2026-07-31 Weekly update — Terraforming Titans Steam update #28947

This week might look like a fairly small update, but I actually worked very hard for 3 days on some large rework of the climate model under the hood. While my goal still is not for a completely physical model, I did want to get a bit closer to realistic. I wanted to enable a new optional difficulty setting that accounts for the energy of phase changes. Indeed, evaporating water actually cools its environment, and raining water warms its environment. This could lead to more challenging gameplay, as the player might have to fight a lot of thermal inertia to get what they want. To accomodate this setting I had to make some changes elsewhere and... a small change in the climate model is never small. I always regret touching it. Oh well what is done is done. Another thing I have done is convert all the textures rebuilds in the world visualizer to shaders. Well "I" is a bit misleading. This is...