Biomes

Every site on the world map belongs to one of seven biomes. A village takes the biome of the site it is founded on, and the biome never changes. It decides two things: how fast each good is made (a multiplier per resource) and what the village map contains (meadow, woodland, water and deposits of stone, iron and pitch).

The basics

• No biome is good at everything. Each one has strong goods and weak goods.
• Multipliers apply to production only. A 1.9 means that building makes 1.9 times as much there as in a neutral biome.
• Some buildings need ground that only some biomes have. Pitch rigs can only be built in the Riverlands and Fenland, because no other biome generates pitch.
• Your rank allows more villages as it rises (one more every three ranks), so the usual plan is to hold villages in different biomes and move goods between them.

The seven biomes

Biome	Id	Description (in game)
Greenvale Plains	plains	Rich, open farmland. Excellent orchards and dairies, little stone and almost no ore.
Riverlands	riverlands	Wide river valleys. Fishing and market gardens flourish and the soft banks hold pitch.
Highlands	highlands	Windswept uplands. Good stone and iron, hardy cattle, poor for orchards and vines.
Mountain Foothills	mountains	Rocky slopes rich in stone and ore. Food must largely be brought in.
Wildwood	wildwood	Ancient forest. Endless timber and game, but cleared land is scarce.
Fenland	fenland	Marsh and reed beds. Abundant pitch and eels; the ground is poor for building stone.
Sunlit Vinelands	vinelands	Warm south-facing hills. The finest wine and orchards in the realm, middling for industry.

Production multipliers

A blank cell is 1. Flour, bows, pikes, swords and gold have no biome multiplier anywhere.

Resource	Plains	Riverlands	Highlands	Mountains	Wildwood	Fenland	Vinelands
Apples	1.25		0.75	0.6	1.1	0.8	1.35
Cheese	1.3		1.15	0.7		0.85
Meat			1.1		1.5
Bread	1.3			0.7
Vegetables	1.25	1.2	0.85	0.6	0.8		1.1
Fish		1.6				1.3
Wheat	1.35		0.85	0.6	0.8	0.8	1.1
Hops	1.1	1.25		0.7			0.8
Ale		1.15				1.1	0.85
Wine			0.5	0.4			1.9
Wood				0.8	1.7		0.9
Stone	0.7	0.8	1.4	1.8	0.8	0.5
Iron	0.5	0.7	1.3	1.9		0.6	0.7
Pitch	0.6	1.2				2.0
Charcoal				1.1	1.35
Salt		1.2				1.6

The multiplier is one factor in the production formula on The Village. It stacks by multiplication with research, cards, Weather, fear and the meadow bonus, and it scales consumed inputs in the same proportion (a Wildwood charcoal burner turns out 1.35 times the charcoal and also burns 1.35 times the wood).

The Plains pitch value (0.6) never applies in practice, because Plains maps have no pitch tiles to build a rig on. The same goes for every biome other than Riverlands and Fenland.

What the numbers mean in output

Base rates at haul distance 2, no other modifiers:

Building	Neutral	Best biome	Worst biome
Iron Mine (3 per 140 s)	75.5 iron/h	Mountains 143.5	Plains 37.8
Vineyard (2 per 240 s)	29.6 wine/h	Vinelands 56.3	Mountains 11.9
Pitch Rig (3 per 150 s)	70.6 pitch/h	Fenland 141.2	Riverlands 84.7 (only other option)

The best and worst iron sites differ by a factor of 3.8 (1.9 / 0.5).

Chains stack the biome on each link that has a multiplier. On the Plains, wheat (1.35) and bread (1.3) both benefit, while flour has no multiplier. A Plains bakery fed with flour therefore makes 2 * 1.3 = 2.6 times the neutral unboosted rate, and the wheat farms behind it make 1.35 times as much wheat.

Terrain mix

Each biome has a set of terrain values that the map generator uses as inputs. They are not shares of the map; they set noise thresholds and clump counts. What they produce:

Biome	Meadow	Trees	Water	Stone	Iron	Pitch
Plains	0.35	0.12	0.04	0.02	0.005	0
Riverlands	0.25	0.12	0.14	0.02	0.008	0.012
Highlands	0.1	0.1	0.03	0.06	0.02	0
Mountains	0.04	0.08	0.02	0.1	0.04	0
Wildwood	0.08	0.38	0.04	0.02	0.008	0
Fenland	0.12	0.1	0.16	0.008	0.004	0.04
Vinelands	0.3	0.08	0.03	0.03	0.008	0

How the map is built

The map is 48 x 48. Generation runs in this order, and later steps overwrite earlier ones:

