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Trying out the NWN2 toolset for the first time? Here are the results of my explorations on building an exterior area, combined with the wisdom of several others…

1. After you have sketched out or designed your area in your mind, you’ll probably want to start out by adjusting the terrain. The first thing you’ll need to know how to do, is how to move the map around in the main window, because it isn’t very intuitive – use CTRL + Left click to drag the area view around, and the mouse wheel/third button held down will allow you to change the camera angle.


2. Go to the drawing tools for the map, and select the one marked ‘terrain’. The general consensus on building a map quickly, is to make heavy use of the flatten tool. Still, you first select the raise or lower options, and adjust the height of one corner of your map.


3. Select ‘flatten’ and then ‘eyedropper’. This is why you raised a corner of your map – the eyedropper tool allows you to select the exact height you are going to use as a default. Zoom in to your piece of raised terrain, and click on the exact height you want to be able to draw at. Now when you paint, you will get a sort of flat-topped hill/plateau. Use this to lay out all of the raised terrain on your map. You can do several heights if you wish. You may also want to use flatten for sunken terrain, such as the path of a road. If you’re planning to build steep terrain, don’t lay down vertical faces – it stretches the textures and looks bad. You either need to step it or find other ways to break it up (see later on rocks).


4. You’re going to probably do a lot of fine tuning on the terrain over the next few hours, but start by making manual adjustments to create your terrain features using the raise/lower tools. Build your hills, drumlins, lake beds, or whatever else you need with these. Don’t worry about errors for now. If you want gentler features, increase the radius of the ‘outer’ setting of your brush, and decrease the ‘pressure’ setting.


5. Once you’re happy with the rough layout of your terrain, use the ‘noise’ tool to add general bumpiness to dull/flat areas (only).


6. Use the ‘smooth’ tool to reduce the harshness of your terrain. If you have jagged edges or a lot of cliffs from the ‘flatten’ tool you used earlier, smoothing is a good way to remove such harsh features that you don’t desire. You should also use the smooth tool to check the tile edges – noise will sometimes cause these not to match heights properly, and you can smooth these oddities out.


7. You’ll be using these tools a lot as you build to make finer adjustments, but I’m not going to be mentioning them much, since I’ll assume you now have the hang of them.


8. Now place any water. To do this, use the eyedropper tool as before to select the water level you want, and then lay down the pancakes of water to fill your hollows/seas as desired. You will need to fiddle with smoothness, ripple and refraction settings as well as colour to get your desired result (setting all 3 levels of water in the panel to similar properties gives you a more wavelike pattern, others give a windy look, etc). A word of warning, surface settings for water apply to the whole tile. If you want two bodies of water to have a different surface or colour setting, make sure they are on different tiles. Remember you can show or hide water using the top menu bar whenever you like. In addition, you can save your water settings – I recommend you do. It’s very easy to inadvertently adjust your water without meaning too, so once you have the settings perfect, save them.


9. I find that it is easiest for me to lay the larger areas of textures next. Go to an unwanted area of your map (or another area) to test textures. There is no undo function for textures, and replacing textures is done on a whole-map basis. It’s a good idea to work out the 6 or 7 textures you are going to be using for the whole map, before you start any texturing work. There are a max of 6