User blog comment:Talvi/Terraria Map Generation/@comment-4123347-20111024115735/@comment-4541103-20111024170102

Thanks, I'd half-forgotten about that. It's actually the opposite - my 2.1 Ghz dual-core laptop is pretty slow with anything but a small map, which it seems to handle rather well. Usually I leave the room and do something else when generating a large one... Which is the only one I've generated for a while.

Even so, I'm looking for something a little more technical - the mathematics of it all. Something like, "X-X clumps of X, size X-X, distanced X-X from X.

Also, if you've noticed, the different elements of the terrain are all pretty much easy to distinguish from each other. You have your large globular caverns and your diagonal ones. These can be either water-filled, partially water-filled or simply empty. It's not random placement, either - larger caverns tend to clump, and they're not evenly spaced along the map, though they avoid the surface for the most part. The smaller caverns seem to be evenly spaced, though.

Dirt has a very clear, definite line between where it comprises approximately 75% of the terrain to where it's down to half, to where it's down to 25%. The first change of this is at the layer where the dirt walls in the background end.

I'm looking, more or less, for the mathematics behind everything. This kind of thing interests me - why, I don't know. My apologies for the wall of text, and thanks for that info - I'd pretty much forgotten that it showed the order in which it does everything. =)