1. Meadow and woodland from noise. A tile becomes meadow when its meadow noise exceeds 1 - meadow * 1.4 (0.51 on the Plains, 0.944 in the Mountains, so the Plains have far more meadow). Woodland is dense in a band around the map edge and sparse inside. The band is 0.18 + trees * 0.55 of the half-width deep: about 5.4 to 5.9 tiles for most biomes and about 9.3 tiles in the Wildwood. A higher trees value also lowers the threshold everywhere.
2. Water. If water is above 0.08 (Riverlands and Fenland) a winding river crosses the whole map, roughly 7 to 8 tiles wide. Otherwise one round pond is placed at random: radius 4 for Plains, Highlands, Wildwood and Vinelands, radius 3 for Mountains.
3. Deposits as round clumps placed at random. Count is max(1, round(share * 48 * 48 / (r * r * 4))) with radius r 3 for stone and 2 for iron and pitch.
4. A starter grove (two clumps of trees) and a stone outcrop, about 14 tiles from the centre, on every map.

The centre (every tile within 8 tiles of the middle by Chebyshev distance) is always kept as grass for the hall, stockpile and granary. Anything that would land there, including part of a pond or deposit clump, is dropped. A clump or pond near the edge is also cut off by the map border.

Random deposit clumps per biome, not counting the guaranteed stone outcrop:

Biome	Stone (r 3)	Iron (r 2)	Pitch (r 2)
Plains	1	1	0
Riverlands	1	1	2
Highlands	4	3	0
Mountains	6	6	0
Wildwood	1	1	0
Fenland	1	1	6
Vinelands	2	1	0

Every biome gets at least one iron clump, but on a small map a single clump of radius 2 can be partly clipped by the centre or the edge. A quarry, iron mine or pitch rig only needs one deposit tile under its footprint (see Placement rules), so even a clipped clump is usually enough for one building.

Within each map the layout is fixed by a seed taken from the village id, so it does not change after founding.

Strategy notes

These follow from the numbers above. They are not rules.

• Food-poor biomes. Mountain Foothills have the lowest food multipliers (apples 0.6, cheese 0.7, vegetables 0.6, bread 0.7, wheat 0.6) and the least meadow. Rations and food variety drive Popularity, so a Mountains village either accepts lower food output or brings food in through Markets.
• Military goods. Swords need iron. Mountains (1.9) and Highlands (1.3) are the iron biomes; Plains (0.5) are the worst. Bows and pikes need only wood, which the Wildwood makes at 1.7.
• Pitch is only in two biomes, Riverlands (2 clumps, 1.2) and Fenland (6 clumps, 2.0).
• Salt boosts dairies and fishing huts. Fenland (1.6) and Riverlands (1.2) make the most salt, and both have a river for the salt works' "within 1 tile of water" rule.
• Wine comes almost entirely from the Vinelands (1.9). Nothing in the village drinks it; it is spent on Feasts and traded.
• Meadow-loving farms (orchard, dairy, vegetable patch, wheat farm, hop garden) get up to +30% on meadow. Plains and Vinelands have the most meadow, which stacks with their food multipliers.
• Windmills must be more than 3 tiles from any tree. On a Wildwood map with its deep forest band, open ground far enough from trees is harder to find.
• Village count. Your rank sets how many villages you may hold: 2 at Freeman (rank 4), 3 at Bailiff (rank 7), 4 at Banneret (rank 10), up to 10 at Sovereign. See Ranks and Renown. The first village is claimed directly; the rest need a commander to march to the site (see Military).

Interactions

• The Village: the multiplier enters the production formula; the terrain decides which buildings can be placed.
• World Map: sites carry the biome. Some wild spawns are biome-bound in the world code: deer herds appear in Plains, Wildwood, Highlands and Riverlands; barrows in Plains, Highlands, Fenland and Vinelands.
• Research, Cards and Crowns and Weather: their production multipliers stack with the biome's.
• Markets: the way to move goods from a biome that makes them well to one that does not.
• Military: later villages are founded by marching a commander from a village you hold to a free site.

For maintainers

Source files:

• server/src/content/index.ts: the biomes array (description, productivity, terrain, ground colour).
• server/src/village/mapgen.ts: VILLAGE_SIZE (48), CLEAR_RADIUS (9), meadow threshold 1 - meadow * 1.4, forest band 0.18 + trees * 0.55, river cut-off water > 0.08, river width 1.5 + water * 14, pond radius 2 + round(water * 60), deposit radii (stone 3, iron 2, pitch 2) and the clump count formula, starter grove and outcrop at CLEAR_RADIUS + 5.
• server/src/village/sim.ts: biome.productivity[res] in derive().
• server/src/features/world/spawn.ts: biome lists for world spawns.

If a biome's productivity or terrain changes, update the multiplier table, the terrain table, the clump count table and the worked examples on this page.