I haven't posted to my Returning to Minecraft Journal for a while. It's not because I've lost interest in the world or playing it, but I got inspired by some discussions here to work on improving forest variety in Realistic Terrain Generation. And I did, and it worked out pretty well. But, once I got started, it TOTALLY snowballed. Next I thought "you know, the RTG Oaks don't look very oak-y". So I developed a fractal tree design with more of an "oak" feel (spread-out extended limbs). But that developed a problem Minecraft has with big trees - they make things too dark beneath them, and you get dayspawning, which I am only OK with in limited circumstances.
So - next I wrote a light tracking routing that trims trees as they are placed so it's not too dark underneath. It wasn't perfect, but it helped a lot. And then I decided I wanted more than one style of Oak tree so I took another RTG tree model (based on vanilla large Oak) and adapted it to this fractal design system and the light tracking. And then I realized because of interactions I had to rewrite ALL the RTG trees to use the light tracker AND modify the light tracker to take account of trees already placed.
Then, I wanted a Birch Tree using the new system, so I wrote a birch-style tree (with limbs going more up than they do in the Oaks). And then I had to adapt almost all the RTG biomes to use the new trees designs and systems. I do respect the aesthetics of the old RTG designs, so Taiga and Mega Taiga are still close to the old system.
And THEN the new lighting system was just not doing well enough, so I redesigned it, which turned out far more complex than I had thought. It's still not perfect, but the error rate is below the vanilla lighting bug rate, so I'll leave it for now.
Along the way I changed Geographicraft to implement an old idea I had, to ramp up the attractiveness and interest of biomes by having a greater variety of (compatible) sub-biomes. In vanilla the only sub-biome for Forest (or relatives like Birch Forest) is the matching Forest Hills. I figured it would be more interesting if sometimes there were clearings to see from (Plains sub-biome) or bare knolls as landmarks (Extreme Hills sub-biomes). The old Zeno design standard of "something to see, something to see from". Likewise Plains can have Forest Hills, Forest, or Extreme Hills sub-biomes, Ice Plains can have Cold Tundra, Cold Tundra can have Ice Plains, etc.
And finally, I did a number of more changes, which I'll discuss as they come up in the journal.
And, in my obviously totally unbiased opinion, I think it came out really well, Really, really, well. So much so that I want to show it off. But, in my existing journal you wouldn't see so much of the new stuff, as I have BoP installed and all those BoP biomes swamp out the vanilla ones. I could have turned off BoP, using Geographicraft to block chunk walls, and sailed to a new continent there, but I decided I didn't want to alter the logic of that world.
So, I'm making a new journal to demo the new changes.
I've shortened my mod list a bit for this journal: I pulled out Psi and Astral Sorcery since I'm already demoing them in my other journal and I don't want to distract from exploration and scenery. I did leave in Millenaire just to see what Millenaire is like at start and with a lower power level. I also changed my Geographicraft setting to have *only* large continents; I do want some seaside scenery and travel; but I think these changes can make the old vanilla generation pretty interesting even on a large scale and I want to test and/or demonstrate that with some very large scale land exploration. I'm also using the new Geographicraft climate defaults of 3 Hot/2 Warm/2 Cool/3 Icy because I though the old 2/1/1/2 produced too much Hot and Icy climates.
Enough intro. Here we go!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Hardcore setting (back to old habits), RTG worldtype, new world!
Well... Not as dramatic as I'd hoped. A nice Taiga forest compared to vanilla, but Taiga is not all that different from previous RTG versions. I did want to keep Pink's tall trees, and they fit best in conifer forests, so here they are. I *did* make Taiga vary in tree size and density, but you can't see that from one place, obviously.
I'm in a village, and RTG doesn't generate any trees next to villages to avoid buildings being built into trees and vice versa. I should probably see if I can relax that restrictions a bit.
Vanilla villages are normally an easy start, except that they don't have beds. A quick glance around reveals no sheep, so I'll have to travel.
First, though, I want some wood.
A bad thing about the big pretty trees is that they take some work to chop. Later in the game that's not much of an issue, but it is at the start. Of course you can chop out the lower trunk, but we all hate leaving the rest of the tree hanging in midair, so I've put a number of features into forest to provide some easier-to-get wood.
One of these is "saplings" - currently one in 10 trees is shorter than the expected height. If short enough, it becomes a vanilla tree. I chop one of these, but it's kind of a pain, and I have to nerdpole up several blocks to finish it. I'm also getting some kind of bug where the wood blocks don't drop when chopped and have to get chopped again.
I then switch to another wood source, inherited from earlier RTG versions. Large RTG trees generally have thickened trunk bases. So you can shave off the extensions without uglifying the tree. I trim trunks until my initial wood axe breaks. I have almost a stack at that point, so it's time to explore. Before too long I see some Plains and as I reach them:
Wow. This is the kind of thing I wrote my part of RTG for. That formation is from Savanna M, and is not all that different from earlier RTGs, although it's somewhat taller than it would have been in earlier version because I though it needed a bit more oomph after realizing it needed to be bigger to be a good backdrop for a larger building. This is a really big and showy Savanna M, though; I did quite a few creative flyarounds for testing before starting this journal and this is better than any of them.
