- Terra Firma 2 is Released! - 27 October 2025
On Monday the 29th of January, 2018 I wrote the very first lines of code for a project I called "land". It was meant to be a simple little project that I could knock out fairly quickly and get some experience actually finishing and releasing a game. How wrong that was- it wasn't quick, or simple, and really "water" would have been a much better name anyhow.Well, 8 years later we've finally made it! It took 2,746 code commits, around 5,000 hours of work, 65,000+ players of the free version providing valuable testing and feedback, and approximately 89 trillion deer running around infesting your worlds but the day has finally arrived. No longer constrained to play Terra Firma for free, you are now able to play Terra Firma 2 in exchange for your hard earned money.A sincere thank you to all the people who made this possible, most especially all of you on steam who provided your support. The…
- Terra Firma 1.0 Released - 21 February 2025
Greetings worldbuilders! Today Terra Firma graduates from early access to full release with the release of version 1.0, which will be the final update to this free version. It's been a long road to get here- I've been developing Terra Firma for 7 years now, and everything so far has been done in my spare time between my full time job, family and other commitments. A special thanks to everyone for playing, giving your support and feedback- it wouldn't have made it this far without you. Your enthusiasm for it has kept me working on it even when it seemed impossible to achieve the vision I had with the time I had available. A shoutout to all those people who have refuted the dozens of times someone has proclaimed the game dead- it ain't so! I'm thrilled to announce that as of 2025 I'm finally able to work on this project as my full time job, and Terra Firma 2, a sequel that's jam packed wi…
- Terra Firma 2 coming 2025! - 21 February 2025
Greeting worldbuilders! I'm excited to announce that Terra Firma 2 is in full time development and will be releasing later this year. This will be a paid sequel to Terra Firma containing many exciting upgrades such as Temperature variations, with snowfall, ice and glacial erosion Rainfall editing and variations, allowing deserts, rainforests and everything in between 16 different biomes with plants and animals based on rainfall and temperature with completely redone visuals Different types of rock with different erosion characteristics Loading and saving worlds, importing and exporting worlds to various formats, including a minecraft exporter A campaign mode featuring 40+ worldbuilding challenges First person and flying camera modes Improved water simulation producing more coherent rivers and floodplains amongst innumerable other improvements. It's been a long road to get here. I've bee…
- Terra Firma 2 coming 2025! - 20 February 2025
Greeting worldbuilders! I'm excited to announce that Terra Firma 2 is in full time development and will be releasing later this year. This will be a paid sequel to Terra Firma containing many exciting upgrades such as Temperature variations, with snowfall, ice and glacial erosion Rainfall editing and variations, allowing deserts, rainforests and everything in between 16 different biomes with plants and animals based on rainfall and temperature with completely redone visuals Different types of rock with different erosion characteristics Loading and saving worlds, importing and exporting worlds to various formats, including a minecraft exporter A campaign mode featuring 40+ worldbuilding challenges First person and flying camera modes Improved water simulation producing more coherent rivers and floodplains amongst innumerable other improvements. It's been a long road to get here. I've bee…
- Patch notes 27th August 2024 - 26 August 2024
Fixed issue on some AMD cards that was crashing the display driver, which resulted in crashing the game and potentially also causing a Blue screen of Death on windows Fixed a couple of rare but general crashes Fixed issue where game would crash rather than displaying information message when OpenGL version is not high enough on extremely underpowered computers, very old computer or computers without hardware graphics support
- Terra Firma 0.3 Released! - 20 August 2024
Greetings Worldbuilders! Are you frustrated by your landform's inability to keep the shapes you so carefully crafted for it? Disappointed when your towering piles of dirt slump into gentle, featureless mounds? Yearning for something harder, more durable, something rock solid? Today your prayers have been answered! Your terraforming activities are now enhanced with the power of stone. Watch lava flows solidify into Igneous rocks, or place sedimentary rocks made from thousands of years of accumulated sediment. Mountain chains, towering cliffs, deep gorges, mesas amongst innumerable other formations are now available for you to craft and explore. New materials Igneous and sedimentary rocks have been added, both with different physical properties and which erode in different ways, vastly increasing the range of landscapes that can be created. Rock layers stack on top of each other allowing…
- v0.2.6 Released - 12 October 2023
