Hi Forboding,
I'm still thinkering about ways to speed up the water table generation. I've got a few ideas, but I won't have anything implemented for at least a couple of months.
Regaring the user-guide: you may find it more useful to browse the
climate tutorial in the wiki, and particularly,
chapter 2. In the official userguide I tend to cover everything rather quickly and formally because there's so much to document. In the wiki tutorials I cover special topics in greater detail, and usually show how I've done everything.
Anyway, if you don't need the water effects (and that's quite reasonable, since Spring only has water at one level), you can skip the water table stage and just define the sand layer by setting the AltRange parameters of the sand layers. Chapter two of the climate tutorial covers exactly this under the
Quick way: Alt range heading.
Also note that you can manually paint the attributes map in L3DT using a brush interface now, so you shouldn't have to do post-work in Photoshop to add sand. To guide your painting, you can also use the heightfield or water map as an image drape (view->image drape).
One more thing: you can speed up the texture generation by decreasing the AA radius in the texture wizard. If you set it to zero, the texture algorithm will be as fast as the 1:1 texture algo. However, if you use zero AA on a high-res texture you'll get unsightly blocks unless you also make a high-res attributes map. With zero AA and a high-res attributes map and texture, it will look just like the old 'per pixel land types' algorithm. With non-zero AA and a high-res attributes map and texture, it looks much better, but as you say, it takes more time.
This reminds me, I have to get back to Tobi vis-a-vis working out the SMT format. Dispensing with MapConv and its texture size limit would be a Very Good Thing [tm].
Cheers,
Aaron.