Merricksdad's Deep Caverns (NW1 and EE)

Work in progress...

This Deep Caverns tileset  is meant to represent underdark environments that are in karst caves just below the surface down to much larger "underdark vault" caves near a mile below the surface.

This set is a stand-alone tileset, but includes enough sub-type rooms to actually be counted as four tilesets in one.

Features

Current parts include:

• Basic Room
• Tall Room (AKA Wilderness, very tall)
• Submerged Passage Room (a lower room that is flooded)
• Tunnel Room (a corridor system made from rooms instead of crossers)
• Cave Hallway (an actual corridor crosser)

 The basic room can also use sub-terrains including:

• Water Pit
• Bottomless Pit (also topless)
• BabaYaga-style pits (an homage to the lost BabaYaga Underdark tileset pits)
• Wet Room (more like puddles here)

The basic room can transition directly to submerged passage, tunnel room, and can use the cave hallway as a door to transition to tall rooms

Basic rooms and tunnel rooms can currently make use of a 3m height transition. Tall rooms will eventually have a 2x height transition similar to those in Zwerkules' tilesets.

Water pits can be considered an entire other room type if used entirely with basic cave and solid walls, creating a room system of bridges over water

A second corridor type exists which includes some carved black stone pillars. This sub-terrain is not finished, and will include glowing gems and runes on the pillars.

The tall room can also use terrains including:

• Mushroom Forest (currently not a separate terrain type, tiles are mixed with tall room tiles)
• Wet Room (more like a swamp here)

Release Notes

2019-09-26: This set was tested on NW1 and was found to look good enough that I won't be planning a separate texture set for NW1. I've added a NW1 module (1.69) in the download section.

2019-08-25: Emergency Pre-release due to hard drive starting to fail.

Known Issues:

• Bottomless pit has no ceiling
• Baba Yaga style pits have walk issues around walls
• Mushroom forest tiles have fully open walkmesh (can walk through all decor)
• Door terrain is unpainted and has bad LOS blocking mesh
• Water pit edge is funky
• Bottomless pit edge has smoothing conflict with normal and specular mapping
• Textures are all TGA instead of DDS, causing severe load slowdown on mushroom forest "trees"
• Blue fungus in base room is horrible
• Wilderness room and base room share a "wet" terrain name, and so sometimes you will see all-wet tiles with different elevations.
• Raise/Lower in base room is decor-free
• Mushroom forest mixing tiles with solid rock are decor-free
• Submerged passage has an entryway with a bad pillar height (you can look inside the mesh from the top)
• The HAK file probably contains abundant unused textures and maybe some other unrelated crap
• The HAK file includes an override for torches. This really shouldn't be in a HAK, but since I was using it for testing in this set, it's there. Feel free to remove it from the file if you want vanilla torch colors and effects.

Future Work

Sub-terrains and alternative textures to be finished include:

• Lava Pits (just a water pit reskin)
• Basalt Room (low tile-count scorched terrain with lava blades and basalt columns)
• Basalt Column Bridges (for lava pits)
• Fumarole Chasm (crosser that emits sulfurous gasses)
• Streams (for tunnel room only, crosser)
• River (for tall room only, terrain type not crosser)
• Dark Lake (a shoreline for tall room only)
• Dark Lake Fortress (and island city system for tall room)
• Worked stone bridges (for water pits and river)
• Cliff Dwellings (for tall room, square buildings with primitive doors)
• Primitive City (Stalactite town for tall room, represents poor-town)
• Drow City (large fancy structures of web, metal, and magically shaped stone)
• Drow Hallway (finished drow decor stalactite town)
• Cave Void Fortress (reskin of Darklake fortress)
• Faerzress Mythal Node
• Webbed Pits (Baba Yaga pits reskin)
• Web Bridges (for webbed pits)
• Arch Bridges (for basic room water and pits)
• Chasm Crosser (crosser version of Baba Yaga style pits)
• Crystal Chasm (crosser filled with crystals)
• Crystal Pits (Water Pit reskin)
• Crystal Bridge (for crystal pits)
• Stacked stone wall (crosser for basic room and tall room)
• Stalactite wall (crosser for basic room)

Basic rooms will also get a simple decor niche crosser which allows adding a recessed wall filled with cave formations or other specific decor, such as:

• Webbed Niche
• Natural Niche
• Portal Niche
• Crystal Niche
• Waterfall Niche

Currently there are no tile exists, entrances, or transitions, and the only door group is still unpainted and having some error correction. There are multiple transitions in the works. I will probably just snag some basic transition tiles from other sets and modify them shortly. In addition, I have the following transition groups planned:

• U-Ramp Up
• U-Ramp Down
• Sunny Entrance
• Rappelling Chute (up and down)
• Stream Slip-and-Slide (down only)
• Undermountain-style Portal
• Big Double Doors (tile group)
• Tavern Stairs up

Possible changes to mixing tiles:

• Allow tunnel room to use BabaYaga-style pits
• Allow tunnel room to have water pits, intead of just half-tunnel streams
• Allow basic room and tunnel room a 2x height transition
• Separate Mushroom Forest into separate terrain