Off to the left you can see a forest with the new large Oaks. But you'll have to wait a bit for a closeup, because I want to get some stone from the Plateau M first.
I head over, grabbing Harvestcraft gardens as I go. The start to this game will be a bit unusual as with Hunger Overhaul *and* Spice of Life installed early game food is a big issue. In my Return to Minecraft journal it was less of an issue because Harvestcraft just plastered many biomes with gardens; but I cut that way back and I've got to work this time.
And to add to the scenery, there's a Flower Forest too. This could be a nice place for a base just to see all this, but - no sheep yet, so I want to keep going.
As I approach the Savanna M rock formation, I'm informed of a Millenaire Seljuk village. This is pretty useful, as Seljuk villages have beds. I decide to check it out after getting some stone.
The plateau M has several exposed coal deposits, so the very early game fuel shortage is not happening in this journal. I chop enough stone for a stone pick, stone sword, and a furnace, plus a bunch of coal.
I get through the Plateau M without having to climb over, using this pretty - and pretty unusual - slot canyon.
Past it I see the Seljuk village to the south, with some big new-style Oaks as background.
Looking back you can see the new density variability at work in the Savanna. On the left the trees are quite dense, almost an Acacia forest, and on the right they're very sparse. The big flat-topped Acacias are based on a design Pink made but didn't actually have going in the 1.12 version. I did modify them to be somewhat more symmetrical.
The Seljuk village extends into the Forest and so here's a closeup of the new fractal Oaks. These are pretty big (remember, RTG forest vary). As you see, every tree is different and I think it adds a great organic feel to forests.
The Seljuk village has (straw) beds and I could sleep in those - but I feel wierd about crashing somebody's house like that. Which is pretty weird in itself, since the occupants are not real people. As it turns out, tthough, there's a group of four sheep at the edge of the village so I just slaughter three of them for the wool for my own bed.
Normally at this stage it would be time to start mining. But, as I said, my modset makes food a big issue early in the game, so first:
To the river to plant some crops. Outside the Seljuk village, because Millenaire villages will sometimes rip up something you put in the village to build their own stuff. I really don't want *that*.
I make a hoe, mow down a lot of grass, and plant everything I have that will grow in Summer - Onions, Bell Peppers, Corn, Peas, and (fortunately) vanilla Wheat. I also grab and replant some Sugarcane along the river. I'm using Serene Seasons, so that's yet another food limitation I've got to deal with - not everything will grow at any time.
aaannnnd... The sun is setting. Time to head into the village to get some sleep. I slap down a few more crops at the river's edge before heading in.
(The tree bits hanging in midair are from the village removing parts of a tree trunk. Somebody needs to talk to the Seljuks about treechopping aesthetics)
I bed down in the town hall, so as not to invade any sim villager's privacy. The villagers do provide a quality of life service - once it's possible to sleep, they switch to "off to sleep", so I know *exactly* when I can go to bed.
Next morning I mow some grass in the village and then head to the river to plant it.
Food is already a significant issue - I'm to "peckish" and, unlike vanilla, with Hunger Overhaul you continue to get hungrier even if you just stay in place. I've got to get my food going, and soon.
I have gotten some freezes as well as that wood-not-dropping bug, so I drop my view distance from 24 to 16, hoping that will fix them. I won't have any big vistas to show for a bit.
Several key Harvestcraft cooking implements need bricks, so I search the river for a clay deposit, eventually finding one. I make a shovel and dive to collect - unfortunately staying down too long and taking some damage. I certainly didn't need *that*.
I roast the clay to brick, make a Harvestcraft Pot, use that to convert my raw mutton from the sheep into pork, and then make *that* into Seed Soup. Not a *great* food, but still enough to fix two shanks of hunger, and two bowls has me back in decent shape.
Then over to the Forest to get a bit more wood. I plan to use it for a starter house, and maybe to trade with the Seljuks.
Plus I get some apples I can use for a Harvestcraft Apple Tree. There's a couple of fruit trees in the Forest, but I'm not sure they're close enough to grow consistently. I'll plant this next to my farming area so I know it will grow and fruit. I get a Harvestcraft Bee Queen too.
Across the river is one of the new outcroppings you can see in forests and plains. This is a Geographicraft-RTG combined endeavour - Geographicraft places them and RTG makes them pretty.
Dang, where does the day go? I've got a day length doubler mod installed, and it's *still* too short! I got some more sugarcane, and some Spice Leaf, so I plant those before heading into town.
And dang it, there's some of the psycho eels in the water! I thought I'd shut that off. And, indeed, in the config, natural spawning *is* off. Maybe that doesn't stop initial spawning? I kill these from shore - it's something else to eat.
And, finally, a nice sunset shot of the Seljuk village against the Savanna M rock formations, before I head into town to sleep the night.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I was wondering what happened to your journal! Glad to hear you've been cooking up something.
Harvestcraft gardens annoy me with default settings, they're just everywhere like weeds. I cut their spawns way back as well, and sometimes stop them spreading as well.
