Rivers Restored
This mod activates partial river creation pathway within the map generation system. If Crate ever brings rivers into a DLC, this mod will be retired immediately to support their work.
Farthest Frontier already includes a sophisticated river generation system — Voronoi-based pathfinding, flowing water animation, fishing integration. Rivers Restored activates that system on new maps and adds a complementary terrain-carving layer so the rivers settle naturally into the landscape.
New maps now generate winding rivers terminating in lakes or spanning the map edge to edge, with carved beds, sloped banks, flowing water animation, and full fishing support.
New in v1.4.0: live map preview that updates the moment you change a setting, plus per-biome slider tuning for fine-grained control over river shape and density.
🌊 Winding Rivers New maps generate between 1 and 8 rivers depending on map size and terrain. Each river winds naturally between water bodies — lakes, ocean coastlines, or both — following the landscape rather than cutting straight lines through it.
⛏ Carved Riverbeds Rivers settle into the heightmap with a deep inner channel and naturally sloped outer banks, smoothed iteratively to blend seamlessly with surrounding terrain. Rivers feel like part of the world because they’re shaped into it.
🎣 Fishable Water Rivers register as proper water bodies with the game’s fishing system. Fishing Shacks placed on rivers produce at the same rate as lake-side shacks, with a configurable productivity multiplier so river-side villages can sustain themselves on river fishing alone.
🗺 Live Map Preview Open Advanced Settings on the New Game screen with the preview pref enabled and you’ll see a polished render of the map you’re about to generate — biome-colored, contour-shaded, with rivers and lakes visible. Change the size slider, biome, or click the seed re-roll dice and the preview regenerates automatically. No clicks, no confirmation — just keep tuning until you like what you see, then start the game.
The preview saves a PNG of every render to
with the seed, size, biome, river count, water %, and difficulty selections embedded in the filename. Auto-prunes to the 25 newest so the folder doesn’t fill up.
🎚 Per-Biome Tuning Five river presets — Idyllic Valley, Lowland Lakes, Arid Highlands, Plains, Alpine Valleys — each with their own carve-shape, density, and width settings. Enable
in the config to surface 13 sliders per preset for fine-grained control: river count, point density, channel width range, carve depth and smoothing, jitter, fishing-area multiplier, and more.
💧 Optional Flow Animation The flowing water ribbon cosmetic animation can be toggled off in the config for performance-conscious players on river-heavy maps. Rivers still render as water surfaces — just without the animated flow effect.
💾 Save/Load Persistence Rivers survive save/load cycles completely. A small sidecar save file stores river data alongside your map file and restores everything on reload — water areas, carved terrain, fishing nodes, and flow animation all return exactly as you left them. (Note: loading saves on different PCs or drives requires files to be copied manually)
⚙ Keep Clarity Integration All Rivers Restored settings — master sliders, per-preset tuning, the preview toggle, flow animation, save behavior — show up in Keep Clarity’s in-game settings panel for live tuning without restarting. Soft dependency: works without KC installed (settings still available via MelonPreferences).
Rivers Restored affects new map generation only. Existing saves will not have rivers added retroactively — terrain shaping happens at world generation time and cannot be safely applied to an established map.
Start a new game to experience rivers.
River generation happens at map creation and requires some extra processing time. Here’s what to expect and how to get the best experience:
Initial generation is slow When generating a new map, expect the loading screen to take longer than usual and possibly stutter briefly. This is normal — the mod is shaping riverbeds, painting terrain, and registering water areas during this pass. It only happens once. Typical times: Small ~45s, Medium ~70s, Large ~110s.
After generation — save immediately Once your map loads and you place your Town Center, save the game and reload it. This is the recommended first step. The reload settles all river data into the normal play state. Load times after this first save are normal.
Yellow border lines You may see faint yellow lines between river water and terrain on map creation. These disappear completely after saving and reloading. They’re a transient artifact of the initial generation pass, not a permanent issue.
Fishing Shacks not finding fish nodes If a Fishing Shack placed on a river shows no fish nodes, move the work area radius slightly. This triggers the game to rescan for fishing nodes and will pick up the river’s fish sources. You only need to do this once.
Tip for heavily-modded saves If you run many mods, consider generating your map with only Rivers Restored active, saving, then re-enabling your other mods before loading the save. This reduces generation time and avoids potential mod-stacking slowdowns during the first load.
On maps with many rivers, the flowing water animation can be CPU-heavy. If you experience stutter or high system impact, set
in the config file. Rivers will continue to render as still water surfaces and all other features (fishing, save/load, carved beds) work unchanged.
🐉 SageDragoon’s Workshop
📱 Keep Clarity — UI Enhancements
🚛 Manifest Delivery — Wagon Shop and Logistics Enhancements
🏹 Warden of the Wilds — Hunting and Fishing Enhancements
🌿 Tended Wilds — Forager Enhancements
🌊 Rivers Restored — Rivers!
📦 Essential Provisions — Curated QoL bundle, sixteen features, all opt-in
👑 Sovereign Boons — Power-spike tuning pack, 14 boons, all opt-in
🌱 Forageable Transplantation — Relocate Forageables (Included in Tended Wilds)
🏘️ Settlement Planner — UI Button Links to Online City Planner (Included in Keep Clarity)
🏘️ Settlement Planner (Direct Link)[sagedragoon79.github.io] — Direct Link to Planner
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
