I've been meaning to make something for the spawn point for a long time. I finally had extra motivation tonight.
I really wanted there to be some drama from the spawn... where your first view can be of the nearby town or whatever. Currently, my world generation prototype finds the "spawn town" first since all towns are predictable and repeatable for a given world seed. Once the spawn town is located then the generator scans around for a good place to put the spawn point. It tries to find something high on a hill with rough line of sight to the town.
The thing is, there are plenty of world seeds that have really flat starting areas and the best the spawn could find nearby was a tall hill.
So I implemented a spawn tower. It changes its height based on how high it is located and what elevation the spawn town is.
Here is a triple-pic of the spawn tower in a few different world seeds:
http://i.imgur.com/1Sxyg.jpgBetween that and a nice path running from spawn point to the town, I think it will be clear from the beginning that this is something different.