Wow, I like the terrain so far. I find 1.18 vanilla worldgen "too big" in a way I'm not sure how to express clearly - it's abstractly pretty to look at but it's just not as enjoyable to live in or build in as the older smaller-scale generation. Whatever you're doing is generating terrain I'd really enjoy working with. That rock outcrop is ideal for a castle.
Are those huge trees renewable by growing from saplings or do they only spawn in worldgen?
With my current settings, the terrain does feel a little smaller than the current vanilla style. My initial pics were at a view distance of 24, which usually gives really nice pictures, but which sometimes looks a bit crowded, especially when looking across climate borders. I thought about increasing the climate zone size back to vanilla's 1000 blocks, because Geographicraft does other things to make extreme climates easier to find; increasing the base frequency of extreme climates, and using a smarter smoothing system that doesn't erase as many. In the end I didn't, though.
Right now RTG is still using the old sapling system, where saplings will grow into old-style RTG trees (basically very large conifers) but only in biomes where those trees appear. So the trees you see are currently non-renewable; an Oak sapling in the Forest would become one of those giant conifers instead, but made of oak materials. In the Plains or Savanna, they would just become vanilla oaks.
I am planning to replace that system with a patterning system where the number of saplings planted in a group will determine the size and type of a tree. I haven't exactly figured out how to decide how big a tree to make, though. Generally trees come in "small" (about 7-19 high trunk, but varies by tree type), "medium" (14-30, same), and "large" (21-40). I'm thinking something like 2-3 saplings together make a "small" tree (upper or lower half of distribution), 4-5 make a "medium", and 6 or more a "large". I may trim the ranges just a little; in initial generation a 19 can be a "small" but will be a "medium" 80% of the time. So maybe something like ranges of 8-17 small, 16-26 medium, and 25+ large. Those ranges aren't yet set in stone; I'm thinking of pushing "medium" size down a bit, both for worldgen and for saplings.
The trees around the Seljuk village are almost all "tall". They're actually not too representative of an "average" RTG forest, but it is good flash for the journal.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
My solution to the issue of "Minecraft lighting system is too limited to make giant trees practical" was to modify the way the game handles the light opacity of leaves in biomes with large trees; since only integer values are allowed and leaves are already at the lowest non-zero value I made it so the game treats most leaves as if they are air (opacity = 0); a single layer of leaves, no matter how large, will never go dark underneath, but there are generally many such layers so the overall result is reduced light diffusion (there are still some areas dark enough for mobs to spawn, even with a reduced light level of 5 or less, but pitch-black or nearly so areas are much less likely, it also helps that due to the size of the trees and chunk decoration limitations (to avoid cascading worldgen, or in my rewrite of worldgen, cut-off trees along chunk borders) I also offset the trees to be closer to the center of a populated chunk, increasing the spacing between adjacent trees):
Mega Forest, I did find one spot with a light level of 5, the upper threshold for mob spawning, but it was generally higher; the "mob counts" shows the number of hostile mobs counting towards the "surface" and "cave" caps, with 1-2 mobs shown as being on the surface (this means zero sky light or below sea level); the trees are so tall that many poke through the clouds. The impact of my changes to the light opacity of leaves shows up in the difference between "block" and "light" in the "Top:" row, where "block" is the highest non-air block and "light" is the highest sky light diffusing block, which may be 1-2 less:
TMCW Mega Taiga, I did not find any areas that were too dark with a quick look around:
Big Oak Forest, the trees are generally much smaller, similar to larger big oak trees in vanilla, as well as the occasional extra large variant with a 2x2 trunk (fun fact: this form is hidden in the vanilla code); I did not find any areas that were too dark here either (there are 5 "surface" mobs on the "mob counts" but they might have wandered out of a cave), I was standing next to one of the 2x2 trees:
One issue with this method is that if you grow the trees outside of their native biomes they will block light as usual, but that isn't as big of an issue with more isolated trees, as players may prefer for looks, and lighting up the area isn't such an issue as with an entire biome. This also shows that even a small decrease in the maximum light level for mob spawning (from 7 to 5) can make a big difference, as I did find many areas between 6-7. Note also that brightness was set to Bright so Moody will look a lot darker (but who plays on that anyway? I even made the game default to Bright, and of course, a block light level of 0 (no block or sky light) is always pitch black, negating a common complaint of being able to see in the dark - many people can even easily see on Moody because they don't know how to set their display).
A more significant issue to me was how slow they made world generation; on my old computer it took half a minute or more to generate a Superflat world with the biome set to Mega Forest and the game could not keep up with Creative flight at a render distance of 8 (this did not noticeably impact actual gameplay though), even on a newer computer it was still much slower than a more normal biome, leading me to refactor the lighting engine to be as fast as possible, to the point where the same Superflat world, or a normal world, now only takes a few seconds to generate (a lot of this was by deferring most sky light updates until after world generation, e.g. instead of updating sky light maps, etc whenever a new section is loaded do all that at the end). I've seen other mods which add big trees simply make them fully transparent to light to avoid performance issues (example: Redwoods, which says "5 seconds to generate spawn without light diffusing and 40 seconds with", so lighting alone can account for 80-90% of the total time taken to generate a world; even block changes like stone to ores can be massively sped up by using stripped-down "setBlock" methods and/or directly accessing chunks, if not just because of lighting).
