I've worked extensively with sc1's tilesets, and even attempted to create one of my own. So therein my expertise lie.

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Terrain is speculated as to come from an original painting or artwork, which was then split up into tiles. These were added to a tileset, found in stardat.mpq. They can be extracted and edited using modding tools, but are still not very well understood.

Placing Terrain

Terrain is placed in a isometric manner. Though it may also be placed by tiles with an advanced editor.


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Applying a grid on top of the terrain, we see that this is split up into squares.


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Notice too, that we can split this into different types. The yellow shows the main tile, while the red designates transitional tiles. This suggests as to why you cannot build cliffs on grass using the jungle tileset: there are a limited number of transitional tiles and there exists no transitional tile from grass to cliff.


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This works quite simply. A tile has four edges, which have corresponding values. These values must match up while placing isometrical tile, or else aesthetics would be shot to hell and you would get what you get if you try to place with the isometric brush on terrain placed by the square brush. Values are changed up to a certain distance out to match edges.


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Actually the "main tiles" and "transition" tiles should all be formed from a 2x1 grid. ;o

Unless you are going purely by how they look (which you appear to be).

I'm pretty sure that is just doodads. I don't think terrain would've matched up all nicely like it is now if they just drew a picture and chopped it up.

I've actually never heard that speculation. Is it your own, or did you actually hear that from somewhere?

Actually it's pretty easy. The terrain wasn't created in painting in full and chopped up, it had to be created on a gridded canvas (digital or non). The grid could possibly have little marks where things need to line up for tessellating the tiles, I did it in art back in highschool

This is how I split terrain up in my mind. Also, they probably drew terrain this way and had some sort of standard for matching up the sides... Also instead of creating new terrain you can see that they just copied another tilesets terrain and modified it to give the right ambiance. For example the twilight, desert, and snow cliffs are all exactly the same just different colors. Twilight and Desert dirt tiles are the same too... Badlands and jungle... Not really on topic but I thought it was interesting.

Well yeah that is probably what they did, but it seems he's suggesting all of it was originally one piece of art that the terrain was then taken from.

You assume I meant it was all one large section, rather than smaller sections. I made no mention of whether it was or not, because it is impossible to tell. Though I image they used something among the lines of this.

Why yes, I did assume that since you said "Terrain is speculated as to come from an original painting or artwork, which was then split up into tiles."

So what you're really saying is that they made the terrain art by texturing it?

Or maybe drew it up from scratch? I dunno the fine details.

That would also be related to "texturing it." It doesn't matter if it was drawn or not.