All in all terrain and rocky walls are the only features you can manipulate into something decent without resorting to models. You may be interested in these tutorials: http://jkhub.org/tutorials/article/101-terrain-creation-using-easygen/ http://jkhub.org/tutorials/article/92-hand-shaped-terrain/ But for single rocks I suggest you making models, since they need more natural shapes. Creating such shapes in Radiant is not convenient, because brushes tend to misalign textures at certain angles (and it's time consuming), and patches tend to be heavy on the game when spammed all over the map. About the lighting, if you feel the map is too dark overall you may want to set a _minlight <value> in the worldspawn, which will light it up a bit. _lightmapscale 0.125 makes shadows much smoother and generally leads to a better lit map, at the cost of compile time (also since it needs to be compiled with a -bounce 8 compile to work properly) and potentially a compile error. Add the -patchshadows command at the light stage of a custom compile build to make patches project shadows. Also, another good trick is to use light shaders as opposed to light point-based entities. Check out the base shaders to see how it's done. As for the water (though unrelated to currents - but I can see how a tcMod scroll in the shader could resolve it a bit) check out Darth NormaN's Water Tutorial: http://jkhub.org/tutorials/article/62-realistic-water/