Goblin Camp is set in a forest that’s more or less based on the kind of woods we have in Finland and elsewhere in Northern Europe. The reason this kind of terrain looks the way it does is actually quite simple: it’s the ice age.

A little over a hundred thousand years ago, the Earth started cooling and entered the Last Glacial Period. Massive sheets of ice covered nearly all of Northern Europe. Here in Finland, the bedrock is mostly very close to the surface, and as the glaciers expanded, they scoured away nearly all of the soil, leaving just the bedrock covered with ice.

Incidentally, this means that if there were humans living around here before the Last Glacial Period, we have no idea who they were or what they did, because pretty much all possible evidence will have been destroyed by the ice. There’s a heated argument over a place in Finland called Wolf Cave, which some people think shows signs of pre-glacial human activity, and some people don’t.

As it got warmer, the glaciers melted and receded. The meltwater flowed from the glaciers, usually into the ocean, carving rivers through the landscape. If the glaciers disappeared completely,rainwater would still gather in these river beds. So in a sense, the river in a Goblin Camp map is a glacial landform.

Because the bedrock is quite close to the surface, river valleys are rarely very deep, so the rivers are prone to flooding in the spring, when the snow that’s gathered over the winter begins to melt. Sometimes this is exacerbated by dams of ice forming in rivers, so that when the dam collapses, a huge pulse of floodwater travels downstream.

As the glaciers receded, they dumped all the soil they’d torn up back on the bedrock, and this is pretty much what made the landscape we live in today. The glaciers didn’t melt back at a steady rate, though; sometimes they stopped, even for long times. Whenever a glacier would stop, it would still deposit rocks and earth, forming a giant pile called a terminal moraine. If the glacier then later withdraws, the moraine is left behind as a ridge. One of southern Finland’s most prominent geographical features is the Salpausselkä ridge, a terminal moraine from the last ice age.

This is why maps in Goblin Camp feature a long ridge running across the map, at more or less a right angle to the river: this represents a terminal moraine. They’re handy places to put up raven statues, by the way, since their fog-clearing radius is bigger when they’re placed higher.

During the ice age, the sea level was much lower because so much water was frozen in the glaciers. However, the sheer weight of the ice pressed the ground down, so much that the bedrock in Finland is still rebounding today. Water would also sometimes form huge lakes before breaking through to the ocean. This means that many areas that are now dry land were then underwater.

The soil dumped by glaciers, known as glacial till, is mostly a mix of sand, clay and rocks, where sand tends to dominate. As anyone who’s done any digging in Finland can tell you, there’s a lot of rocks! This is why you can build stone tools in Goblin Camp without any sources of stone: rocks are readily available.

When glacial till spends a substantial amount of time underwater, the water sweeps away most of the lighter sand and leaves behind the clay. You could say that soil that’s been underwater long has been more efficiently sorted. For this reason, the more fertile clay soils are mostly found lower down, while the ridges, for example, tend to be almost exclusively sand, with more clay deeper down. The story of Finnish farming starts with slash-and-burn farming on sandy soils and later moves to the lower, heavier clay lands when plowing technology advances.

Some lovely glacial landforms we added to Goblin Camp recently are ponds. Glacial ponds, also known as kettles, are formed when pieces of ice shear away from the glacier and are left behind. The block of ice gets covered with sediment, and as it melts away into the subsoil, it leaves behind a hole in the ground. Usually this will fill with rainwater, creating a cute little pond.

As you can see, the landscape in Goblin Camp represents our attempt at creating terrain marked by glaciation. Our map generator simulates how the glacier carves up the land, what features are left in its wake, and how the forest and vegetation grow. And we’re not done yet: stay tuned for the Earth Update, where we’ll add more glacial landforms and the exploitable resources they give your goblins! Until then, happy camping.