Also, the issue you have with blocks reappearing after breaking them is a classic symptom of server lag, as you may have guessed reducing the render distance can help (or the entity simulation distance, as entity ticking is the single biggest cause of increased server load with higher render distances; e.g. 8 chunks gets 1.33 ms with 159 entities and 16 chunks gets 2.92 ms with 415 entities, and 415 / 159 * 1.33 = 3.47:
8 chunks:
16 chunks; notably, client tick time is still the same since the server doesn't send any additional entities to the client, as indicated by the "E:" value (most are limited to within 80 blocks and are visible from even less so it doesn't matter):
Of course, as shown in these examples 24 chunks would still be peanuts in terms of server load; I'd be curious as to what is actually consuming so much tick time.
Why... why must you allow me to see such forests!? Such trees? Why!?
Now I'm going to want them.
And to make a new world.
And that's not good right now haha.
I'll just watch your world.
I was wondering most of the way through wow that's a lot to accomplish in one day" until you mentioned a longer day cycle. i wish vanilla offered options for day ratios (even if it was simply a few presets like half the vanilla length, normal length, times and a half the vanilla length, and twice the vanilla length).
At first I was wondering what so many of the structures were. That village being to overwrite stuff doesn't sit well with me. I suppose it's to make them seem more "alive" but that's bad form if it overwrites stuff. Some people already think the villages make the game seem more alive than they should, and while I don't agree with that (they are simply too frequent in occurrence is all), I definitely don't think they need to feel that much more lively either.
Building should be left for the player. I'm not saying the concept couldn't work, but it should never overwrite stuff... and I'm not sure it has a way to know, so maybe just disallowing it it's for the best.
I'm excited this is hardcore too, though I'm not sure if this harder start due to the hunger changes gets offset and becomes easier later. In any case... survive.
Note also that brightness was set to Bright so Moody will look a lot darker (but who plays on that anyway?
I do. I guess I'm the opposite because I almost can't enjoy it at bright. It looks close to downright awful to me, and even the now called "default" (the middle of the slider) is brighter than I prefer, but at least night doesn't look very ambient bright there.
I've only found above moody truly desirable when playing on my TV, which is probably because it's a lower end panel type (TN). I have its backlight set low and the brightness set low, as it looks fine there for media, but PC use is a different story, and this seemingly extends to Minecraft despite being a game. Certain areas (underground, the nether, or just night time) looks almost too dark unless the brightness is at least in the middle, and it's a problem of the display brightness being too low/panel quality not right.
LCDs, even the best ones, just do dark colors poorly no matter what (the day OLED is cheap enough and burn-in issues are firmly gone is the day I'm happy) but I've noticed most common LCD panels do it especially poorly, so some people may try and set them real dark to compensate for this drawback, and it might look good sometimes, but most of the time it does the opposite and either makes it worse or introduces new issues. My TV is like that. If your display is set low on brightness then that's probably what's happening. Since the game doesn't treat a light level of 0 as truly dark, it should be (barely) visible, and this is how it is on my display. If it's actually too dark for you to see, it's Black crush, most likely resulting from the brightness and/or backlight being set too low. That or you've got a ton of ambient light overpowering it (I can see more clearly in these barely light areas with low ambient light, but when sun is flooding in it gets overpowered, and that's normal to an extent).
My solution to the issue of "Minecraft lighting system is too limited to make giant trees practical" was to modify the way the game handles the light opacity of leaves in biomes with large trees;
Also, the issue you have with blocks reappearing after breaking them is a classic symptom of server lag, ... I'd be curious as to what is actually consuming so much tick time.
Changing leaf opacity isn't an option for RTG, as one of its purposes and selling points is that it doesn't add or change any blocks, so you can use a pre-generated world for a vanilla server, or have it on a server for vanilla clients.
There is certainly something going on to cause the lag and I'm just stumped at present. I was stationary for a while and still getting the lag near start, so I don't see how worldgen could be doing it. Millenaire can slow things, but never *that* much IME, and there was nothing Millenaire near spawn.
Why... why must you allow me to see such forests!? Such trees? Why!?
Now I'm going to want them.
At first I was wondering what so many of the structures were. That village being to overwrite stuff doesn't sit well with me. I suppose it's to make them seem more "alive" but that's bad form if it overwrites stuff. Some people already think the villages make the game seem more alive than they should, and while I don't agree with that (they are simply too frequent in occurrence is all), I definitely don't think they need to feel that much more lively either.
Building should be left for the player. I'm not saying the concept couldn't work, but it should never overwrite stuff... and I'm not sure it has a way to know, so maybe just disallowing it it's for the best.
I'm excited this is hardcore too, though I'm not sure if this harder start due to the hunger changes gets offset and becomes easier later. In any case... survive.
I'm trying to sell my changes. Sorry you're getting swept up by the pretty trees, although I'm glad you like them because I value your opinion. There is a chance I'll eventually try to move these trees (without the rest of RTG) to a modern (post-1.18) MC version, although I'm not going to ride the update treadmill so it would be bound to a particular version, whatever I pick.
