Creator Guide

Creating Worlds: Terrain, Vegetation & Import

The Build Panel shapes objects. This guide is about the ground they stand on: spinning up a brand-new world, sculpting its terrain, scattering forests across it, and importing whole regions from other virtual worlds -- then pushing all of it into your live space.

A world in poqpoq is more than a pile of prims. It has land you can raise into mountains, vegetation that carpets the hills, a biome, a name, and rules for who may enter and build. Three purpose-built tools handle the heavy terrain-and-nature work -- Terraformer, Landscaper, and Legacy Import -- and they all feed into the same place: your active world instance.

They live one click away, inside each world's card in the My Worlds panel. This chapter walks the whole pipeline, from the empty biome you pick at creation to the finished landscape you and your visitors walk through.

Starting a New World

Open the left shelf and expand My Worlds. Every world you own is listed here with its type badge -- WORLD for a full region, WORKSHOP for a small building space, ZONE for a special area -- alongside its age rating and public/private flag. At the bottom sit two ways to make something new.

The My Worlds panel: a scrolling list of world cards each with a name and badges (WORLD, WORKSHOP, ZONE, plus G rating and PUBLIC). The currently-active world is marked 'Currently here'. Two large call-to-action buttons sit at the bottom: 'Create Another World -- Choose a biome, name it, set the rules' and 'Create a Dungeon -- Design instanced party content with the Dungeon Master'.
Figure 1. The My Worlds hub. Each card is a world you own; the two buttons at the bottom start a new world or a new dungeon.

Create Another World

Choosing Create Another World asks one question first: where do you want to start from? Each option is a different biome -- a starting terrain and material palette you can build on or completely reshape later.

A 'Choose a starting point' screen with four biome cards in a two-by-two grid: Blank Canvas (Start from scratch), Forest (Temperate woodland biome), Desert (Arid dunes and canyons), and Island (Tropical island paradise), each with an icon.
Figure 2. Four starting points. Blank Canvas is flat and empty; Forest, Desert, and Island each seed a biome you can keep or overwrite.

Pick a biome, then name the world, add an optional description, and set its rules before you create it:

  1. Starting point -- the biome card you selected above. This only seeds the initial look; Terraformer can replace the terrain entirely.
  2. Name & description -- how the world appears in your list and to visitors. The description is optional.
  3. Rating -- G, R, or X, the same content-rating scale used across poqpoq. Pick the one that matches what will happen in your world.
  4. Access -- Public (anyone can visit) or Private (only you and people you allow). You can change this later; building permissions are covered in Managing Your World.
The full Create World form: the four biome cards at top with Blank Canvas selected, then a 'Name your world' text field and an optional description box, then Rating (G/R/X toggle) and Access (Public/Private toggle), and a green 'Create World' button at the bottom.
Figure 3. The create form gathers everything at once -- biome, name, rating, access -- then Create World spins up the region and drops you into it.

Create a Dungeon

The second button, Create a Dungeon, is a different path: instead of an open region it builds instanced, party-scoped content with the help of the Dungeon Master. Dungeons spawn a fresh private copy for each group that enters, so loot and enemies are never shared or camped. The dungeon design flow is covered on its own -- see Dungeon Instances and Quest Loops in the World Guide.

The World-Building Pipeline

Once a world exists, its card in My Worlds expands to reveal the tools that shape it. Click your world to open it; the card shows Editing this world, a row of quick actions (visit, rename, delete), and three buttons that launch the heavy tooling.

An expanded world card for a world named 'banana', marked 'Editing this world', with a row of four small action icons (visit arrow, edit pencil, delete trash, warning). Below are three large tool buttons: Terraformer (Sculpt terrain and paint biomes), Landscaper (Place vegetation and natural features), and Legacy Import (Import virtual worlds in OAR format).
Figure 4. An expanded world card. The three buttons -- Terraformer, Landscaper, and Legacy Import -- are the entry points to everything below.

These three are full Black Box suite applications, not panels inside the world. Each opens in its own workspace, you shape your terrain or vegetation there, and then a single action pushes the result back into your live world. That "push into the active instance" step is the thread that ties the whole pipeline together:

Terraformer → Landscaper → Send to poqpoq → Your live world

A natural order is terrain first (Terraformer), then vegetation on top of it (Landscaper), but you can revisit either at any time -- each tool sends its own layer independently.

