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My river system looked wrong until I actually studied a real watershed
Last month I was drawing a map for my D&D campaign and kept getting frustrated that the rivers looked fake. I had them branching out like tree roots from the mountains. My buddy who is a geology nerd looked at it and laughed. He showed me a satellite photo of the Mississippi drainage and I realized rivers merge together, they don't split apart. Had to redo the whole damn thing. Took me 4 hours to fix. Has anyone else made this dumb mistake or am I the only one who didn't pay attention in geography class?
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oliver5231mo ago
Did you ever mess with that river simulation game, what was it called, something like... Rainfall? I downloaded it once thinking it would be a fun little thing and ended up spending three hours watching water run down a mountain. Realized that if you drop a ton of rain on one spot it carves out a little gully, but once that gully hits flat ground it just spreads out into a big muddy mess with no direction. My fake rivers used to look like a spider web too, now I just steal shapes from real maps on Google Earth and call it a day.
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elizabeth_williams1mo ago
Solidarity, that simulator is way too hypnotic for its own good.
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