Why do you think rivers are important?
TL;DRWill says rivers matter because building them drove planetary tech improvements, such as terrain modification and local spawn control, which can now be reused everywhere and for future unique locations.
Yo, Chat. Rivers. The reason I think rivers are really, really cool and really, really important is they are almost just a catalyst to improving the planetary tech in and of itself. So everything that has been built around rivers and built to allow rivers to work has generated improvements on the planetary tech itself. So we didn't have terrain modification. We wouldn't have taken that as far if there wasn't as big a mandate as rivers. We didn't have this specific control over what spawns in what area depending on local features. But because we wanted it for rivers, we drove that and now we can use it everywhere. So it's not just a cool feature in a cool location, and it doesn't just add to the realism of the planets and add unique locations that we really didn't have before. It is a way of not only showing off new development in the planet tech and the procedural tech, but also a catalyst for generating the need for work and the drive to provide these new features. It's all well saying, well, I want to be able to control specifically at what level all these rocks want to spawn. You say, well, why do we need that control? What feature demands that? But actually what you can say with the rivers, you can say, well, we need it for this. So we make it for the rivers and now we've got it for everything and we can use it for all the other locations. And when we start introducing more unique POIs, we have this control and we have this technology that we wouldn't have otherwise.