Big G' Terrain Tools

Or install the zip by hand

No automatic updates — you would come back here for each new version.

Then Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins → Install from ZIP. Keep the file named gtt.zip.

Ask in the Discord

Stuck on the install, an export that will not finish, or a map that comes out wrong? Ask in the DayZ ModCast Discord — there is a channel for the terrain tools, and Big Grampa reads it. Asking there beats asking alone: the answer stays up for the next person who hits the same thing.

Current version 2.26.42, 13 October 2026

• 2.26.42 13 OctSix fixes from Wishy’s three-pass test. A missing elevation tile no longer turns half the map into sea behind an “Export done!”: land that had no data is reported, never lifted into a flat plain, and the export ends with a red STOP. Tiled satmaps no longer come out part black when the tile size is not a divisor of 4096. A tile size of 0 is refused instead of crashing after a six-minute render. A heightmap layer whose file was cleaned from Temp shows as an error, and a re-download re-reads it instead of saying “already in the project”. Clear cache keeps your elevation tiles and says what it kept. Each export writes a fresh raw heightmap, and gtt_export.txt now says which run wrote it and drops the old low-ground note.
• 2.26.41 11 OctLift low ground said “no land sits under 0.5 m” and in the same breath “the lowest land is 0.06 m”. It only ever lifts land at or below the sea (0 m); land already above the sea is left alone. The message and the log line now say that.
• 2.26.40 8 OctBlank sea the heightmap could not vouch for is filled too. On Rottnest the hole fill painted just over half the blank sea and left the rest white, because it only paints where the heightmap says sea — and where the heightmap has no data for an area, it says nothing at all. It now asks the photo instead: a blank patch ringed by open water is sea and gets painted, while a blank patch inland is still left alone for you to re-export. The log stops over-claiming as well — it used to report “every blank block filled” over a map that was still half white, because it counted blocks but painted pixels and never compared the two. It now reports the share of the blank area it actually filled, in red when the heightmap does not reach.
• 2.26.39 8 OctWishy’s Rottnest re-test, fixed. The satmap sea-hole fill now finds every blank patch over open sea wherever it sits, and paints it with the colour of the real sea around it. Before, patches that did not line up with its block grid stayed white, and the fill came out pale grey-blue beside deep blue sea while the log still said the satmap was fine to build with. The fill now checks its own colour and says so when it cannot vouch for it; blank ground on land still stops the build. After a half-failed NASA download, the one-click fix keeps the elevation source that has all the tiles your marked area needs (“Keep copernicus (complete)”) instead of the half-finished one. The temporary satmap layer no longer goes into the Layers panel, which is what set off QGIS’s stray “Zoom level” tooltip at the start of an export. The world-config message names its files by folder.
• 2.26.38 4 OctThe Terrain Builder setup guide now says what a magenta-and-green scene after the imports is: the mask view, not a bad file. Terrain Builder’s main toolbar has separate toggles for the satellite image and the mask image (hover the icons for their names, or View → View settings). Satellite on, mask off, and the photo appears. A tester lost an afternoon to it; the guide and the export notes carry the fix above the layer-order tip.
• 2.26.37 2 OctWishy’s Rottnest test, fixed. The satmap clean-up passes run on the photo you just exported; blank patches no longer tint the even-out; no ground-mask tile gets more than the 5 textures DayZ allows; town names in the world config sit on the map; fences and power lines stay out of roads.shp; the NASA login box comes to the front; a busy OSM server falls back to a mirror with a countdown in the bar; new projects start fresh instead of copying the last map’s settings; old red banners clear on the next export; file logging writes a gtt.log; and the Terrain Builder guide names the right menus.
• 2.26.36 2 OctThe New map box now says up front that a map name must start with a letter (FourPoints, not 4Points), instead of only after you type it. The world is named after the map, and DayZ’s config names cannot start with a digit.
