---
title: "Streamed Terrain World"
package: "@phaser-ae/terrain-world-3d"
tier: Free
version: 3.0.0-4
released: 2026-10-14
updated: 2026-10-20
description: "Streams a window of terrain tiles around the camera across landscapes too large for one height array, with fixed limits on memory, meshes and generation work."
url: https://phaser.io/packs/terrain-world-3d
site: Phaser - https://phaser.io
---

# Streamed Terrain World

Procedural ground that goes on for kilometres without a world-sized height array. A window of tiles follows the
camera, built under budgets you set and recycled as you travel, and the edits you make are still there when you come
back.

## What it does

The landscape is sampled on one stable world lattice. Tiles of `tileSize` world units are built around the camera out
to `radius` tiles, nearest missing tile first, at most `buildsPerTick` each simulation tick. Their meshes and small
colour-atlas frames are reused as the window moves, so the number of meshes is set by the radius, `(2 * radius + 1)²`
at most, rather than by how far the player has gone. Source heightfields sit in a least-recently-used cache of
`cacheTiles`.

`heightAt` is triangle-exact and answers anywhere without building a tile, and `normalAt` gives the slope from
neighbouring samples, so a walking camera, a vehicle or a low-flying aircraft can read the ground at any distance.
Far tiles drop to coarser detail, and their edges meet full-resolution neighbours on identical boundary vertices, so
there are no cracks between levels and no skirts to hide them.

Edits use the `raise`, `flatten`, `road` and `valley` operations of `terrain-3d`. Only the samples you changed are
kept, and they survive eviction: carve a road, travel away, come back, and it is still there. `save` and `load`
persist those samples. Underneath, the exported `TerrainTileStore` does the generation, caching, queries and
authoring with no rendering at all.

## Features

- **Camera-centred tiles** — a radius of one to six tiles around the camera, with the mesh count fixed by it.
- **Bounded work** — one to eight tile builds or detail changes per tick, nearest first, and `pending` reports the
  queue.
- **Bounded memory** — a cache of 1 to 1,024 source tiles, and mesh and atlas slots reused rather than allocated.
- **Ground queries anywhere** — `heightAt` and `normalAt` without loading a tile, on one lattice that runs through
  negative coordinates too.
- **Persistent sparse edits** — raise, flatten, road and valley, validated and committed as a whole, kept through
  eviction, with `save` and `load`.
- **Crack-free distance detail** — coarse tile interiors join full-resolution edges, with matching colour texels at
  the boundaries.
- **Your own landform** — a seed, amplitude and feature size for the built-in generator, or a pure `height` function.
- **Resource readouts** — `tiles`, `cachedTiles`, `triangles` and `pending`, on WebGPU and WebGL2 alike.

## Good for

- **Flight games** over hills that continue wherever the player turns.
- **Exploration and expedition games** that cross kilometres of country on foot or by vehicle.
- **Off-road driving** across open land, with `heightAt` and `normalAt` for the wheels anywhere on the map.
- **Travel and survival games** where the world is a seed and the player's roads and levelled camps must stay put.
- **Tools and simulations** that need ground heights far from the camera, through `TerrainTileStore` on its own.

## Make it yours

The options are the tile's world width (`tileSize`, default 192), its detail (`resolution`, 16 to 256 quads a side,
default 64), the window (`radius`, default 3), the build budget (`buildsPerTick`, default 2), the cache
(`cacheTiles`, default 64), and the landform: `seed`, `amplitude` and `featureSize`, or your own `height` function.

The settings pull in different directions for different games. A fast flight game wants a wider radius and a bigger
build budget, with fog drawn in to hide the loading edge. A walking expedition can use smaller, more detailed tiles
in a tighter window, with its own height function for a hand-shaped valley and edits for the camps and tracks the
player makes.

## Works with

- `terrain-3d` — for a finite authored scene, with biome painting, footprint placement, undo and redo, and smooth
  detail transitions.
- `rig-fps` — give its floor the streamed world's `heightAt`, and the player walks the ground wherever they go.
- `world-3d` and `render-3d` — the world it builds into and the renderer that draws it; `procgen` supplies its noise.

## Good to know

- It is bounded tile paging, not a planet renderer: queries refuse coordinates beyond ±1,000 km, and rendering
  precision falls off towards that limit.
- Generation and colour baking run on the CPU under a tile-count budget, not on a worker; keep travel speed within
  it, since a teleport briefly shows the loading edge.
- Detail changes are discrete, without the morphing `terrain-3d` has.
- Streaming does not page foliage, water, buildings or physics, there are no caves or overhangs, and region masks and
  landform brushes belong to `terrain-3d`.
- An edit batch covers at most 262,144 candidate samples and authored data at most a million; restore a save with the
  same generator settings it was made with.

---

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