selects vegetation and ground palettes. Architectural geography selects building recipes. Wildlife combines ecology, native-country limits, and mapped habitat. They share composable content packs and bounded quality settings; plants/buildings use deterministic tile generation, while animals use a separate deterministic population and movement loop. Mapped land cover, building use, footprints, and measurements remain the local evidence.

Content and downloads

Pack	Regional content	Role
molen.ecology	Ecological atlas, plant presets, habitat profiles	ecology-atlas, regional-catalog
molen.wildlife	Procedural animals, habitat populations, attributed native-country limits	wildlife-ranges, regional-catalog
molen.earth	Architectural region outlines	atlas
molen.worldgen.default	Architectural profiles, archstyles, shared materials	regional-catalog, stylepack

openPacksFromIndex includes ecology and wildlife among the default Earth pack IDs. Hosts still supply the index URL and opened packs; the kernel never fetches data. loadEarthContent discovers regional catalogs across those packs, validates references, and passes plain documents to the worker. An architecture-only catalog works without an ecological atlas. A catalog scoped to a different style pack is omitted, so a custom style pack can retain the ecological content.

The ecological atlas and catalog total about 169 KB gzip (173 KB as a content pack). Its 264 procedural plant presets need no GLB downloads. The architectural atlas is about 313 KB gzip; ordinary regional recipes are small JSON files using the default pack's shared material graphs. Authored landmark GLBs continue to use the existing geographically sharded, lazy model archives.

Geographic evidence

The ecological atlas derives from RESOLVE Ecoregions 2017 under CC-BY-4.0. It uses a quarter-degree grid with run-length encoded rows. Metadata retains 847 source entries, including rock and ice; 843 appear in the reduced grid. Small islands use intersecting land polygons when a cell center misses land. Four very small source regions fall below this resolution. This describes potential habitat, not current vegetation or species observations. Actual local land cover controls whether a plant can be placed.

Architectural envelopes derive from Natural Earth 1:50m country outlines, which are public domain. Exterior rings are simplified at 0.02 degrees and coordinates rounded to 0.001 degrees. The shipped atlas groups 241 country/territory features into 53 broad envelopes, retaining the Pacific Northwest and US Southwest subregions. Exact containment wins; an optional nearest-outline fallback fills otherwise unclassified coastal gaps within 2.5 km in local world coordinates. These envelopes are visual priors, not building-style surveys or a political boundary service.

Ecological lookup uses a separate grid, so a national border does not move a forest. Each plant candidate and each building centroid resolves its own profile. Ground meshes sample regional palettes at vertices, and worker-generated surfaces use the same samples. Uncovered ecological cells are visible in generation diagnostics and do not receive invented wild vegetation.

Bare and distant terrain receives the same ecological ground palette before detailed map surfaces arrive. createRegionalGroundColor supplies the terrain stream's optional surfaceColor callback; it runs before upload for both worker-prepared and local meshes and returns linear RGB. An explicit host style.ground palette takes precedence in mountEarthView. Nature-reserve, national-park and protected-area designations retain their protection metadata, but do not paint over the physical habitat beneath them. With no mapped physical cover, sparse open-ground planting remains a prior, rather than inferred forest or a wildlife-presence claim.

Composable catalogs

molen/regional-catalog@1 contains profiles, scatters, optional plants, animals, populations, and exact-version requires. The overrides list names items intentionally replaced from required catalogs. Load order has no effect. Missing dependencies, accidental ID collisions, unused overrides, missing references, and equal-priority overlapping profiles in the same channel are errors.

A profile matches any listed value within a dimension and all specified dimensions together: biomes, realms, ecoregions, and architectural atlas regions. Higher priority wins independently for scatter, buildings, and wildlife. A botanical module can refine the vegetation without changing buildings; a city architecture module can refine buildings without rearranging plants. Architecture catalogs may name stylePack, matching the resolved style pack's name identity (the default is molen-worldgen-default, distinct from its content-pack ID).

