Alright, so I built a terrain with some noise, then scattered some boxes around the geometry. I viewed some of these tutorials:
I want to follow this one up, they don't animate a number to change the geometry nodes, they are using an empty object to make the geometry nodes appear and disappear. I still don't know how to animate the seed of my geometry nodes.
I used this video to figure out how to get indirect illumination with the Eevee real-time renderer:
Node Wrangler was recommended by one of the youtubers. Helps with node management.
Everyone speaks highly of this guy, but I haven't seen anything of him yet.
I followed this tutorial to understand how to scatter objects without having to use Gscatter (a paid plugin).
I used this tutorial to create the terrain.