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Valtellina

Welcome to Valtellina! This valley is located in northern Italy, near the border with Switzerland, and is crossed by the river Adda. It runs from west to east, therefore only the northern side that gets much more sunlight during the year is cultivated, while the southern side is almost completely covered in trees. The name of the valley comes from the town of Teglio, which is located a few tiles west of the start square, situated in Chiuro.

This map roughly covers the area between the towns of Sondrio and Tirano (these excluded), which is the area where I live. Now, as you may have noticed from the screenshots a very big part of the map is missing, so let me explain.
The game only allows a maximum height of 1024m, and every map is roughly 18km wide. While 18km is almost the distance from peak to peak, the change of height between peak and valley is at least 3km, way too much for the game's limitations. I wanted to recreate the place as close to real life as possible, so changing the size of the map wasn't an option and I had to find a solution for the height limitations. One possible way was to compress everything within the 1km limit, but this meant lowering everything by a factor of 3, which made mountains look like small hills. Therefore, to keep proportions intact, I decided to cut the top two thirds of the mountains so that at least the lower part of the valley would resemble real life. Obviously, I am aware this is not an ideal solution and looks terrible, but I really wanted to recreate the place where I live in a map, and I had a ton of fun doing that, so here we are.

Networks and tree placement should resemble real life quite closely (among the screenshot you can find the image overlay I used), while I took some liberties with field painting. Most of the fields seem too small for the game, therfore field shapes are quite unrealistic but their placement is not, so you won't find a field where houses should be. The gravel paths I put between fields are also (most of the time) unrealistic and are only for aesthetic.
You'll notice some lines of missing trees in a few places, that's where I traced the paths of stuff like electricity cables or roads without actually placing these down.

I traced the borders between Italy and Switzerland, and between the provinces of Sondrio and Bergamo. These are out in the fog and up in the flat plateaus, so don't really serve any purpose.

For this map I have used my Uvaspina Summer theme, with the Springwood LUT. If you want a winter version of the map you can use my Uvaspina Winter theme (just unpaint the snow from the fields). With the latter theme you I think the Cinematic HD and Swiss Spring LUTs work quite well.

Bonus song for this map: a 100% accurate socio-economical analysis of Valtellina and its people. Definitely recommended if you want to seriously understand the place and delve deeper into this topic.



SOME USEFUL MODS

Since there are 798069 trees, you will need the Tree Control mod. Make sure it is activated in the content manager and set any number bigger that that used in the map. Since the map was created with a previous tree anarchy, you may want to uncheck "Ignore Tree Anarchy mod data" before loading the map for the first time.

If you plan to buy each tile one at a time, I highly suggest you use the Common Ground mod. This way you'll be able to see gravel paths and no glitches on the roads outside the tiles you bought.

There are a few roundabouts in the map, and to make these I used the vanilla one lane highway. If you want, you can upgrade to this two lane road that matches the one I used. Since it would only be used for a few segments I didn't employ it, to not add another dependency for this map.
There are two outside connections to the west and one to the east. These are connected by an underground highway, so that you won't have unnecessary traffic in the start square, which may become quite congested otherwise.
Outside Connections: 3 highways, 2 railways, 4 air routes, 0 shipping routes




A few things I didn't include in the map (if you're familiar with the place):
- Some main roads (like SP19 between Piateda and Chiuro) or roads going up in the mountains.
- The bikeway running along the main river.
- Some small creeks that are too small for this game's physics (the few I put are already way too large)
- Val Vedello (the big empty valley near the edge of the map): To save on tree count I left this one mostly empty. I only put enough trees in the places that are visible from the rest of the valley.
- Penstocks from the Gaggio dam to the Venina power station: there's a clearing in the trees and underground pipes, but no visible pipes.

A few things I didn't include in the map (if you're NOT familiar with the place):
- Room for harbor: well, there's no sea, so you won't find any ships either.
- Room for airport: there's no room for airports that can support commercial flies, but I have put some airways anyways in case you want to try that.
- Eiffel Tower: that's in Paris.
- Workable resources: all the resources I put have been used for detailing/field painting. Realistically, there is no oil around here, and while there are some mines, none of them are in the area within the map.



In case you want to paint trees using the same compositions I used, here are the settings for the Forest Brush mod.

- Brush used in the lower parts of the valley:
Eastern Cottonwood: 85%
Boreal Pine: 1%
Horse Chestnut: 30%
Generic Pine Tree: 65%
Live Oak: 100%

- Brush used at medium altitude:
Eastern Cottonwood: 30%
Boreal Pine: 50%
Horse Chestnut: 30%
Generic Pine Tree: 30%
Live Oak: 50%

- Brush used at high altitude:
Eastern Cottonwood: 25%
Boreal Pine: 100%
Generic Pine Tree: 25%
Live Oak: 45%