Terraformer -- Shaping the Land

Terraformer is where flat ground becomes canyons, dunes, and mountain ridges. It has three stages you can mix freely: generate a base terrain, sculpt it by hand, and dress it with materials.

The Black Box Terraformer app. A sculpted desert terrain block sits in the center viewport. The left panel has Terrain Generation (Biome Type: Desert, Terrain Size fixed at 512x512, Max Elevation 100, Generate New Terrain button, Museum Block toggle) and an Erosion section with Hydraulic, Wind, and Thermal types each with iteration and strength sliders. The right panel has Sculpting Tools (Raise, Lower, Smooth, Flatten, with Brush Size and Strength) and Material Settings (blending, texture scale, per-layer height splatting, active material set: Desert).
Figure 5. Terraformer with a generated desert region. Terrain is fixed at 512×512 for poqpoq worlds; erosion and the sculpt brushes do the rest.
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Generate a base

Pick a Biome Type and a Max Elevation, then Generate New Terrain for an instant landscape. Layer on erosion -- Hydraulic (water-carved valleys), Wind (dune drift), and Thermal (rocky slumping) -- each with its own iteration and strength, to weather the shape into something believable.

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Sculpt by hand

The Raise, Lower, Smooth, and Flatten brushes let you carve exactly what you want. Tune Brush Size, Brush Strength, and Falloff for anything from a gentle hill to a sheer cliff.

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Paint materials

Material Settings splat textures onto the terrain by height -- sand low, rock high -- with blend sharpness and per-layer scaling. Switch the active material set to re-skin the whole region for a different biome.

When the land looks right, Terraformer's world panel sends it to your instance -- the same "push to the active world" step every tool shares.

Landscaper -- Scattering Life

Bare terrain is lonely. Landscaper populates it with vegetation and natural features -- trees, ferns, ground cover, underwater kelp, and rocks -- using a scatter system rather than hand-placing every object.

The Black Box Landscaper app. The left panel shows a large Oak tree preview, a Species list (Trees 20, Palms and Ferns 6, Grass and Ground Cover 5, Underwater and Kelp 4, Rocks 5) with an Oak dropdown selected, and a Scatter section (Pattern: Clustered, Per Group, Population 25, Total 25) with Scatter and Clear buttons. The right panel shows WORLD INSTANCE (Sim: banana, User: poqpoq), WORLD ACTIONS (Send to poqpoq -- Push vegetation to active instance, Mode: Replace all vegetation, Open Terraformer, Return to World), and EXPORT (Save Locally -- Download as JSON).
Figure 6. Landscaper scattering oaks. Pick a species, choose a scatter pattern and population, then Scatter -- and Send to poqpoq pushes the whole layer into your world.
  1. Pick a species from the categories -- Trees, Palms & Ferns, Grass & Ground Cover, Underwater & Kelp, and Rocks -- then choose a specific model (Oak, for example) from the dropdown.
  2. Set the scatter -- a Pattern (such as Clustered), how many per group, and a total Population. Landscaper distributes them across the terrain for you.
  3. Scatter and review -- press Scatter to place them, orbit to check the result, and Clear to start over. Repeat with more species to build up layered ground cover.
  4. Send to poqpoq -- the Mode setting controls whether you replace all existing vegetation or add to it, then the push delivers it live to everyone in the instance.

Landscaper can also Save Locally as JSON -- a portable snapshot of your scatter you can keep or reuse -- and it links straight to Open Terraformer so you can hop between shaping land and planting it.

Legacy Import -- Bringing in Existing Worlds

The third button, Legacy Import, opens Black Box Legacy -- a converter that turns OpenSimulator region archives (OAR files) into poqpoq-ready 3D content. If you have a world built in OpenSim or a Second Life-style toolchain, this is how you bring it across instead of rebuilding it by hand.

The Black Box Legacy splash screen: a Matrix-style cascade of green characters behind a wireframe cube and the title 'BLACK BOX LEGACY', subtitle 'OpenSim OAR to GLB converter -- preserving worlds, one archive at a time', with a glowing 'START' button. Small 3D buildings (a saloon and a hut) sit at the lower corners.
Figure 7. Black Box Legacy converts OpenSim OAR archives into GLB models poqpoq can load -- "preserving worlds, one archive at a time."

The conversion preserves geometry, textures, and layout so an imported region arrives recognizable rather than as a jumble. The deeper story of why cross-engine geometry is tricky -- and how poqpoq keeps imported shapes faithful -- is told in Bridging Worlds.

Pipeline Tips