AgrarianGameArchive/Docs/Terrain/GroundZeroTile.md

Ground Zero MVP Tile

Decision

Ground Zero for the first real-terrain MVP tile is the Linda Mar / San Pedro Valley edge in Pacifica, California.

This is a practical first tile because it gives the terrain pipeline varied coastal California terrain in a compact 1 km square:

• Pacific coastal influence without starting in a dense city center.
• Hills, valley slope, drainage, and vegetation transitions.
• Nearby ocean/coastline/bathymetry cases for early pipeline design.
• Real public terrain, land-cover, hydrography, and coastline datasets are available from US sources.
• The environment supports the first survival loop: wood, fiber, water, shelter, weather exposure, and wildlife placeholders.

Tile Identity

The MVP tile uses a simple UTM 1 km grid ID for the first prototype. This is not the final global indexing decision; it is the concrete local key we can build against now.

tile_id: gz_us_ca_pacifica_utm10n_e544_n4160
display_name: Ground Zero - Pacifica Linda Mar / San Pedro Valley
country: United States
region: California
nearest_place: Pacifica
utm_zone: 10N
utm_easting_min_m: 544000
utm_northing_min_m: 4160000
utm_easting_max_m: 545000
utm_northing_max_m: 4161000
nominal_center_latitude: 37.5925
nominal_center_longitude: -122.4995
tile_size_meters: 1000

MVP Scope

For the first pass, this tile should prove the pipeline rather than final art quality.

• Import real elevation data into a 1 km x 1 km Unreal terrain.
• Preserve real-world horizontal scale.
• Use a conservative vertical scale that can represent hills accurately without making traversal unusable.
• Generate a tile metadata record and store it in the registry.
• Track source datasets and generation version.
• Add at least the eight neighboring tile records as placeholders.
• Validate that edges can be stitched to adjacent 1 km tiles.
• Infer first-pass biome and resources from terrain, land cover, water, and coastal influence.

Initial Biome Direction

Working biome label:

coastal_california_scrub_woodland

Expected early resources:

• Wood from scrub/woodland patches.
• Fiber from grasses, reeds, and coastal scrub.
• Water from drainage/creek source where present in source data.
• Stone from slope and exposed terrain placeholders.
• Wildlife placeholders appropriate to coastal California foothills.

Source Data Targets

First-pass source candidates:

• USGS 3DEP elevation data for terrain height.
• USGS National Hydrography Dataset or equivalent for streams/water.
• NOAA coastline and bathymetry datasets for coastal/ocean handling.
• USGS National Land Cover Database or equivalent for land-cover/biome hints.
• OpenStreetMap only as a secondary reference for roads/trails/landmarks.

Open Decisions

• Whether the final global tile grid stays UTM-based by zone or moves to a single global equal-area grid.
• Exact Unreal origin strategy for tiles outside the MVP area.
• How much coastline/ocean data belongs in the same tile package versus a separate water/bathymetry layer.
• Whether player-built state is stored per terrain tile, per settlement region, or in a separate spatial entity table.