• 2.26.35 1 OctThe sea has depth. The elevation sources put the open sea at exactly 0 m, the same height as DayZ’s water, so maps came out with no water to speak of. A new option under Heightmap, on by default, lowers the open sea to about 1 m deep near the shore, sloping to 10 m further out; land, lakes and rivers are left alone. Ticked boxes now show a tick. An OSM download that hits a busy server tries again by itself, and a failure says which server, which area and why. Choosing Classified (Orfeo) without its training areas or OrfeoToolbox now stops before the long satmap, not after it. A satmap or surface mask over 2 GB gets a warning, since Terrain Builder may show only part of it.
• 2.26.34 30 SepOne elevation source per map. A finished Download now removes tiles left over from another source, or from a box you have since moved. The export merges every gtt_heightmap layer, so leftovers were being blended into the terrain with nothing on screen to say so. Your own rasters are never touched. If a NASA (srtm) tile fails, the message now says the map has heights for only part of its area and offers Copernicus in one click. A project that is already mixed shows an error under WILL EXPORT with a Keep link. Old projects no longer switch Elevation back to srtm when no NASA login is saved on this PC. New world configs explain the navmesh file the game needs before it will load the map.
• 2.26.33 24 SepFixes No pure colors found in Terrain Builder. Terrain Builder reads only the very top row of MapLegend.png, and the legend the plugin wrote started below a white margin, so that row held no surface colours at all. The top row now carries every surface colour. Checked in Terrain Builder: the message used to appear every time Buldozer opened, and now it doesn’t. Maps exported before this get the new legend on their next export with the surface mask ticked.
• 2.26.32 23 SepWhen an export finishes, the panel now offers the Terrain Builder setup guide with a green Open the Terrain Builder setup guide button. It opens gtt_export.html, every Terrain Builder tab drawn as a look-alike with this map’s numbers already in the boxes. The guide was always written into the export folder; now you don’t have to know it exists to read it.
• 2.26.31 21 SepA Discord button in the panel’s bottom row, beside dayzmodcast.com and Ko-fi. Until now the plugin gave you nowhere to ask: if an export would not finish or something did not make sense, there was no way in from the panel. Now there is, and the answer stays up for whoever hits the same thing next.
• 2.26.30 18 SepFixes a hard crash at the start of the heightmap step on installs where QGIS’s Processing framework had not registered its GDAL tools: the export now registers them itself, and if it still cannot reach them it stops with a message saying what to switch on instead of taking QGIS down. Reported twice on QGIS 4.2.1.
• 2.26.29 16 SepThe New map dialog's Browse… button now opens Qt’s own folder picker instead of the Windows shell one, after a QGIS 3.44 tester had QGIS crash inside that dialog. If QGIS ever crashed on you the moment you pressed New map, this is for you.
• 2.26.28 16 SepFIX: OpenStreetMap layers that arrive with no coordinate system (no .prj beside the clipped files) are now treated as WGS 84, which is what OpenStreetMap data is. Without that the roads, places and buildings were shifted as if degrees were metres and every one landed in a single spot on the map (Honolulu). The log says when it happened.
• 2.26.27 16 SepFIX: an export could write every shapefile in UTM zone 31N (the zone of longitude 0) when QGIS handed the plugin an empty marked-area extent mid-run — 25,000 Honolulu roads collapsed into one spot. The marked area is drawn in its own UTM zone, so that zone is now used directly, and an empty extent stops the export with a message instead of a guess.
• 2.26.26 16 SepFIX: the low-ground lift could be reported in gtt_export.txt and still be missing from gtt_heightmap.asc on disk, so docks and flats came out under the sea anyway (two maps, two machines). The lift now runs inside the step that writes the heightmap, and the end of the export re-reads the file and says “verified on disk” — or lifts it again and tells you.
• 2.26.25 15 Seproads.shp now carries BRIDGE, TUNNEL and LAYER columns straight from OpenStreetMap, so a road tool can lay bridge decks on a bridge span instead of a road on a mound. Breakwaters and boat ramps join the piers in the linework layer and the export.
• 2.26.24 15 SepRivers and lakes the sea cannot reach are now lifted to a dry bed with the rest of the low ground, so they no longer come out as a strip of sea running through the land (DayZ only draws the sea; the Waterways tool carves creeks). And if the land map cannot be read during an export, the panel now says so in red under WILL EXPORT with a “Lift it now” link, instead of one log line and a coast left under water.
