A guided example: create a landscape, generate eroded mountains with real drainage networks, carve a river that lowers the ground it runs through, paint layers from the erosion history, scatter foliage, and build lighting and navigation.
This walkthrough builds terrain from nothing: a landscape, mountains that erode into real drainage networks, a river that carves its own valley, layers painted from what the erosion actually did, and foliage scattered over the result. Every command is listed in the World Building reference.
Size is decided by component count and quads per component, and the two multiply fast. The command reports the resolution it worked out, and refuses sizes the project cannot support rather than taking the editor down.
A moderate open world sits around 8 by 8 components at a section size of 63. Scale is how many world units one quad covers.
cfa create_landscape --name Terrain_Main --component-count-x 8 --component-count-y 8 --section-size 63 --scale 100,100,100Resolution, component sizing, world size, measured height range, and the edit layers, which is the field that explains most landscape problems.
cfa get_landscape_infoA noise heightfield alone reads as lumps. What makes terrain look real is erosion: water cutting drainage networks, slopes slipping until they sit at a believable angle, and valleys becoming concave the way real ones are.
Ridged peaks, hydraulic erosion for drainage, thermal erosion so ridges are not knife edges, and stream power incision for concave valleys. Amplitude is the peak to trough height before erosion, and erosion is droplets per vertex. It reports the slope distribution it produced, so you can judge it against real terrain.
cfa generate_terrain --seed 1337 --amplitude 6000 --erosion 2Glacial carving produces U shaped cross sections and cirques that no river erosion can make. Snow, coastal benches and tilted sedimentary bedding are the others.
cfa apply_terrain_process --process glacialRegenerates a region and blends it back into the surrounding ground, so there is no visible rim. It reports the seam step before and after, so the join is measured rather than assumed.
cfa regenerate_terrain_region --center 12000,8000 --radius 4000 --blend poissonThese are real Water plugin bodies, so the river lowers the landscape itself. You do not sculpt a channel first and hope the water lines up with it.
Give it a destination and it routes there through the terrain, preferring low ground and existing channels rather than cutting a straight canal. The water brush lowers the landscape for you.
cfa add_river --name River_Main --to "14000,3000" --depth 300Beyond height and slope, a layer can key off where water flowed, where sediment settled, where rock wore away and where debris collected, so texturing follows what actually happened to the terrain.
Painting layers one at a time is wrong: the engine normalises internally, so several layers each written at full strength average into a wash. Always include one 'all' layer as the base, or vertices no rule claims render black.
cfa paint_landscape_layers \
--layers "Rock:all; Grass:below_height:3000:2600; Snow:above_height:5400:1800"Uses Unreal's own brush pipeline, so the foliage type's own scale, rotation, offset and slope rules apply. It reports what it placed, what missed the ground, and what the type's rules rejected.
cfa create_foliage_type --asset-path /Game/Foliage/FT_Pine --mesh-path /Game/Meshes/SM_Pine
cfa scatter_foliage --foliage-type /Game/Foliage/FT_Pine --pattern random --count 4000The six actor sky system, then a lighting build with a check that proves it is actually built.
cfa setup_default_scene --preset daylight
cfa build_lighting --quality Preview
cfa validate_lightingA navmesh can exist and still be unpathable, which is what the projection test catches. A tile count alone is not proof.
cfa build_navigation
cfa validate_navigation --test-point 4000,4000,500Aims the editor viewport itself rather than an offscreen camera, which never converges its exposure and drops the landscape several detail levels down. A straight down frame flattens relief, so an angled pitch reads better.
cfa capture_top_down --resolution 2048 --pitch -25Returns a verdict rather than a boolean, and reports the edit layers, which is the usual cause when the water brush or spline tool silently does nothing.
cfa validate_landscape