The building you've seen was at worldgen. For a building to be placed, what's there has to be removed, at least to a certain extent. Millenaire does remove more than absolutely necessary; these trees could have been left intact above the building. Millenaire villager do build during the game as well, but I think having the Millenaire villagers build is a good thing - it gives them something to do and a sort of motivation missing in the aimless vanilla villagers.
Yes, hardcore is exciting, and appropriate for a world that's only supposed to be moderate duration. The stacking of food difficulty (Hunger Overhaul slowing growth plus Spice of Life requiring variety plus Serene Seasons applying season and biome restrictions) is really making it hard for me, though; I'm finding it much more difficult than in my Return to Minecraft journal and I'm really obsessing about food (and needing to) even after several days. The difference seems to be the Harvestcraft gardens, which had ridiculously higher spawning *and* faster spreading; at some points I was clearcutting significant swathes of them. Now that I think about it, that was a lot of food even if each vegetable is just a "morsel".
LCDs, even the best ones, just do dark colors poorly no matter what (the day OLED is cheap enough and burn-in issues are firmly gone is the day I'm happy) but I've noticed most common LCD panels do it especially poorly, so some people may try and set them real dark to compensate for this drawback, and it might look good sometimes, but most of the time it does the opposite and either makes it worse or introduces new issues. My TV is like that. If your display is set low on brightness then that's probably what's happening. Since the game doesn't treat a light level of 0 as truly dark, it should be (barely) visible, and this is how it is on my display. If it's actually too dark for you to see, it's Black crush, most likely resulting from the brightness and/or backlight being set too low. That or you've got a ton of ambient light overpowering it (I can see more clearly in these barely light areas with low ambient light, but when sun is flooding in it gets overpowered, and that's normal to an extent).
I do have some very aggressive settings (very low gamma set in Windows "display calibration tool") but I can still see in dark caves in vanilla, if just barely; my settings actually try to replicate what I experienced on an older computer/monitor, which was even darker and I never changed any settings. Also, the display calibration tool claims that my display gamma is way too high at the default setting, and everything, not just Minecraft, looks washed-out, no matter the brightness setting. I also see people post screenshots from Alpha/Beta and they are just impossibly dark to me, as if torches only had a light level of 8 or it decreased by 2-3 per block instead of 1 (which I know is not the case, the game just had a very aggressive non-linear brightness scale). Another thing about how I set my display is that I don't use any of the included "color presets" (this includes things like "splendid"), and have the color temperature set to "user", which looks a like brighter (and whiter / less blue) than the standard "sRGB" mode (the individual RGB color values can be adjusted and are all set to 100).
Interestingly, the creator of Optifine, which originally added a brightness slider before it was added to vanilla (no idea if their implementation is what was actually used), claims that properly calibrated m9nitors will be too dark at night (light level 4, which should be 4/15 or 26.7% of full brightness on a linear scale), with my settings, and modification (aside from a light level of 0 levels 1-4 or so are also slightly darker to smoothen the transition):
Minecraft uses non-linear light levels. The difference between level 0 and 1 is much smaller than the difference between level 14 and 15.
On a good calibrated monitor which can show near-black colors the Minecraft night scenes are almost fully black (light level 4). On the other hand, not so good monitors which have problems with near black colors show the night scenes very good.
The Brightness setting fixes the Minecraft light levels for properly calibrated monitors. Brightness 0% corresponds to default Minecraft light levels. Brightness 100% uses linear light levels, so the steps between all light levels are equal.
I also tend to place new torches when the light level has dropped to 2-3, with additional torches placed in remaining darker areas so they look like the rest of the area (this also happens to be just about perfect in terms of deterring mob spawning; two torches placed when the light level of one drops to 2-3 results in 8-9 between them; assuming you place them to see, as I do, I can't see how the changes to make mobs only spawn in complete darkness could have any impact on torch usage, and indeed, my own change in TMCW (light level 5 instead of 7, this was done to match my "cave maps", which map caves lit up with a light level of 6+ from a torch) never had any effect since a light level of 7 is already starting to look too dark in a place like a base), while the occasional missed spot in a cave doesn't matter. Even if you place new torches in the first block with a light level of 0 you'll still get 7 between them, and then there is the issue of not getting being able to see any danger until the last second).
I'm trying to sell my changes. Sorry you're getting swept up by the pretty trees, although I'm glad you like them because I value your opinion. There is a chance I'll eventually try to move these trees (without the rest of RTG) to a modern (post-1.18) MC version, although I'm not going to ride the update treadmill so it would be bound to a particular version, whatever I pick.
Like them? I need them! Haha.
Overall, it all looks fantastic, but I'm going on limited example based on what I can see.
