Aerial view across a sea loch towards eroded highland massifs

LibreTerrain 2026.1

Build worlds,
node by node.

A free, open-source terrain authoring application. Shape, erode, colour and populate landscapes, then take them into Unreal Engine, Blender, Godot or any other tool.

Download for free Read the docs

Windows · macOS · Linux

Scottish Highlands example project

Exports to

Unreal Engine
Blender
Godot
EXR · PNG · CSV

Everything a landscape needs, in one graph. Land, water, erosion, colour and vegetation, with a Rust engine underneath and every output ready for the engine you ship in.

60: Nodes
65,537²: Largest build
GPU: Accelerated, with CPU fallback
Free: Open source, MIT / Apache-2.0

island.lterrain · Terrain

Click a node to preview it. A sketch generated in your browser.

Generating terrain…

Viewing: Colourise

Node graph

Non-destructive, from the first shape to the last blade of grass.

Build a landscape from primitives, noise, landforms, filters and simulations. Every node shows a live thumbnail and any output can be previewed and exported. After an edit, only the nodes downstream are recomputed.

60 nodes across 11 categories
Terrain, Vegetation and Colour graphs
Custom nodes and comments

The node graph

Hydraulic and thermal erosion

Simulation

Erosion that reads like geology.

Hydraulic erosion carves branching valleys over geological time and drops sediment where rivers slow. Thermal erosion builds scree. Rock hardness gives you stepped cliffs, and every pass outputs flow, wear and deposition maps.

Hydraulic and thermal erosion
Rock hardness strata
Flow, wear and deposition masks

Erosion and water

A glen with a river running into a loch between mountains

Rivers, lakes and sea lochs

Hydrology

Rivers, lakes, sea and snow.

Rivers carve channels that widen downstream, lakes fill hollows to their spill level, the sea floods from the world edges and wears the coast into beaches, and snow settles by altitude, slope and shade.

Water surfaces exported separately
Shoreline, shallows and riverbank masks
Snow lines that respect the sun

Water nodes

Colour map of the Highlands: heather moor, pinewoods, crags and lochs

Colour map from the Colour tab

Colour & texture

A dedicated graph for colour.

Colour by altitude, slope or facing, layer materials through masks, or bring in aerial imagery. Then produce splat maps, packed masks and normal maps for your engine.

Natural gradient presets
Splat maps with up to 8 layers
OpenGL and DirectX normal maps

Colour

Density of a pinewood population across the terrain

Tree density from a Trees population

Ecosystems

Vegetation that knows where it grows.

Trees, shrubs and grass respond to slope, altitude, water, snow and each other. Populations compete for ground, and rocks collect on scree. Export density masks for painting, and points for instancing.

Species presets
Chained populations
CSV and JSON point export

Vegetation

Export

One click. Every output. The right scale.

Mark the outputs you want and press Build. LibreTerrain writes heightmaps, masks, colour maps and vegetation points at full resolution, with a build.json that the import helpers for Unreal Engine, Blender and Godot read to place everything in metres.

Import helpers

highlands/build/2,049² · 12 × 12 km

build.json	Manifest	JSON
snow-n_0015_height_2049.exr	Heightfield	EXR 32
snow-n_0015_height_2049.png	Heightfield	PNG 16
rivers-n_0012_river_2049.png	Mask	PNG 16
sea-n_0014_shoreline_2049.png	Mask	PNG 16
wetness-n_0016_wetness_2049.png	Mask	PNG 16
trees-n_001b_density_2049.8bit.png	Density	PNG 8
trees-n_001b_points_2049.csv	Points	CSV
splat_map-n_0038_weights_1_4_2049.8bit.png	Splat	PNG 8
normal_map-n_0039_out_2049.8bit.png	Normals	PNG 8

And the details that make it a tool you live in.

Draw on the map

Block out continents, islands and plateaus with polygons, straight on the 2D map.

Resolution independent

Every size is in metres. Preview at 513², build at 16K with the same result.

GPU accelerated

Heavy nodes run on the GPU, with a full CPU fallback for older hardware.

Masks everywhere

Slope, curvature, occlusion, flow and wetness drive any setting with a mask port.

Custom nodes

Turn a group of nodes into one reusable node, and label stages with comments.

Tiled builds

Builds up to 65,537², written as single images or tiles for World Partition.

Undo everything

Every graph, setting and world change can be undone, including an AI assistant’s.

Stable projects

Projects saved in 2026.1 open with the same result in every later release.

AI assistants

Work alongside your AI assistant.

Assistants that speak the Model Context Protocol, such as Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and VS Code, can read the graph, add and connect nodes, look at the terrain and start builds while you watch. Each change is one undo step. It listens on your computer only, and one switch makes it read-only.

Connect an assistant

$ claude mcp add --transport http libreterrain \
    http://127.0.0.1:17428/mcp

> Add a sea loch to the west, erode the highlands
  and plant pinewoods in the sheltered glens.

Gallery

See the gallery

Sea loch and massifs — Scottish Highlands

Free. Open source.
No strings attached.

LibreTerrain is dual-licensed MIT and Apache-2.0. There's no licence key, no subscription and no edition to upgrade to, and what you make is yours to use commercially. It's built in the open with a Rust engine and a Godot 4 editor, and contributions are welcome.

View on GitHub Join the discussion

Start building.

Download LibreTerrain for Windows, macOS or Linux. Nothing else to install.

Download for free Your first terrain

Build worlds,node by node.