HOW-TO: Create a new world

Learn how to create your own World.

If you don’t feel like re-modelling an existing world, you can create your own world from scratch. “Worlds” in The Witcher 3 can also be considered “levels”: Skellige and Novigrad are both “worlds”.

This guide tackles only the basics of creating a new world. Keep in mind that a world is where all other aspects of the game function and come together - you will need to also reference other tutorials in order to further develop your world.

You can learn how to Load an existing world in the Working with the Editor section.

Table of contents:

1 1. Create a world
2 2. Save location
3 3. The Scene Explorer
4 4. You need terrain
- 4.1 4.1. Creating terrain
- 4.2 4.2. Terrain material
5 5. Draw mountains and valleys
6 6. Vegetation
7 5. Test out your world
8 6. What’s next?

1. Create a world

Click on the Create new world button or open File toolbar menu and select New world.

2. Save location

Select a save location and name the newly created world.

To follow the convention, save it in the ./r4data/levels/newworld/ folder.

3. The Scene Explorer

You should see the new empty world in the Editor. As you can see in the Scene Explorer panel (right side of the screen), there’s not a lot of files available - only source_foliage and streaming layer groups are generated automatically.

4. You need terrain

The minimum we need to be able to play in our newly created world is to generate a Terrain. Otherwise our character will keep falling through the “floor” to nothingness as there are no objects to stand on.

4.1. Creating terrain

To create a Terrain click on the Tools panel (next to the Scene tab). Click on Terrain Edit Tools.

In this window first we need to set up our terrain parameters.

Go to the Setup tab. Here you can set the Edge length in meters, and the elevation range parameters to your liking. They can differ from the ones on the screen.

Please note that Maximum elevation values higher than 0 will can make it seem like your camera is underground. In that case, press and hold Q to move the camera higher and to get a better overview of the terrain.

Next, set the Number of tiles and LOD config (level of detail) to your liking.

You can also use the Import full terrain option which allows you to use .png files to generate the tiles.

When you are ready, click Apply setup.

Note: this step may raise an exception in the editor “Unhandled exception thrown: read access violation. atomic was nullptr”. In that case, restart the editor and open your world again.

4.2. Terrain material

Now the tile map has been generated, you need to load in a material that paints the terrain. In the Terrain Edit Tools select the Material tab. Click the green arrow on the right (Choose terrain material).

This arrow will paste the path of the material asset from the Asset Browser which you need to open (CTRL+A or View menu).

In the Asset Browser find a Material Graph file (check the Depot/Levels directory). To make browsing easier, you can also filter the file types (2) and set them to “CMaterialGraph”.

Make sure that the material graph file is selected, and click on ⇦ next to Choose terrain material in the Terrain Edit Tools / Material. You should see the path in the field as on the screen below.

The Texture pick has shows various textures. Select one of them, close this window, and take a look at the terrain that we just created.

5. Draw mountains and valleys

You can draw mountains, valleys etc. in the Terrain Edit Tools using the Shape Brush tool and one of its various brushes. You can undo changes with CTRL+Z.

6. Vegetation

Also you can paint vegetation with the Vegetation Edit Tools.

Find out more about the tool and how to use it, here: TOOL: Vegetation Edit Tool.

5. Test out your world

You’re new world is here. Want to see how it looks in game? Just click on the Play Game on current layers only. Fast button and the level will start loading!

You can move around as Geralt and experience the new world.

It’s pretty empty there right now. Even Roach isn’t here when you call!

Press F10 to jump back into editing mode to try and change that.

6. What’s next?

Yes, at this point you can add NPCs (Entity Templates) to the world by adding new layers. But instead of going into details of how this can be done, we will move on to another tutorial and a slightly more complex topic: adding a Game Definition file and a Main Quest file in the next tutorial.

Why? Because without these important files for your World, the added NPCs wouldn’t really exhibit any behaviours, the encounters wouldn’t work and you would have no jobs to complete. There would still be nothing to do there!

Learn about the next steps in:HOW-TO: Make a new world come alive.