What I’m looking to make is terrain based on an external map generation formula that will determine the texture at any given spot on my map (not based on height or a predefined alphamap). In order to make this work with TerraMonkey, would I have to generate alphamaps procedurally or is there a better way to make it work? Thanks in advance!
You could put the texture formula into a fragment shader and not have to use alpha maps. The alpha maps are more useful if someone wants to paint onto the terrain. You can use whatever shader/material you want on the terrain, you aren’t bound to the ones provided, so writing one specifically to your needs would work.
Of course if you don’t want to write a shader, you can use the existing one and generate alpha maps. Look at TerrainGridAlphaMapTest.java to see how it loads in alpha maps for each tile.
I’m totally new to jMonkeyEngine so pardon if this sounds totally confused 
I’m thinking about a resource-mining type of game where I would tweak the terrain texture based on the resources on (in) the ground. So the terrain would have some meta-data on (vertices/chunks/some other unit) that informs the game logic what resources you acquire when mining there. Given that the resource-data structure would be used for both game logic and texturing the terrain: should I learn shader coding? Should I go with generating alpha maps or is there some other design the forum would like to suggest?
Cheers,
JM
P.S I don’t mean mining as digging holes in the terrain, I’m happy with something like: animating a mining “ray” at the ground for a while and possibly lowering the height of the vertices a bit.