Walk a lakeshore in a new world on the mountains terrain. A big lake no longer meets its valley wall in a sheer face straight out of the water: every lake and tarn has a graded shore, a toe of beach and slab at the waterline that bends into a talus slope, with the wall set back behind it. The toe runs on under the water as a shallow shelf, so the beach meets the water in a soft pale band, and grass and young pines grow on it. Ponds and lakes of every size get the same smooth banks as the creeks, so the waterline follows a curve instead of a 4 m grid zigzag.
Where a lake does meet a cliff, the water drops straight off deep and dark, as it does under real Sierra walls, and the pale shelf stays only under gentle shores. Along a big lake the forest breaks into gaps that reach the water and thins where the ground is rock or scree. Cattails stand only by sheltered still water: ponds and small lakes keep them, and big lakes with more than 300 m of open water do not.
Still visible: the band of trees along a big lake’s far lower shore reads as one continuous row. A change of November 14 gives a pond one water color over one bed out to its round shore, where a playtest showed a stepped rectangle; it is in the generator and has not been filmed in the game yet.
