The first thing you need to do is to partition your tank in a land area and a water area. You can do this easily by buying a piece of glass proportionate to the width of your tank and as high as you want your land area to be. You can fix it in your tank using aquarium sealant or clear window sealant. You can then fill your land area with gravel like in the kit or with with witch you could plant . If you put soil, add some gravel at the bottom first to help drain excess water.
For the river bed, you can use pieces of plastic tubing cut in half that you can glue together to create the river shape that you want and glue rocks to it to create a more natural look. Plastic never looks natural so you can cover it by gluing sand to it. Someone suggested to me using aquarium sealant mixed with sand as a good material, it is both water resistant and transparent so you will see the sand through it. If you wanted to get more experimental, you could cast a piece in the shape of river that you want and then fill that with the sand/sealant mix. Or you can get big rocks and hotglue them together to create you river/waterfall shape. When that’s done, just put the outflow of your filter to the river start point and you’re set.
You can email me if you want, I’m in the process of building something too.