If I had to try and give critique to something, it's the oak trees in particular seem a bit different than I would have expected an improved oak in Minecraft might look like. But that might be more a matter of "it doesn't what I envisioned" and not so much "they have flaws". So they don't look bad. They actually look great. They just sort of don't match what I would have envisioned (and again that might be a me thing). I'm not sure I can pin down why either because they look good on their own. If I had to guess, maybe there's not enough examples of branches starting lower, or maybe it's more specifically the branches not spreading out from the main trunk as much, and not being as full of leaves could be why. I'm just trying to imagine trees in my area and how they are (yours are more of branches with thin layers of leaves surrounding them as soon as they split from the main trunk, but the ones I see are big branches with no leaves at first which themselves split and have clusters of leaves off them), but I can only imagine how these sorts of changes would present challenges. Getting realistic looking trees when you have blocks as the smallest layer to work with is tough, and leaf decay and performance are concerns, and if you create trees with wider tops, the space between trees on the ground has to be much larger (which makes it less dense of a forest) or else all the canopies just smash together.
So with those things in mind, your results are probably better. Realistic oaks might not translate too well in Minecraft as-is.
The birch in particular looks nice. Would it possible to have more variants? In particular, I'm thinking of sometimes how they grow in split "Y" shapes (but not symmetrically) as opposed to just an "I" shape.
But I like the trees on the whole. When I think of forests, that is pretty much what I think of. Not what vanilla has going on with ground level canopies.
Oh, okay. I presumed what was going on was the villagers building after the fact. I thought you mentioned something in your other world that make me think this was happening (or maybe it was?). As neat as it sounded, it also sounded like something I wouldn't like.
I do have some very aggressive settings (very low gamma set in Windows "display calibration tool") but I can still see in dark caves in vanilla, if just barely; my settings actually try to replicate what I experienced on an older computer/monitor, which was even darker and I never changed any settings. Also, the display calibration tool claims that my display gamma is way too high at the default setting, and everything, not just Minecraft, looks washed-out, no matter the brightness setting. I also see people post screenshots from Alpha/Beta and they are just impossibly dark to me, as if torches only had a light level of 8 or it decreased by 2-3 per block instead of 1 (which I know is not the case, the game just had a very aggressive non-linear brightness scale). Another thing about how I set my display is that I don't use any of the included "color presets" (this includes things like "splendid"), and have the color temperature set to "user", which looks a like brighter (and whiter / less blue) than the standard "sRGB" mode (the individual RGB color values can be adjusted and are all set to 100).
Yeah, at the end of the day, set it how you like because you're the one using it. Unless you're using hardware to calibrate the display settings (and almost nobody does, and few people even have a need to), then it's not going to be "correct" so much as "how you like it". But that's fine.
I was just weighing in because a lot of LCDs just... don't do this well, so the problem is with them to begin with and is very widespread.
Interestingly, the creator of Optifine, which originally added a brightness slider before it was added to vanilla (no idea if their implementation is what was actually used), claims that properly calibrated m9nitors will be too dark at night.
Depending on what "too dark" meant, I might find that incorrect.
If it meant "difficult to see" maybe. Especially if ambient light is overpowering it. During mid-day (referring to real life, not in-game), at least on a sunny day, the ambient light will overpower my display and if I'm in areas of low light like the nether, underground, or just above ground at night, then yes, it becomes difficult for me to see as well. That's not because the display isn't showing a difference between these lower values bit simply because ambient light is overpowering it (the solution is raising the brightness at these times or changing your ambient lighting, but I hate completely shutting curtains/blinds during the day), so I often raise brightness a tad during the day to compensate for this very reason.
But if it meant "a light level of 4 looks no brighter than anything less" ignoring the above ambient factor, then that's wrong, at least inherently. If a PC is showing Black (0) and just above Black (literally anything above 0) as the same, that's what Black crush is. They are supposed to be different colors, after all, not the same. Saying they should be the same if properly tuned is incorrect.
Now that might be partially correct despite that because on some (or honestly, most) displays, even proper calibration (or otherwise any tweaking of the settings) probably won't entirely eliminate it, because as I mentioned part of the issue is LCDs being rather bad at this to begin with. TN panels in particular are downright awful at this and even a "properly calibrated" one will just be a lesser level of wrong, so to speak.
If I had to try and give critique to something, it's the oak trees in particular seem a bit different than I would have expected an improved oak in Minecraft might look like. But that might be more a matter of "it doesn't what I envisioned" and not so much "they have flaws". So they don't look bad[/i]. They actually look great[/i]. They just sort of don't match what I would have envisioned (and again that might be a me thing). I'm not sure I can pin down why either because they look good on their own. If I had to guess, maybe there's not enough examples of branches starting lower, or maybe it's more specifically the branches not spreading out from the main trunk as much, and not being as full of leaves could be why. I'm just trying to imagine trees in my area and how they are (yours are more of branches with thin layers of leaves surrounding them as soon as they split from the main trunk, but the ones I see are big branches with no leaves at first which themselves split and have clusters of leaves off them), but I can only imagine how these sorts of changes would present challenges. Getting realistic looking trees when you have blocks as the smallest layer to work with is tough, and leaf decay and performance are concerns, and if you create trees with wider tops, the space between trees on the ground has to be much larger (which makes it less dense of a forest) or else all the canopies just smash together.
So with those things in mind, your results are probably better. Realistic oaks might not translate too well in Minecraft as-is.
The birch in particular looks nice. Would it possible to have more variants? In particular, I'm thinking of sometimes how they grow in split "Y" shapes (but not symmetrically) as opposed to just an "I" shape.
