Hi there,
I want to make a city builder game where I can sculpt, flatten, raise the landscape at specific locations and then build on them.
How can I manipulate the landscape in gameplay to achieve this?
thx!
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You generally can’t edit Unreal’s default Landscape mesh in a simple, gameplay-friendly way at runtime, especially not with pure Blueprint. From Epic’s docs and forum discussions, Landscape is mainly built for static terrain, and the important parts for changing height/material/collision are not really designed for direct runtime editing.
If your goal is to let players raise, lower, dig, or flatten terrain during gameplay, the more practical options are:
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Procedural Mesh Component
Build your terrain as your own mesh and update the vertices from a heightmap. This gives you much more runtime flexibility, but you’ll also need to handle LODs, collision, normals, and optimization yourself. -
Voxel terrain / voxel plugin
If you need digging, caves, holes, or frequent terrain deformation, voxel systems are usually a better fit than the default Landscape system. -
Runtime terrain editing plugins
There are marketplace plugins that already implement parts of this workflow. That is usually the fastest route if you do not want to build the whole system from scratch, but you should still test performance carefully.
Technically, some developers have experimented with updating Landscape heightmaps and collision in C++, but even on the forums people point out that this can be unstable, hard to maintain, and expensive if updated often. So yes, it can be experimented with, but it is usually not the best solution for real gameplay systems.
So my advice would be:
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Need a quick prototype: try an existing plugin
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Need long-term control: use Procedural Mesh or a voxel solution
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Only need a visual fake: use decals, overlay meshes, or material tricks instead of modifying the real Landscape