Use the registered schemas through molen schema get regional-catalog and molen schema get ecology-atlas. The low-level API accepts already-loaded data:

import {
  createRegionalEnvironment,
  createRegionalLibrary,
} from '@bendyline/molen-worldgen-earth/kernel';

// Validate dependencies and architectural references against the host's resolved pack.
const library = createRegionalLibrary(catalogs, pack);
const environment = createRegionalEnvironment(
  { atlas: ecologicalAtlas, catalogs: [...library.catalogs] },
  metersPerUnit,
  architecturalRegionResolver,
);
const selection = environment.at(worldX, worldZ);

Pass this environment to the Earth tile adapter/renderer; pass its docs to the corresponding worker bridge. The worker and renderer must use the same documents. ModelLibrary accepts the environment's library.plants as its fourth constructor argument (including any derived seasonal variants). Geometry is cached separately by preset and LOD, and released when its last consumer drops it. Content hashes include regional documents; placement seeds stay tied to individual scatter IDs/versions rather than unrelated catalogs.

Plant and building selection

The plant families cover broadleaf, conifer, palm, cactus, succulent, bamboo, banana, grass, fern, reed, mangrove, deadwood, shrub, thicket, forb, vine, mat, and fallen-wood silhouettes. Habitats combine canopy, understory, ground cover, open land, parks, orchards, and wetlands. Regional refinements keep American cacti out of Old World wild desert profiles and avoid applying Australian eucalyptus profiles to New Zealand.

Each of the 78 plant forms has a base, spreading, and slender preset, available in every applicable habitat and crop rule. Optional shapeSeed varies branch/frond arrangements, crown contours and stem profiles independently of the placement seed. Dimensions, crown height, trunk lean and restrained foliage tones also vary; these are visual forms, not additional taxa. All 19 procedural families share the existing near/medium/far triangle limits.

Brush and ground coverage

Shrubs and thickets have multiple stems and foliage at several heights. Grass and reed patch recipes contain five tussocks with seed heads; fern colonies contain three overlapping plants. Herb patches, trailing ground vines, low moss/litter mats, fallen trunks and small trees fill the space below the canopy. Humid tropical climber recipes add vines around their own generated trunk and hanging from their branches. They do not attach to arbitrary mapped trees or buildings.

Natural forest, wood, scrub and heath receive an understory scatter layer. Open grassland and savanna receive sparser brush. Cultivated polygons, parks, gardens and residential land do not receive wild overgrowth from these rules. Explicit wetland labels permit sedge patches; desert profiles retain sparse dry forms and never acquire humid forest plants.

The optional clustering sharedSeed coordinates broad patches across vegetation layers while keeping each rule's placements independent. detailScale adds smaller clumps and gaps inside those patches. These are deterministic visual density fields, not a simulation of individual plants competing for sunlight or measured local occupancy. Low vegetation uses smaller path and building clearances than trees; road surfaces, buildings and water remain excluded.

Earth tiles reserve maxUnderstoryInstances / maxUnderstoryModels separately from canopy and groundcover. At the finest level, Economy allows 450 brush instances/two models, Balanced 1,600/three, and High 2,400/four. One coarser level retains 80/250/400 instances respectively; coarser levels omit brush. Existing groundcover instance caps stay at 0/5,000/8,000, with 0/five/seven model slots. Economy keeps simplified shrub masses while omitting fine blades and litter. These are per-tile limits, not whole-scene frame-rate guarantees.

The brush milestone's 234 recipes produce 324 appearances including deciduous seasons. All geometry is generated and shared by recipe and LOD; the brush expansion adds about 25 KB to the compressed ecology pack and no GLB downloads. Reproduce comparison captures with node content/ecology/source/preview-regions.mjs --brush and node content/ecology/source/preview-diversity.mjs --brush in the engine repository.

Scatter populations can supply weighted variants: [{ model, weight }]. The parent model is their interchangeable fallback and its weight still controls species proportions. Variant selection uses an independent random stream, keeping positions, density, crop rows and ordinary quality thinning intact. A tile reserves a base form for each retained species before admitting extra variants into spare model slots. Unretained forms use that base instead of disappearing; Economy and distant views therefore show fewer forms without increasing draw limits. Variant recipes must be suitable for the same habitat and placement-scale bounds as their parent.

Mapped trees preserve source species, genus, leafType, height, and crownDiameter when available. Exact species names take precedence over genus names; preset taxa names match case-insensitively. These choose a representative silhouette, not a botanically exact specimen. Observed trees may be planted outside their native habitat. Unknown trees use compatible local park-tree populations, with the legacy measured broadleaf/conifer form as a fallback. Crown width and height scale independently to source measurements.