But I like the trees on the whole. When I think of forests, that[/i] is pretty much what I think of. Not what vanilla has going on with ground level canopies.
First off, I think you'll like the medium oak design better. I'll try to explore and find a good spot to discuss it soon.
Pretty much all of the issues you've brought up are ones I've wrestled with or at least thought about. I wanted to make the branches more "splitty" to get more leaves on the end but I got aesthetic problems because the branches are made of one-block log pieces and when the branchings happen more often it starts to look like just a 3D jumble of wood blocks. There are leaves on all stages of this model's branches because this model can place blocks diagonally and the treefelling mods can get confused by that. I found sticking leaves on those diagonal junctions helped the treefelling mods recognize the whole thing as one tree.
The medium tree model has branches that connect orthogonally so those connections are not an issue and the interior areas can be leaf-free. The branches do end up looking kind of chunky, though.
There are also limits on how far the branches can spread because if they spread too far they go into adjacent chunks and that creates problems for the Minecraft generation system. Some such spreading is tolerable but too much starts to create very problematic worldgen lag or even crash Minecraft altogether. I've already had to make the oak shorter than birches or spruces because they spread more. The branches you see on the trees here are pretty much the longest that can be done without completely overhauling the MC decoration system.
Lower branches on really big trees also start to get limited by the lighttracking system. I have branches stop if they would cause lighting problems and below the top canopy a lot of branches get aborted because they'd make it too dark.
Incidentally, my canopies *can* run together and it's not really a problem. Just for fun, I've crossed an entire oak forest on treetops. But forest density varies, and these big oaks space out a bit more because initially I overestimated their expected space (my forest algos place trees based on how much space they want, not just on crude counts) but I liked having them a bit more spread and left them that way.
I thought about y-splits and I *could* do them but I was concerned about making the trees too hard to chop, because the player would need to ascend multiple branches going up at >45 degree angles, and would no longer be able to nerdpole since they're not straight up. But then again I've not yet felled any of the really big trees and am doing fine with treefarming based on the occasional smaller trees I have felled, so maybe it would be OK to make the big trees more-or-less decorative. These really big oaks actually *do* sometimes have y-splits at the very top, but only of shorter leaf-only branches.
Incidentally, there *are* two different birch models but they ended up not looking all that different. You've mostly been seeing the Silver Birch (the larger), which (in my design) spreads more widely and has lots of weeping terminal leaf branches. The other design I made, River Birch, has branches going up more, out less, and no weeping. Both have the diagonally connected branches because birch trees just don't have chonky branches like oaks often do.
I'll see if I can push this large oak design more in the directions you suggest. It's more or less what I want too, it's just that this is the closest I've been able to come so far.
Oh, and Millenaire villagers *do* build after generation; but this village hasn't yet collected enough to do it (or hadn't, they may have started by now).
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Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I figured there were a lot more challenges than what I was aware of, which is why I was shy to want to make criticism.
Overall I think the trees look great, especially with knowing the sacrifices they have to make and why.
As for birches being difficult to cut, that may indeed be true, but I also wish Minecraft would sometimes veer towards making things look better and not keeping everything rapidly accessible. Sure, everything shouldn't give up accessibility for form, but I think there's a lot of room between them. Right now, the game's default trees, at least the one block trunk ones, all seem to cater to "can I be cut down looking straight up", and that's mostly a yes for all of the older ones, the large oak aside (and sadly, that's get complaints despite being so uncommon). It's not like the majority of trees get chopped. But many of the new trees (mangrove swamp tree especially, but also cherry) have slightly veered from this, which makes me happy.
And I wasn't necessary meaning a literal "Y" shape in that it followed those exact angles. Think more of a "V" stacked on top of some "I"s with more "I"s on top (of course with various branches coming off". I've seen trees that have the main trunk sort of split in two and them split from there. Sort of what the Acacia trees already do, just a different form and different angles.
Come morning I head back out to the fields for more setup. I knock over some Harvestcraft gardens for crops, kill a few eels from shore for food, plant some oak saplings for wood, and plant more crops along the banks of the river.
What can I say? It's a nice place to work.
Then I start on a small fishing shack as a starter base. I don't have a good precise plan; I want a slanting roof, a dock on the river, and a small room behind it. I think I'll make the roof from Spruce and the rest from Oak. I don't have enough Oak wood yet, though.
I start what will be a drop shaft from what will be the corner of the shack. The stone is soft Soapstone (yay!) and in a great stroke of luck I find a 6 iron deposit only nine blocks down. I race upstairs to smelt it and the moment I have 3 ingots I immediately fashion a bucket and dash across the river -
Because I want milk. Milk and other dairy products aren't edible by themselves, *but* they are a great enhancer for a huge variety of foods, especially flour products, which probably will be the basis for my diet for a while.
I get a couple buckets, each of which makes 8 fresh milk. I also find there are pheasants *and* turkeys there, and collect a few eggs, and find a pawpaw,a chestnut, and a hazelnut tree. These are all great resources because they work through the winter, and the variety is a big help.
