It is procedurally generated (of course it is, this is David Braben we’re talking about!).

I’ve written a deep dive on how it works, here:

https://lander.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/generating_the_landsc...

It’s basically a Fourier analysis. Very, very clever!

Perhaps a Fourier synthesis rather than an analysis, since there was no original map analysed into waves, but indeed, highly ingenious. Thank you for writing that article!

That's a good point - I wondered what the correct term was, and Fourier synthesis makes a lot more sense! I will update the article accordingly; thank you for pointing that out.