At the risk of claiming a monopoly on Northern Clan applications, if no other mods have objections I'm prepared to approve your app for Norrey. It looks like you've put a lot of thought into the plans and tests and I know you're eager to get started.
Here are my thoughts on your current plans and then I'll repeat the advise I gave to Johan on his Knott app.
- Overall the territory map looks good. I think you've made the right call in cutting Hamlet 1 since it is indeed very far North (and I know Enah had some thoughts about making sure you didn't build too far north). You're not beholden to use the spot for ruins but it's certainly not a bad idea to add some, would make a great immersion build!
- I'm wondering about the placement of holdfast 2 since it's so remote from the other hamlets, I guess it makes sense that they'd want to use it to assert their control into the area. Would make sense to give it some distinguishing defensive features, I can see you've thought about giving it a low earthern walle/motte and bailly which would be a good start.
- The main broche keep test is neat, it's a little unorthodox to have the three broches joined by the walls in the triangle shape, I'm more used to seeing the circular design but I don't hate it. Have a think about integrating some of the smaller roundhouses into the inner walls as well like here:
General tips
I tried out a few different styles of snow vegetation but this one turned out the best I think. It's a layer of oak leaves beneath the top levels of snow layers. Can be tricky on steep slopes though as the leaves become can be come exposed on the sides so it works best on flat areas.
I also tried putting down layers of carrot/turnip crops and then using WE to replace the soil beneath them with muddy snow, but it's not the neatest option since you can't put any snow on top of the crops and they'll all self-destruct if touched once the soil beneath them is removed.
It's easy to go overboard with the gravel/dirt/mud mix for village paths. Eventually I realised the style that looks best was a narrow line of dirt/gravel with a layer of muddy snow between it and the regular snow to make a gradient.
The roads between villages/hamlets/holdfasts are a pain to make, since you have to clear all the existing trees in the way then smooth out all the snow layers running along side it. I used a script that made it a little easier, but I haven't discovered the perfect way to do it yet. You'll also need to make sure you add slabs every time the road goes up/down a hill. Best advise I could give would be to make the paths before you add any more forests.
It took me a long time to figure out the best way to add snow to mountains. It's tempting to just get the gunpowder brush and /b snow the entire side of the mountain, but that invariably just scatters snow layers around randomly and doesn't look good (the snow brush also has a habit of sneakily spreading the snow inside houses without you noticing).
If you're starting with the all snow hills like this:
get a Northern Terrain block brush (/br sphere 2029:3)
Then add a mask of snow and the angle of cliff you want to make, e.g. /mask [2029:3]&/[50d][90d] and start brushing over the snow.
The last thing is to remove all snow layers on top of the northern terrain. Use an air brush (/br sphere 0) with a mask of on top of northern terrain /mask [78]&>[2029:3]
Regular snow blocks are weirdly affected by dynamic shadows and by default create these weird gross shadows over snow layers. We recently realised that you can remove these shadows by swapping the vanilla snow blocks with their snow layer equivalent (block id 78:7).
For example:
Advanced snow smoothing
Using the above trick of swapping snow to snow layer 78:7, you can also smooth snow out with the //smooth command.
Best method I've found:
1. Select the area of snow you want to smooth.
2. put a snow layer block on top of any snow block that doesn't already have one (you need to double layer the snow basically):
//gmask >80
//replace 0 78:7
3. swap all other existing snow layers to 78:7 - //replace 78 78:7
4. add a snow layer gmask (so the smooth command only affects the snow) - //gmask 78
5. execute the //smooth command - //smooth 1 -s
NOTE:
- No matter the gmasks, //smooth will always affect blocks above and below the selection, even if the blocks aren't in the selection. Which means this command won't work in forests, as the trees will confuse worldedit and won't smooth the snow layers properly.
- you can change the power with //smooth [ insert number 1-infinity] e.g. //smooth 1 -s is the lowest, or you could push it up with //smooth 5 -s
- This isn't a perfect solution and will still require some manual adjustment.
I also made some schemsets for snowy terrain /schset WWDetailSnow and WWDetailSnow2
When placing tree schems on top of snow, you'll generally always find that the tree sits on top of the snow layer and looks like it's floating, I never figured out what combination of schbr settings and masks to make the schem actually replace the snow layer, but I made a script that automatically fixes it and adds snow/icicles to the tree.
The gunpowder /b snow brush is the fastest way to add semi smooth layers of snow, but you can also use it to lay pebbles down for streams etc if you use a pebble brush and mask to replace the snow layers.
Say you wanted to add some pebbles down for a river, you could cover the area with snow layers, then use a pebble brush with the ID pattern: /br sphere #id[2212] with a snow layer mask: /mask 78
(You can then reverse it to mix some snow layers into the pebbles like this)
