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Cultures
Part of Generate
Cultures are the peoples of your map. Each culture has the land it suits, the places it starts from (its homelands) and the language it names its places in. When you Generate, the cultures spread from their homelands over the land that suits them, meet and mix at their borders, and name the towns, castles and realms where they live. Dwarves can keep to the mountains, elves to the forests and a seafaring people to the coasts.
Cultures are optional. A map with none has one people living everywhere, naming its places in the Generate panel's Name style.
Generate's Cultures section with the Hillfolk and the Valefolk, and the Hillfolk in the inspector, their homeland marked on the map.
The Cultures section of the Generate panel lists the map's cultures, each with its colour, its name and its name style. The badge says rebuilds the political map.
- + Culture at the end of the list adds a culture. It opens a naming row: type a name and press Enter (or click away). Escape, or an empty name, makes nothing. A new culture starts with the usual settings (open, the usual density, no limits on its habitat, its homelands placed for it), the panel's name style and the next unused preset colour, and opens in the inspector.
- Click a row to open the culture in the inspector.
- The row's More options menu has Rename, Duplicate (with its homelands) and Delete (after asking: places already generated keep their names).
Each of these is one step of undo. A map can have up to 24 cultures. While the map has cultures, the panel's Name style is hidden, since each culture names its own places.
Changing a culture after a run marks the run out of date.
Each field applies when you finish with it and is one step of undo. Double-clicking a slider puts it back to its default.
- Name.
- Colour: the culture's colour, used for its homeland markers and its share in the Results.
- Name style: the language this culture's places and realms are named in, from 43 styles.
- Openness, from Closed to Open: how readily the culture mixes with others. Open cultures blend over wide borderlands and draw others to their towns; closed ones keep sharp borders and keep others out.
- Density: how many people the same land feeds when this culture farms it, compared with other cultures (from a quarter to four times as many).
The land this culture suits. It spreads quickly and settles densely there, and slowly and thinly elsewhere. Each range is one track with two handles: drag a handle (or move it with the arrow keys, Page Up and Page Down, Home and End) to set where the range starts and ends. A full track is Any: no limit. Double-click a track to remove its limit.
- Temperature, from Cold to Hot.
- Moisture, from Dry to Wet.
- Height: elevation, from the sea level to the highest peaks, as the information bar's Elev shows it. Lowland, Upland, Highland and Mountain set the range to that zone, as in the biome rule editor (see Biomes).
- Relief: how rugged the land is (the difference in height across a small area, in the same units as Height). Flat, Rolling, Hilly and Rugged set the range.
- Coast and Rivers, from Avoids to Seeks: whether the culture seeks out the coast or rivers, or keeps away from them. The middle is neither.
Where the culture starts. It spreads from all its homelands at once, so a culture can begin in two mountain ranges on opposite sides of the map.
- With none given (Auto), the run places one where the land suits the culture best, away from the other cultures' homelands and, where there is room, away from the map's edges. Cultures with the narrowest habitat are placed first, so a mountain or desert people is seated in its own country before a people that could live anywhere, whatever their order in the list. On a world with little land for its cultures, homelands may sit closer together.
- Add homeland, then click the map's land to add one there (a click on water is refused). The button reads Click the map while it waits; Escape, pressing it again, or closing the inspector stops without adding one. A culture can have up to 12 homelands.
- Each homeland is listed by its position, with a button to remove it. Use auto removes them all.
While the Generate tool is open, each culture's homelands show on the map in its colour: filled where you put them, and hollow where the last run placed one for a culture you gave none. A homeland that is not on land when the run starts (the sea level has risen over it, say) is left out, and a notice says so.
- Where people live: each part of the land is shared among the cultures that reach it, by how well it suits them and how open they are.
- Names: each place is named in the language of the culture with the largest share of its people. Counties, duchies and realms take their names from their seats, so they are named in the language of the people at their seat.
- Realms: cultures tend to keep to their own realms, so borders between peoples often become borders between realms.
- Ages: in the Generate tool's Ages, an age can have a culture arrive (it is absent from the ages before) or invade (it also takes land from the peoples it meets, and the age is more war-torn where it advances). The History tool shows each age's peoples with the Culture thematic layer.
After a run:
- each generated place and realm lists its Cultures (the peoples living there over 5%, largest first) in the inspector's Generated section, and each duchy and county its Culture;
- the panel's Results give each culture's share of the population;
- in Foundry, the journal pages of an exported scene list the same figures.
These figures name a culture as it is now, so renaming one after a run renames it in the details too. A culture deleted after a run is still named as it was then.
- Start with a broad habitat and narrow it after a run: a culture limited too tightly may find very little land that suits it.
- Give a mountain people a Height range of Highland to Mountain and Relief from Hilly upwards, and a seafaring one Coast towards Seeks.
- Use several homelands for a people scattered across the map, and an Invade event in a later age for a conquest.
- Cultures travel with a regional map, with the homelands that fall inside it.
- To see where each people settled, choose Culture in the map controls' Thematic layers menu after a run (see Thematic layers).