Something I've been playing with recently is Pixelforest's flowscape - allows you to make a 3D fantasy map pretty easily in 3D, as opposed to most of them which are focussed on 2D.<p>There's a page at <a href="https://pixelforest.itch.io/flowscape" rel="nofollow">https://pixelforest.itch.io/flowscape</a> which sort of shows it off - basically it's a Unity engine "game" which lets you make landscapes.
Related: a list of similar map generators at <a href="https://www.fiction.tools/#worldbuilding-map-generators" rel="nofollow">https://www.fiction.tools/#worldbuilding-map-generators</a>
A slightly older one that produces very nice looking results for certain aesthetics is <a href="https://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/" rel="nofollow">https://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/</a><p>As well as also being open source, the page gives interactive demonstrations of each step that the process takes which is interesting.<p>(edit: clicking round a bit more, Azgaar's project lists the one at mewo2 as on if its inspirations/influences)
Surprised nobody has mentioned donjon, well worth checking out if you haven't seen it before.<p><a href="https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/" rel="nofollow">https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/</a>
When I tired the 'project on globe' feature, it put a tiny rectangle of the map about the size of the UK on a big black globe. Presumably not intended behaviour.<p>Otherwise very cool
This is important infrastructure for a lot of the table top RPG community (virtual and physical). Make sure to contribute to it while it's getting the HN hug of death.
There are plenty of similar generators, it's not very difficult work.<p>What I'm more interested is making this a 3D world with procedural geometry, make cities, make it run as a multiplayer game... Not to mention you cannot store all that geometry, it's too large, you can only generate the place you're exploring on the fly and save it to a cache and then render it.<p>Then you would have to explain all your artists and game designers how to make all of this work. It's a lot of constraints. The multiplayer side won't be interesting unless the world is persistent, so you have to split the world into several servers to not overload servers, because players need to cross the path of other players for the game to feel alive.<p>AND THEN, you would have to adapt netcode strategies in very densely played areas like cities where you have a lot of players next to each other.<p>In the end, such game would be very popular, but I don't think you would need a map generator like this, the map would still be done by a human because it would yield better results. What matters is the high resolution procedural geometry, at a low scale: trees, terrain, buildings, etc.<p>So yes, that's essentially the story of developing world of warcraft, except world of warcraft has several world instances and phases, because their world is not very large when you look how many players they have, they can't have a single world, even when they use phases, which is not a cool feature.