Hey folks, I have been looking into setting up terrain sets for a tileset I have, and while I sort of start “getting” the simpler cases, there is one particular scenario I came upon that I’ve been having a hard time figuring out how to set up. I have the following beach tiles:
For some reason, the “sand” pattern seems to be working sort of fine (just missing the transition to water, but that is the next question), while the “water” pattern, when draw, seems to be missing the side in some repetitions (see the picture below) Why is this happening if the “sand” and “water” patterns are the same?
How do I deal with the transition from sand to water? I’ve tried a few things, like doing their own terrains for each, but no solution seems to work.
Terrains aren’t great at multi-tile transitions like this. Using multiple terrains for the transition produces terrain sets that are woefully incomplete and confuse Tiled. You can use Automapping to place the detailed transitions instead - you’d draw your basic shapes like in your screenshot using Terrains, and when you’re ready, run Automapping to make them pretty. You can even make it so this’ll work with Automap While Drawing so that it’s almost as dynamic as terrains, but that’ll mean you’ll need input layers with all your different water tiles, including the water-sand transitions.
To make your automapping easier, I recommend removing terrain labels from the redundant tiles (most of the edge tiles are all the same, it seems?) and using a minimal set of tiles. That way your Automapping rules will only have to look at the tiles you actually need to use. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even remove the redundant tiles from the tileset entirely, so that the tileset takes up less space. I personally find it confusing to have redundant tiles in my tileset :'D Artists add them to fill space so it’s easier to understand what the tiles are, but they don’t serve any practical purpose when you’re using automation tools like Terrains and Automapping.
