How to Make a Cave
Looking for more little details to spice up your latest greatest map creation in Stronghold 2? This easy tutorial will show how to make what looks like a cave opening on your terrain. Caves can be a great place to script wolf and bear invasions. They also add a little interest to iron mine areas or just alone as some oddity of the landscape.
Cave openings are made by exploiting a small graphics glitch that the game can’t compensate for so you end up with a black hole in the map. You can’t enter the cave but it makes for a nice map detail.
First go to the water tools and place a large block of swamp.
Next, go to the terrain menu and select ‘raise terrain’ and toggle the ‘effects water’ button. Using short quick taps of the mouse button, raise the terrain across half of the swamp. A black void will develop where the swamp tiles get separated. Raise the terrain as much as you can before it turns into a solid cliff face. A little trial and error will let you get a feeling of how far you can push it.
Now go back to the water tools, select ‘swamp’ and ‘delete’ and using a small brush size, slowly begin deleting the raised swamp tiles, until you have narrowed the opening down to a reasonable size.
You can eliminate most of the swamp but not directly above or below the opening.
Place large dark grey stones above the cave and use the ‘lower stones’ option to sink them into the opening, breaking up the square blackness.
Finally, you go back to the terrain menu and, with the ‘effect water’ button toggled off, raise hills around the cave and garnish with some foliage.
Write-up and pictures by Doomsword.