Why mesh terrain is often a better choice than Unity terrain for stylized mobile projects

Unity’s built-in Terrain system is powerful. It has years of tooling behind it: sculpting, painting, vegetation, LOD, detail maps. But it was designed around one core assumption: Terrain is a heightmap rendered as a smooth surface. That assumption becomes a constraint when your project does not want smooth terrain. The core limitation: Heightmap-locked topology Unity Terrain is fundamentally a heightmap grid: Vertex density is tied directly to heightmap resolution. Topology is uniform across the entire terrain. Normals are generated for smooth shading by default. If you want a faceted low poly look , you are fighting the system. You can fake flat shading in shaders, but: Geometry shaders are not available on most mobile targets. Even when available, they are not ideal for performance-sensitive projects. So you end up with a mismatch: The engine assumes smooth terrain. The art direction requires faceted geometry. That mismatch is what led me to explore mesh terrain instead. What is Mesh