The problem is that the map right now is still randomly generated, so it’s New England as far as the foot can wander. Realistically, you’d hid coast going east far enough, and Canadian Shield and pine tree lined pocket lakes going north far enough.
I dunno if I’d want the map to be made static to make biome travel like that work - unless there was some kind of rule to randomly generate such biomes x distance in y direction from your spawn point maybe? Closest thing to desert biomes would likely be some sort of Dustbowl 2.0. Unless those portals have drastically changed the landscape.
Nobody is working on one at the moment that I’m aware of. The first step is just having types of overmaps, so on one you might have the current scattered small towns, and on another it might be entirely forest, and on another just one big city, and surrounded by “suburb” overmaps. At some point after that we could add a map one level of scale up from that that defines continent-scale features using those overmaps, with the default spawning you somewhere in New England, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be set to either completely random, or some other specific (fictional or real) location.
There is already code in place to tie temperatures to location (in a way that provides inputs for random variation), but we could also adjust the weather based on lattitude and/or specifically tie the weather to large-scale locations.
After I read this I was wondering if some of the dimensional issues could cause environmental change that might produce something like a desert or other odd terrain.
Aberrant biomes are definitely something I’d like to see. Particularly fun is if an event the player triggered could cause a gradual biome shift over time in an area.