The North Star for the terrain has always been "StarCraft 2 meets Into the Breach" — bold, well-lit terraced cliffs over a clean, readable grey surface. Getting there took a lot of wrong turns: high-contrast patchwork, over-blurred mush, muddy low-contrast grey.
The breakthrough was almost embarrassingly simple. The cliffs were tracing the zig-zag of the underlying hex grid, and that was the whole problem. Now we trace the elevation boundary into a smooth curve, gently terrace it, and light a soft grey lip along the top. No bright white bar, no harsh cast shadow — just clean rock that reads instantly.
It runs at over a hundred frames a second and, more importantly, it finally looks like the Moon we kept describing.