ggplot2 geom_area overlay area plots in front of each other

Question

I am trying to make an area plot with the different areas are overlaid on one another rather than stacked.

I have a dataframe that looks like this:

Answer 1

Using tidyverse:

library(forcats)
p + geom_area(aes(colour = variable, 
fill= fct_reorder(variable, value, .desc = TRUE)), position = 'identity') 

Remove .desc = TRUE if it does the opposite of what you want.

Answer 2

As Nathan wrote you have to use geom_area(position = "identity", ...)

But before this you should reorder the levels of variable:

df$variable <- factor(df$variable, unique(df[order(df$value, decreasing = T),"variable"]) )

or

df$variable <- reorder(df$variable, df$value, function(x) -max(x) )