Observed land-cover crop, trees, and irrigated tags survive semantic decoding. Supported crop tags select olive, date palm, coconut, oil palm, coffee, tea, banana, rubber, and grapevine forms. Untyped orchards use a regional fruit-tree prior. rows on a scatter rule specifies between-row spacing, along-row interval, angle in degrees, and bounded jitter. Rows share the global placement grid across tile boundaries and retain nested quality subsets; density can thin the grid but cannot overfill it. The default row bearing is an inferred presentation choice, not a surveyed field orientation. Crops are confined to mapped cultivated polygons or explicit crop tags; bare desert does not imply an irrigated oasis.

Scatter rules may require nearWater: { maxDistance, classes? }. This gates placement against mapped water at the exclusion raster's resolution; it does not infer groundwater or tides. Water polygons preserve dry island holes. Mangroves in an ecological coastal envelope require nearby mapped water for generic forest/scrub, or mapped wetland/mangrove land cover. Riparian populations use mapped river/lake proximity and gentler slopes. Missing water data can therefore underpopulate a real habitat instead of planting wetland trees far inland.

Seasonal appearance

mountEarthView and createEarthWorldgen accept vegetationMonth: 1..12. The equivalent low-level setting lives in RegionalEnvironmentDocs and is passed unchanged to workers and cache keys. Omitting it keeps neutral leaf-on appearance. The World Explorer freezes the current UTC month for its mount; ?month=1..12 selects a repeatable month and ?month=0 disables the seasonal cycle.

Only presets with explicit deciduous phenology change. Derived spring and autumn colors and bare winter branching keep the same mature dimensions, instance positions, individual variation, and placement seeds. The coarse calendar reverses the southern hemisphere and extends dormancy at high latitudes. Tropical locations stay leaf-on; evergreen plants do not become bare. This does not infer local weather, snow, tropical wet/dry seasons, crop harvest dates, or climate change. Remount with another month to change appearance.

The ordinary architectural catalog supplies 273 recipes across 13 construction families and seven uses: detached homes, attached homes, apartments, commercial, civic, industrial, and farm buildings. Mapped use wins over neighborhood inference. Taller measured residential buildings select compatible apartment recipes; source footprint, height, and levels still control the generated geometry. Named precedents from the 120-entry structure library remain available explicitly. Without evidence of age, the ordinary catalog does not randomly assign an iconic historic building type to an untyped home. Each family/use has three weighted recipes: base, compact facade, and open facade. Stable building identity selects their window/bay rhythm, roof weighting, eaves, parapets and supported facade details. The facade names do not resize the mapped building. Explicit original recipe IDs remain available, and identity-free selection keeps the base recipe.

Near-detail ordinary facades include a bounded single, double, or service entrance. The inferred entrance fits an eligible exterior wall, reserves a ground-floor window bay, and yields to known structural openings, open ground floors, and raised buildings. It is a visual entrance; it does not create a traversable opening or claim a surveyed door position. Industrial and farm recipes also include high windows and larger service doors.

Agricultural land use

All 36 habitat profiles supply an independent agriculture channel, refined by ten worldwide agricultural overrides (including the Corn Belt, Cerrado/Pampas and Indus/Gangetic plains). It activates only on mapped or retrieved farmland, cropland, orchards, vineyards, plantations and pasture. Climate alone never turns natural habitat into a farm. Ordinary farmland receives agricultural appearance from the ecology pack without another download.

The 22 crop recipes cover maize, soybean, small cereals, rice, cotton, sugarcane, sunflower, rapeseed, root vegetables, sorghum; olive, fruit, date, coconut, oil-palm, coffee, tea, banana, rubber and grape cultivation; and pasture/fallow surfaces. Ten annual forms each have three procedural variants. The complete catalog now has 264 plant recipes and 474 appearances with crop stages and deciduous seasons. Several source tags share a visual recipe: wheat, barley and rye use the small-cereal model. Preserve the source crop tag when presenting observations; cultivation.crop identifies a rendering recipe.

Selection uses explicit crop/trees tags first, then a sufficiently confident retrieved crop, then a deterministic regional mixture. Iowa's temperate mixture favors maize and soybeans; Mediterranean profiles include olives and vines, Asian profiles include rice, and tropical profiles include cane and plantation forms. These mixtures are authored visual priors, not acreage statistics or a claim about this year's crop. The current Protomaps basemap collapses some agricultural classes to farmland and does not generally retain crop tags, so inference remains important even where field outlines are mapped.

