Show HN: A CSS-Only Terrain Generator

The internet just discovered a tiny toy that makes whole landscapes in your browser using only CSS (the style stuff behind websites), and the comments are a nostalgia rollercoaster. Fans slammed the like button with “looks sick!” praise while instantly comparing it to classic god-games—yes, Populous, SimCity 2000, and OpenTTD all got namedropped like gaming royalty. You tweak simple sliders for world size, land coverage, and terrain vibes (pampas to alpinist), spin the camera for that perfect angle, even export a heightmap—a grayscale image of the land’s shape—for future play. It’s v0.0.1, but the crowd’s already treating it like a time machine.

Of course, no party is complete without a little drama. One user reported a corner glitch where walls overlap grass, and another showed up with the ultimate feature creep: “Now do collision checks ;)”—as if CSS should suddenly handle physics. Cue the thread split: Team Pure Art Toy vs. Team Turn It Into A Game Right Now. Meanwhile, mobile bragging rights popped up—“runs great on my phone”—fueling the hype that this is more than a desktop demo.

The mood? Delightfully chaotic. The dev drops a simple, stylish generator; the crowd sees a 90s city-builder comeback. It’s proof of how far a clever idea can go in the browser—no game engine, just vibes—while the community simultaneously celebrates, nitpicks, and dares the dev to break the laws of CSS for our entertainment. Check the demo and join the comment circus.