TerraScatter – Object Scattering & Ecosystem Simulation

- Ecosystem simulation: light competition, growth, mortality, seed spread, succession

- Biomes driven by height, slope and moisture, with blended borders

- Scatter Lake: carve, beach, shoreline paint and water; fully reversible

- 9 rules: height, slope, curvature, terrain layer, texture mask, noise, collider exclusion, path distance, waterline

- Non-destructive mask brush that survives regeneration

- Blue-noise distribution; footprints stop overlaps across layers

- Unity Terrain, terrain grids, or any mesh with a collider

- Path scattering, settle-to-surface, grid snapping

- One-click reversible bake to GPU instancing

- Full undo/redo, deterministic seeds, cancelable progress

- 12 layer presets, 6 biome presets, demo scenes included

- Full C# source, no package dependencies

- Unity 6.0+; Built-in, URP, HDRP

GROW A FOREST INSTEAD OF PLACING ONE

Set a layer to Ecosystem and TerraScatter simulates it. Seedlings compete for light, grow or die, and spread seed. Fifty generations later you have a forest with history: old trees with space around them, young growth at the edges, clearings, and shade-tolerant species filling in underneath.

BIOMES

Each biome says what height, slope and moisture it wants, and the terrain sorts itself out: scree up top, conifers on the slopes, woodland in the valley. Where biomes meet they blend instead of cutting a hard line.

LAKES

Drop a Scatter Lake and press Build. It carves the basin, shapes a beach, paints the shoreline and fills it with water. The Waterline rule then puts reeds in the shallows and keeps trees back from the bank. Remove restores the terrain exactly.

A BRUSH THAT SURVIVES REGENERATING

The brush paints a mask, not objects. Clear a spot for a building, then change rules or seeds as often as you like. The clearing stays clear.

RULES FOR DIRECT CONTROL

Height, slope, curvature, terrain paint, image masks, noise, distance from paths, and exclusion around roads and buildings. Rules fade out softly, so density thins at an edge instead of stopping dead.

WORKS ON ANY GROUND

Unity Terrain, grids of terrain tiles (forests cross the seams cleanly), or any mesh with a collider. Objects sit flat on slopes, can snap to a grid, and can follow a path for hedges and fences.

SAFE TO USE

Unity Terrain, grids of terrain tiles (forests cross the seams cleanly), or any mesh with a collider. Objects sit flat on slopes, can snap to a grid, and can follow a path for hedges and fences.

SAFE TO USE

Real prefabs with colliders and prefab links intact. One Ctrl+Z undoes a whole generate. Same seed, same result. Settings live in a reusable asset. When the object count gets huge, bake to GPU instancing with one click, and unbake just as easily.

Demo art: Quaternius' Stylized Nature MegaKit (quaternius.com), CC0. Licence file included at TerraScatter/Demo/Art/Quaternius-License.txt. The tool does not depend on it.