The pure prepareAgricultureTile adapter derives matching surface and scatter parameters in workers and the renderer. It retains holes, rejects roads/buildings/water and steep slopes, reserves headlands, aligns plants to world-anchored rows, and excludes competing wild brush inside cultivated fields. Known field identifiers retain their variation across clipping; a supplied full-field anchor also stabilizes regional selection. Unnamed polygons are divided on a fixed projected grid, clipped to agricultural land. These visual divisions are not surveyed parcels. Derived cultivation metadata records recipe, mapped/classified/inferred evidence, source, observation year where known, growth stage and row angle.

Near views instance bounded plant patches and orchard trees. Distant views retain soil/crop bands through an antialiased procedural shader without downloading textures or drawing each plant. Agriculture has a separate instance/model budget: finest-level Economy 500/2, Balanced 3,500/5 and High 6,500/8. Annual patches disappear at medium detail; Economy uses their surface patterns. Both WebGL and node-material paths consume the same field attributes, including worker-built landcover. Custom ground materials must opt into { agriculture: true } and use landcover geometry's attributes; use a separate material for bare elevation meshes.

An explicit vegetation month selects sown, growing, mature, ripe or stubble appearances; the default is mature. Coarse authored calendars shift six months in the southern hemisphere. Tropical crops stay mature without a source calendar. Retrieved sowing/harvest months are absolute calendar months and override that shift. This is illustrative growth, not a crop rotation, weather, irrigation or multiple-cropping simulation. Mapped barns, sheds, stables and generic buildings inside mapped farmyards select the regional farm architecture. A field never invents a building footprint.

Optional global retrieval

A terrain package may declare a compact agriculture source:

{
  "urlTemplate": "https://your-host.example/agriculture/worldcover-2021-v1/{z}/{x}/{y}.json",
  "level": 10,
  "source": "esa-worldcover-2021-v200",
  "year": 2021,
  "maxTileBytes": 131072
}

This is a hosting example, not a deployed release. Earth View and World Explorer consume it automatically for geospatial XYZ packages, after overzooming and joining semantic archives. They share up to 32 parent-grid requests between visual layers, bound uncompressed responses, validate coordinates/provenance and retain the basemap on missing or failed requests. Hydrology does not request agricultural data. Add the source's license and attribution to the terrain package; large source rasters stay outside ecology content packs.

molen/agriculture-grid@1 uses a small palette and row-major [count, paletteIndex] runs. Index zero is unknown/non-crop; a positive entry without a crop supplies only agricultural extent. Optional crop, source confidence, irrigation and calendar information refine appearance. Cells supplement missing land use; mapped surfaces and explicit crops take precedence. Area-weighted majority observations refine untagged farmland while retaining mapped outlines. At most 256 additional polygons are admitted per semantic tile.

The sibling Qualla repository's pipeline/agriculture/ compiler reads range-addressable ESA WorldCover 2021 v200 COG windows and reduces cropland class 40 to conservative sampled-majority cells. Its default is 64×64 cells per level-10 tile: about 612 projected meters per cell, with smaller ground distances toward the poles. It supports every continent and bounded resumable shards. Source URLs, recipe/payload hashes, year, attribution and exact covered tile inventory accompany each dataset. A partial shard is never advertised as global coverage.

Optional categorical COG adapters support global WorldCereal 2021 products, including maize and spring/winter cereals, and regional refinements. WorldCereal's cereal class is not a specific wheat observation. Raw classification rasters are required; colored map previews are unsuitable. The checked six-continent WorldCover sample is historical extent data, not crop-type evidence. Production hosting and larger geographic builds are separate Qualla release operations.

preview-agriculture.mjs captures controlled six-region farm compositions, growth stages, inference, near/far views and shader paths. preview-diversity.mjs --agriculture builds real GLB review assets and exercises public import, inspection, simulation and capture APIs. Fixtures are labeled separately from observations; inspect live terrain before claiming local accuracy.

Wildlife and habitat sound

The optional molen.wildlife pack adds an independent wildlife profile channel, animals, and populations to regional catalogs. It depends on molen.ecology.regional@1; opening packs in a different order does not change selection. Earth and World Explorer load it by default when it is in the host's pack index. ambient: { wildlife: false } disables animals in mountEarthView; World Explorer accepts ?wildlife=0. Frozen captures retain the existing ambient opt-in rule.

