Terrain, Kit & Own Content

Working With Terrain and Levels

1. Place the entrance at the foot of a slope with Draw on Surface, so it sits on the terrain.
2. Switch to Draw on Plane for the underground part and set the elevation a few metres below the surface.
3. Draw passages and rooms underground.
4. Click Cut Terrain Opening, then check the mouth from outside. Add rocks or the manual kit pieces around the entrance to hide the terrain edge.
5. For a cave inside a mountain mesh, check that the passages stay inside the mesh. The cave is single-sided and only visible from inside.

Manual Kit

The folder Prefabs/CaveBuilder Basic also contains the cave pieces as ordinary prefabs: walls, corners, floors, ceilings, junction strips, a ramp, a ledge, an arch, a floor skirt, an opening wall, the rooms, the entrance, the cap, the plug and the four Basic decorations (every theme has its own decoration prefabs in its Prefabs folder). The kit pieces snap together on the 2 m grid and use world-space materials, so neighbouring pieces line up. Use them to dress the outside of an entrance, or to build small hand-made caves without the tool.

Your Own Content

• Themes – Assets > Create > Arkerion > Cave Builder > Theme. Assign a cave material made with the ArkerionCaveSurface shader (fill its Walls A, Chambers, Alternative and Floor textures; use ArkerionCaveLava for a lava-style theme), the role materials and optional decoration prefabs. The theme’s four decoration slots are what its caves scatter, so a theme gets its own look by pointing them at prefabs with its own material (for example a copy of the Basic decoration prefabs with your material).
• Profiles – Assets > Create > Arkerion > Cave Builder > Profile: a custom cross-section shape.
• Rooms and entrances – model the opening to the standard 4 x 4 m shape (coordinates in Documentation/CB1_Contour_Unity.json), add empty objects named Model_Socket_Id at each opening’s floor centre, select the model and use Assets > Create > Arkerion > Cave Builder > Module From Selected Model. The module’s Inspector reports whether every opening fits.

Programmers can add their own generated content, settings and checks. See CaveBuilder_Extending.md in the Documentation folder.