I'm evaluating methods for generating "clumps" or "veins" of rocks in a 2D top-down procedural game. Obviously the most common suggestion is to use various types of noise, but I feel like noise (alone) won't achieve what I'm after.
I've used a combination of voronoi and perlin noise because it's easier to generate "regions" of different noise. I can more easily turn these areas into "veins" of rocks or something than I could be using a "heightmap" alone - heightmaps tend to be more swirly/cloud-like.
With a high threshold and some rounding, I can turn this into a mask that works well for veins:
Changing the spacing and scale is as simple as toying with the math/threshold.
The difficulty lies with choosing which "rock" (or "ore") will fill each vein. Primarily, this is thanks to the fact that my rocks are weighted. Veins of rare rocks should not be common.
I currently map the original voronoi cell value to a specific rock, which forces each vein to be a single type, but can't be weighted. As you can see in picture #1, there's a fairly even distribution of each shaded area.
So either, I need a new way to choose a weighted random rock type for each vein, or I need a new way to place veins.
Minecraft is a good well-known example of what I need, except I work in 2D:
- Regularly distributed ore veins
- Veins of common ores are found more often and are typically larger veins
- Veins of rare ores are harder to find, and are smaller in size
Noise alone just can't seem to produce these values. What else can I try?
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