The catalog has 90 recipes: three adult body/coat forms for each of 21 named mammal taxa and nine functional bird, reptile, fish, and insect groups. These are modest visual variations, not claims about sex, age or subspecies. Each trio shares habitat/range/season gates and divides the previous visual density equally; total expected abundance and population caps stay unchanged. Mammal country membership comes from Mammal Diversity Database v2.5 under CC BY 4.0. A quarter-degree Natural Earth map-unit grid preserves overseas territory distinctions. The range document compresses to about 30 KB; the recipe catalog adds about 6 KB (40 KB as a content pack). No animal GLBs are downloaded. Source hashes, transformations, licenses, and limitations ship in the pack.

Country membership is a coarse limit, not within-country occupancy. Named taxa require an attributed range plus compatible biome/realm and actual mapped land cover. Recent introduced populations and uncertain country memberships are omitted. Large/rare mammals also require explicit mapped conservation habitat, and water-dependent animals require mapped nearby water. An uncovered range cell cannot authorize a named mammal. Unnamed functional groups deliberately make no precise species claim. These choices and visual densities are authored priors, not a census.

Wildlife reads the finest displayed land-cover and human-feature tiles. Unknown terrain, built areas, roads, buildings, water inappropriate to the animal, and steep slopes reject placement. Island/courtyard holes remain usable. Swimming animals share the rendered water datum; flight uses a bounded clearance. The 20 Hz kernel uses stable world-grid candidates, independent seeds, plain restorable state, bounded wandering, and path substeps. Population, distance and pose caps follow Earth quality. Models share recipe geometry, use one opaque skinned draw per animal, and dispose with the terrain stream. Tiny animals disappear at short distances.

An explicit vegetation month also suppresses the generic insect/lizard groups in the coarse cold season and changes the arctic-fox coat. It does not simulate migration or actual weather. Existing generic birdsong and cricket recordings are gated by regional habitat and season, then by weather, daylight and height above ground. They are not recordings of the named visual taxa. Hosts composing their own view can supply EarthAudioFrame.regionalAmbience or use EarthWildlife.ambience; omission preserves the legacy generic soundscape.

Authoring and verification in this repository

The authoring source is in content/ecology/source/. Run build-catalog.mjs for plants/habitats and build-architecture.mjs for regional archstyles and bindings; both support --check. packages/worldgen-earth/scripts/generate-structure-atlas.mjs derives the runtime architectural atlas from the checked-in reduced country data and geographic assignments.

Large upstream geography stays outside runtime packs. The Python converters under packages/worldgen-earth/scripts/ accept an explicitly supplied source ZIP and use the pinned authoring requirements there. Source URLs, hashes, licenses, and reduction methods travel with the data or its notice. Regeneration does not require downloading the upstream datasets during ordinary builds.

content/wildlife/source/build-catalog.mjs builds the animal recipes and supports --check. build-wildlife-ranges.py takes explicit, checksum-pinned MDD CSV, metadata CSV and Natural Earth map-unit ZIP inputs. content/wildlife/source/preview-animals.mjs imports, inspects and captures procedural bind poses through the public asset pipeline; it does not verify live animation.

preview-plants.mjs, preview-regions.mjs, and preview-architecture.mjs produce local review artifacts. Landscape fixtures exercise the real scatter adapter but bake placements for portable capture; they do not measure live instancing performance. Review real streamed locations as well as fixtures, including camera movement, terrain slopes, boundaries, and quality changes. Follow the medium-fi style guide for geometry, color, and LOD budgets.

preview-live-viewer.mjs accepts a local terrain package and geographic camera position, captures the streamed Explorer in fixed daylight, and records loading failures, draw/geometry counts, wildlife counts, and measured frame intervals. profile-live-tile.mjs separates scatter and building CPU costs on real decoded map tiles. preview-mounted-viewer.mjs exercises the public mountEarthView API through orbit, walking, driving and flight. Browser measurements describe the reviewing machine; they are not portable device performance guarantees. The reusable terrain extract builder accepts an explicit source release, bounds, package name and snapshot date, so these small local QA extracts retain their own provenance.

content/wildlife/source/preview-motion.mjs captures changing skinned poses from the actual wildlife renderer and deterministic movement system. It complements the static asset previews. After completing those captures, content/ecology/source/build-review-gallery.mjs assembles a searchable local gallery at .artifacts/regional-world/review.html, with separate live terrain, controlled landscapes, building families, wildlife poses, and public API camera modes. It retains the known visual limitations beside the evidence rather than treating successful capture as art approval.

Fine habitat transitions, richer wildlife behavior/body variation, and detailed city/rural architectural overrides need finer evidence and additional authored content. The repository's content/ecology/coverage-plan.json records implementation, acceptance evidence, and these remaining fidelity limits.