To break up the wall of text here's a quick illustration of how the heightmaps can be used in 3D. Please ignore the shift in height scale, that's an artifact of me not properly correcting the maps for use in Blender.

I’m proud to announce the first user-facing release of my terrain generator for Acerola’s #Dirtjam. It’s intended for use in generating maps for tabletop or video games, and if anyone uses it or has suggestions for improvements I’d be excited to hear all about it.