Giving the valleys back
An Earth without people should look like one. That meant taking a few things out of the ground first.
The maps that measure the Earth from space were made in our time, and our time has left its marks. Many of the lakes in the southern Appalachians are not natural at all: they are reservoirs, valleys flooded behind dams in the last hundred years. In an Earth without people, those dams were never built.
So we took the reservoirs out. Where a lake sits behind a dam today, the game rebuilds the river valley that would be there instead, with the river running through it. Natural lakes, like Lake Van in eastern Turkey or Lake Victoria in East Africa, stay just as they are.
The same goes for the tops of forests and buildings. Measurements from space see the roof of a forest and the top of a city, not the ground beneath them, so we lower those back down to the land. In the game, trees will return as living plants that grow, change with the seasons and fall, and cities belong to the chapters with people in them.
Nothing is lost along the way. Later, when people arrive in the history chapters, each lake fills again in the year its dam really closed, and the Earth changes around your family as the real one did.