[Suggestion] Paint your own atlas instead of it being fully generated via RNG

Current Design:
You start endgame from the Ziggurat refuge, you see travel nodes and must slot waystones to open maps in them, progressing this way forward through the map and revealing more terrain.


Suggested Design:
You start endgame from the Ziggurat refuge, you see some pre-existing travel nodes, but there are many gaps in the landscape.

Waystones and their tiers allow the player to choose the type of location when they are slotted in the "missing" nodes. Perhaps the terrain can be an rng implicit on the waystone itself.
So if a player has a waystone with a "desert" implicit on it, when this waystone is "slotted" in atlas the "missing" terrain turns into a desert with a map that fits the desert type (iirc something about rust was one of maps names in desert).
You could even create a hidden mechanic where certain kind of terrain combinations produce unique locations, with some ingame hints/quests that teach this of course. So maybe when player carefully sculpts the atlas from 6-9 maps, he produces a unique map this way ?

Some of the atlas content still remains constant to drive the quests whatever future ideas there might be for designers, but the empty zones allow to give some agency in players hands. Maybe some dont like forests, some dont like crypts, now with a bit of rng on waystones people can specialise more in being exiles who hunt in the desert or mountains.



Some thoughts and reasons:
Currently many areas are sort of ruined by water, because theres nothing there, but atlas without rivers might also be kinda boring. Maybe these river areas could be an experiment ground ? Rivers become these odd rifts in space that could be filled by players ?

If about 40% of the atlas would have zones that are up to the player to choose what type they are, it could produce some funny looking atlases while giving agency in players hands and allow to focus more on maps they like more.

This would also allow to data mine "bad maps" and see why they are skipped.



(reference image has too many areas "unknown", but its just a reference image)

What do you think ? Do you skip Hidden Grotto often ?

Interesting idea, but won't it work more like a time saving design?

Every biome in current version gives different bonuses, I see your implementation as a way to target farm some specific biomes to benefit from their bonuses, rather than searching them on current Atlas.

You shape the terrain, but how far does it expand? Same size as what a biome is now? Because if you have empty nodes as you said and you decide to put a waystone that has the "desert" biome, won't it affect the other empty nodes as well? basically override them to be desert as well? I don't quite understand the size metrics here, I would like you to detail.

The size is the single node, yes, this means that the player could paint some bizarre terrain, or perhaps painting could be done a by a different item...sort of like slotting puzzle pieces that fit, but that might also be just annoying in the long term.

Yes, target farming is a good side effect.