Trees that grow back
The logging camp stopped making wood out of thin air: loggers fell real trees and plant new ones, and the map got hills, rivers and mountains.
Yesterday I wrote that the logging camp made a log every five seconds out of nothing. That is gone. There are real trees now, birch, oak and pine in three shapes each, and a logger has to go out and get the wood. A logger first picks up logs that are already lying around, then fells any tree you marked with the Cut tool, then plants saplings until its circle is back to about one tree in three tiles, and only then fells the grown tree nearest the camp. A felled tree drops two to four logs, and a logger carries two at a time back to the camp.
The ground has a fertility now, in patches rather than per tile, and the forest at the start of a map follows it: thick on rich ground, nearly bare on poor. Saplings grow faster where the ground is fertile.
Then the land itself. Until today the map was one flat plane. Now it comes from a seed, 512 tiles square for now, and every tile has a whole height, so the ground rises in blocky steps that fit the voxel look. The lowland rolls gently with a few wide flat areas, water gathers into rivers and lakes, and the mountains stand up in cliffs. Height matters for play: one step up costs walking time, two or more is a cliff nobody climbs, so a mountain can only be crossed at a pass. Rivers have fords every so often, and the starting camp gets a flat, dry spot near the middle.
A building can stand on a slope if the ground under it differs by two steps at most; its plot is levelled to the height most of it already has. There is a Flatten tool for yards and paths too. Levelling is free for now. Once there are construction crews it will be dirt work that makes a build take longer.
I also started on music, a first set of tracks for the menu, the early town, a busy town, the night and the steam era.