Need an escape from... everything? Yeah, me too. So I was happy to discover Flowscape on itch.io (opens in new tab) this morning (via this Reddit post (opens in new tab)). You can use it to generate a 3D landmass, then select a brush to paint trees, rocks, hills, bushes, flowers, and wildlife—even birds and insects—simply by moving your mouse across the screen. It's like being Bob Ross, only in 3D and you don't need any actual painting skills. Thank god.
I've been playing with it a bit today and it's not only easy to use but highly customizable. It'll generate a mass of land from a seed and quickly populate it with features, plants, water, rocks, fallen logs, and animated animal life. You can remove the things you don't want simply by pointing and pressing the delete key, and paint in your own stuff instead. Or you can start completely from scratch and create precisely the type of world you want.
There are a collection of skies and backgrounds to add, and you can play with a bunch of post-processing settings for the perfect screenshot. You can even add ambient nature sounds for making videos or just for putting on your headset and escaping into this beautiful little world you've created for a while. It's like carving out a little slice of heaven.
There are even fantasy creatures and castles you can add to your scene, and there's the option to import your own objects from various modeling programs. You can save high-res images of the worlds you create, and there's a tool to take top-down images and add grids or hexes for use in D&D or other role-playing games.
Flowscape can be found on itch.io for $10 (opens in new tab), which feels like a steal considering how neat a tool it really is. It's also heading to Steam (opens in new tab) next week.
