Wasteland regions

The Total War map is a huge square. This normally suffices but this forces you to fill the entire map with provinces even if you don’t want to, or you explicitly want to block some areas off. The usual trick for this was a “deep forest” province with a settlement buried somewhere unreachable, which still left a phantom city on the books with all the rebel, AI and territory bookkeeping that comes with it, confusing the campaign AI and still having rebels as their owner.

A wasteland region does all of this properly. Wastelands have no settlement, no owner, and no economy. The AI never targets it, it never counts towards a map-control victory, and no rebels or brigands spawn in it. Combined with the impassable_shrouded ground type (below), it becomes a black void that units cannot enter and players cannot see into. Both work in RTW and M2TW.

Making a region a wasteland

A wasteland is defined in descr_regions.txt by writing the keyword wasteland where the settlement name would normally go. Because a wasteland has no settlement, owner or economy, the rest of the region body carries no meaning, so the entry can stop right after the map colour:

Sahara_Province
wasteland
80 40 20

The first line is the region’s name key, which still has to exist in your <campaign>_regions_and_settlement_names.txt file. The keyword wasteland takes the place of the settlement name. The three numbers are the region’s RGB colour in map_regions.tga. That is the entire entry.

Britannia_Province
londinium
romans_julii
britons_rebels
70 130 180
gold
0
2

You can also convert an existing region into a wasteland by swapping its settlement name for wasteland and leaving the remaining lines in place. Those lines (faction, rebel, resources, triumph, farm level) are still read but ignored, so the older long form keeps loading.

On the map side, paint the region’s colour into map_regions.tga exactly as you would for any region. The one difference is that a wasteland does not need a settlement-position pixel, because it has no settlement.

Terrain

By itself a wasteland region is still made of whatever terrain you painted in it, so units could in principle walk across it. To turn it into a proper black void, you paint its tiles with the impassable_shrouded ground type in map_ground_types.tga:

impassable_shrouded   RGB 32 32 32

A tile painted this colour is impassable (no land unit can move onto it) and permanently shrouded (it stays black under the fog of war forever, so the player never sees what is there). That combination is what gives a wasteland its empty, off-the-edge-of-the-world look.

There is a related, visible option if you want a barrier you can still see:

impassable_land       RGB 64 64 64

impassable_land blocks movement the same way, but it stays visible: the player sees the terrain, it just cannot be crossed. Use impassable_shrouded for hidden void and impassable_land for a visible wall like an impassable mountain range. Both ground types now work in RTW as well as M2TW.

impassable_shrouded is not tied to wasteland regions. You can paint it inside a normal faction’s region to wall off an unreachable, unseen corner without making the whole region ownerless. The region keeps its settlement and owner; those particular tiles are just dead and dark.