Greetings Worldbuilders! The engineering department has toiled diligently to bring new, unparallelled levels of realism and control to your terraforming activities. Marvel at the way that rivers mazily meander on their way to the ocean, building up the land before overflowing their banks and changing course in ceaselessly unending permutations. Watch the water flow over your terrain accurately and at never before seen speeds, the accumulated force of quadrillions of drops of water relentlessly grinding mountain ranges into nothing as they sink beneath the ocean before your eyes. Anisotropic adjustment Changes have been made to the water simulation to make water less inclined to artificially flow in the four cardinal directions and more likely to follow the contours of the land. Previously many rivers would emerge flowing unnaturally straight towards one of the four sides of the map. Thi…
- New version Beta now available - 20 May 2023
Greetings, fellow worldbuilders! It is my pleasure to share with you the exciting news that your terraforming abilities will soon be significantly enhanced. Content yourselves no longer with the damp, moist, irrigating powers of water, or the stale and dry control of the height of land. Today you will wield the power of Hephaestus himself as molten lava pours forth from your fingers across the landscape at will, forming blazing rivers of fire that annihilate everything in their path. Observe the ancient battle between fire and water anew as the lava slows, cools and eventually becomes new foundations of earth, as is the fate of all once our brief spark dims and leaves this world. Release 0.2.5 Now available using beta branch on steam. Will be released in 1 week, assuming no major breaking bugs Added lava Basic support for different types of rock that can erode at different speeds Fixed…
- v0.2 released - 15 January 2023
Terra Firma v0.2 is here! Animals, revamped visuals and camera system, a host of bugfixes (welcome those with recent Radeon cards) and minor improvements are all part of it. Thank you all for your support, testing and feedback that has helped development tremendously. Animals Various animals now appear on the game, including deer, ibex, bears, rabbits, crabs and crocodiles- you'll have to zoom in quite far on the map to see them. Different animals will appear depending on the different biomes that are present, whether it's plains, forest, coastal, swampy or ocean. The number and variety of animals will be continue to increase giving you more reason to experiment with the landscape and will make coming features such as variable rainfall, variable temperature, snow and ice a lot more impactful. Visuals Visuals have gotten a big overhaul. All models for trees have been redone, as well as n…
- New version Beta now available - 30 December 2022
The beta version of the next update is now available to play. We'll be monitoring and testing over the next couple of weeks before the release. There are a lot of changes so we expect there to be a number of bugs- please post feedback in the discussions forum in the beta thread.
- Next Update Information - 14 October 2022
It's been a long time between updates, but there has been a lot going on behind the scenes. I'm nearing completion on the next update which will, amongst other things, add animals to the game to give some more excitement to exploring the different biomes. When I released the initial version of Terra Firma it was the most minimal, hacked together version of my vision for the game that I thought people could get any fun out of. The feedback has been amazing, far beyond my expectations for essentially a tech demo that I assumed only family and friends would play. The first release had a lot of shortcomings technically that have required a decent amount of rework to progress the game. Let's dive into what has been improved and what's coming for the next release. The most important change is to the camera system. The current camera uses an orthographic projection, which makes everything the…
- Update notes 23rd July 2021 - 22 July 2021
This update adds support for changing the speed of the simulation. Players can choose between time progressing at speeds between 0% and 500% of what was previously possible. At 0% speed, the water still flows over the landscape but no erosion takes place, allowing you to observe your landscape without it changing. The default rate in game of "100 years" corresponds to the single speed available previously. A feature has been added to automatically pause the simulation when zooming in to view details- this is important for upcoming features that will add animals to the simulation, which is the focus of the majority of work being done. Finally we've made some minor tweaks to the water flow simulation, to allow lakes to persist for longer before they are eroded away. Added different speeds of simulation Simulation pauses when zooming in to view plant details Minor tweaks to the water flow…
- Update notes 9th July 2021 - 9 July 2021
Fixed crash when pressing keyboard '2' during plate tectonics Fixed rare crash on some AMD graphics cards
- Patch notes 7th July 2021 - 6 July 2021
Fixed bug where game would crash on startup
- Patch notes 2 6th July 2021 - 6 July 2021
Fixed crash when looking at trees over long period of time
- Patch notes 6th July 2021 - 5 July 2021
Fixed crash on older graphics cards Fixed pause functionality Allow pausing with spacebar Fixed issue with date on screen being cutoff Fixed title of window
- Patch notes June 29th 2021 - 29 June 2021
Fixed a number of crashes on Intel Integrated Graphics
- Patch notes June 28th 2021 - 28 June 2021
Fixed bug where game would crash on certain AMD graphics cards