A lot of worldpainter worlds end up having pretty boring, featureless seafloors, so I had the idea of making some deep-sea hydrothermal vents or "black smokers" to add in some locations. I put them around divergent plate boundaries or underwater volcanic hotspots. Though modeled after submarine volcanoes, these also work just fine above water, so feel free to add them to any kind of volcanic landscape be it high on a mountain or the bottom of an ocean trench.



I also had the idea of throwing in my smoke generators since they're related. If you want steam or whatever to come from the ground without needing these volcanoes, use these instead. They're just campfires underground that make smoke for adding extra character to volcanic or other harsh landscapes.

There are 9 different variants of the vent schematics and 2 variants of the smoke generators, they work above and underwater. The only issue is that worldpainter hates underwater magma, either as a terrain or from schematics, so if you want the magma to create bubble columns they have to be updated manually. Maybe it's for the better that they're inactive by default. I have also included 2 .layer files with checks to allow these to spawn underwater and everything already so that other artists don't have to go through the tedium of all those dialog boxes.



Sure geologically speaking they aren't made of basalt or slate IRL, but actually precipitated minerals coming from the vents, but whatever basalt works well enough and they look cool. Maybe I'm my own worst critic. I post trees here but everyone forgets I'm a geology major, not botany lmao



Happy worldpainting y'all!