I finally cracked the Soft Landscapes color code.
It was tricky to combine paralax, color blending, gradual color change, deterministic randomness... but I did it this morning.
Since the change is gradual, I make a quick hack that can skip 100 levels at a time, this is the result of that
next step I want to add some fog. I did this small experiment last night when I had completely given up on color (couldn't get them to work)
Fog and maybe an overall very light gradient, as well as prevention from too dark colors, are next up.
The water will either be it's own version of this algorithm, or a continuation.. I'm not sure yet