• 2.26.23 14 SepWhen the mask layer paints a colour no surface maps, the log now names the rule doing it (usually Buildings, which is pink and ships switched off) instead of blaming an old download. The shipped style is still put back for the export.
• 2.26.22 14 SepPressing Download for elevation you already have no longer stacks a second gtt_heightmap layer on the first. The cached tile is named in the log, and the panel says it was already in the project. Different tiles are still separate layers, merged on export.
• 2.26.21 14 SepThe empty band under WILL EXPORT is gone. Once the issue list had been long it stayed that tall for the rest of the session with nothing in it; it now shrinks back the moment the issues clear.
• 2.26.20 14 SepA setting picked after the square is marked now belongs to the project. Before, the project only remembered what the panel said at the moment you marked, so reopening it could flip Copernicus back to SRTM and start a NASA download unasked. New installs start on Copernicus, which needs no login.
• 2.26.19 14 SepThree beta-tester fixes. Water on land: DayZ's sea is a flat plane at 0 m, and the elevation models flatten docks, reclaimed land and river flats to 0 m along with the water, so they came out under a see-through sea. The export now lifts land that sits under half a metre to half a metre, sloped in from the water's edge (land from ESA WorldCover); also under Tools for a heightmap you already have, so no re-export is needed. SRTM "hangs": a refused NASA login used to be swallowed in silence with the bar left saying Downloading; it now says the login was refused, forgets it so you can retype it, and a stalled download stops after two minutes. Copernicus needs no login at all. Tiling left on: the Advanced Tiling tick, once set for a big map, quietly lifted the one-file cap on every map after (a 40 km export in 100 tiles, four hours). The panel now warns with a Turn tiling off link, and marking a new square unticks it.
• 2.26.18 13 SepOpening a project now loads its own settings: map size, grid, imagery and the rest come back from the marked area, where they were saved. Before, a project opened after another map showed, and would have exported, the other map's size. Also since 2.26.15: New map works on QGIS 4, wrapped lines are never cut off at a bigger font, and the panel scrolls when the window is too short instead of losing its Export button.
• 2.26.14 13 SepNew map: type a name and the plugin makes the map folder, a qgis folder inside it, and saves the project there, so exports land where Terrain Builder and Big G' ToolZ expect them. It refuses names Terrain Builder would refuse (a hyphen) and will not sit a new map on an old one. 2.26.13 tidied an error message behind Save as.
• 2.26.12 13 SepAn unsaved project now says so at the top of the Area tab, with a Save project button: the marked area, the settings and the exports all live beside the .qgz, so nothing can be marked until it has a home. A beta tester could not see why the box would not go down.
• 2.26.11 10 SepMarking a new square puts the satmap size back to auto, so a pixel count typed for another map no longer follows you. If it ever does, the warning carries a Set to auto link. The Advanced section on every tab is now a proper button, no more clipped label.
• 2.26.10 9 SepA go-to box on the Area tab: type a place name or the latitude and longitude and the map flies there.
• 2.26.9 9 SepBlank imagery tiles over open sea are filled with sea. Holes at sea no longer block the build; a hole on land still stops it.
• 2.26.8 9 SepA missing land-cover tile falls back to the OpenStreetMap mask instead of killing the export. Gaps in the height data are filled from the ground around them, never a 9,999 m pit. A satmap size typed for another map is flagged, with a button to set it back to auto.
• 2.26.7 7 SepThe satmap size caps itself to one file: a 40 km map exports at 20480 px, 2 m per pixel, and the panel says so.
• 2.26.6 6 SepCalm the sea: boats, wakes and sun glitter settled to the sea's own tone, on by default. Clean vehicles off the roads, experimental and off by default. Both also under Tools for a satmap you already have.
• 2.26.5 6 SepBuilding footprints exported as buildings.shp, with type, levels and height.
• 2.26.3 5 SepThe export refuses terrain cells finer than 3.75 m, which come out black in Buldozer, and names the safe grid.
• 2.26.0 4 SepA project saved in a Qgis folder exports to that folder's parent; Tools → Set map folder for any other layout.
• 2.25.4 4 SepSTOP banners in the guide for the four-materials black-polygon trap in Terrain Builder.
• 2.25.3 4 SepBing imagery added. Two crashes fixed: Even out, and Recover area.