In spite of the huge trees and the fairly high density here, there are no dayspawning spots, thanks to my light tracking routines. I still have to be very careful the first time through, though, because while problems with my light tracking are very rare (I didn't actually see any pretesting) vanilla lighting bugs *do* happen with some frequency and they can definitely permit spawning. I saw a lot of *that* in my testing; it can be cleared up by placing and demolishing a block or a torch, but you do have to do it!
Dusk approaches, so I retreat to the town to sleep as my shack isn't yet secure.
Next day I start with more of the same, except:
One of my saplings has grown up very oddly. This turns out to be a bug in one of the RTG tree routines; there are actually leaves and a trunk there, but the notification flags weren't set right and they don't appear until save/reload. It takes a bit to track down the problem, but it's an easy fix.
And, it turns out, a similar issue was the primary reason for the odd blocks-not-dropping problem at the start of the journal. Also fixed.
I spot another squid and jump in to kill it for calimari, but
I get attacked by a psycho eel. Except it's not an eel; from the pic it's a lamprey. Well, *that's* why my config changes weren't working!. I can restrict these obnoxious visitors to more appropriate places like swamps now.
I have a heck of a time killing it, though. I just can't find its hit box in the water. Only after I climb out does it die. I hope it was me and just not suffocation. Fortunately it does little damage and I'm down only 3 1/2 hearts.
Some more lumberjacking, and
Where *do* these days go? So glad I'm not on vanilla day lengths.
With a decent wood supply, the next day I build my shack. Here I'm putting in trapdoor stairs so I can get out of the water but block it afterwards so mobs can't climb in. On the left you can see I am using fences for my windows; I don't want to bother with glass right now.
Initially I'd been thinking of leaving the water side open but I realize skellies could shoot in. So I put in a fence wall - so I can still see *something*, and double doors to access the dock.
Very crude, but it will do for now.
Then some more lumberjacking, and then I explore a bit in the other direction.
Finding a Lemon tree, a Plum tree (here) and an avocado. With a bunch of fruit and nut trees, plus milk products, plus respawning squid, survivability looks pretty good although I'm spending a lot of time going around to my various food sources.
And FINALLY a few of my crops are starting to ripen (here a raspberry).
That night I spend in the shack, now secure enough for sleeping to be reasonable.
Next morning, I switch to mining as I want some iron for some more Harvestcraft cooking utensils. I'm saving my iron pick for now, so it takes quite a while to get to diamond level with a stone pick. I hear a LOT of zombie noises, but fortunately no breakouts.
I don't have a clock, and don't want to miss out on a day, so I head back topside for the rest of the day. While there, I investigate a Harvestcraft cobweb tree. I had always assumed it took shears to harvest them -
But it doesn't. Just right-click for string. I collect some string, and then decide not to use it, because this is just *too* easy.
Next day, back to the mine to start a baseline for branch mining. I find some lapis lazuli (not yet useful) but then:
Diamond! Plus another iron deposit, which I'd been having trouble finding. I take the iron upstairs to finish my Harvestcraft kitchen tools.
While it's smelting, I cross the river to where the turkeys and pheasant are to collect the food resources there. I go a little further into the forest, finding:
One of the forest clearings Geographicraft can put into forests now (with the MoreComplexSubbiomes flag, not currently on by default, although I'm thinking about it). I think it's obvious how this can generate some really nice scenery, and fight the "another forest" problem at the same time. There's a Flower Forest in the distance, and beyond that some extra-extra large Birch trees which are probably some version of Birch Forest M, rising up on some kind of hill to the right. Also, to the left of the birch trees you can see a couple of RTG Oaks with a rounder shape than the ones in the foreground with their insouciantly outflung branches. That's probably RTG transitioning to smaller trees; those are the "medium" RTG oaks.
If it weren't for the forest clearing, you'd see almost none of this and it would look a lot like the previous pic. In RTG you might glimpse the Flower Forest from under the raised canopy but you wouldn't see the giant birches, the tree transition, or the hill (from here). With the vanilla shrub forests, you'd see nothing. And it would just be - Another Forest. Even though it's really not! Great stuff doesn't count if the player can't see it.
Back home I finally get my first wheat crops so it's time to start thinking about recipes. I'll need some high-quality foods for exploring as otherwise I'll get too hungry.
Now that I have a safe space, I stay up all that night making the Harvestcraft kitchen utensils like the Skillet, Mortar and Pestle, Bakeware, etc. I forgot to make Salt, one of the near-essential ingredients, but it turns out I can reach through a small gap in my fence wall to the river to pull out water so I make a stack of that too.
I also make a Paperbark tree: I want to get exploring *soon* and it's obvious the sugarcane isn't going to grow fast enough to do it this Serene Seasons year. I'm having some fun wrestling with the food situation, but I wanted to write about the new terrain generation. So I'm going to make a Paperback grove like in my Return to Minecraft Journal. That should generate paper fast enough for some maps by the time I have enough food.
I look at some of the recipes I might be able to make but night is over before I get to actually making any. I debate whether I should risk spider-hunting with no armor and a stone sword -
But when I check for mobs outside there's a creeper waiting. I guess the day will start with a stint in the mines.
Still not finding much Iron, but I do find 8 Diamonds, which I figure I can afford to use for a breastplate. I've yet to even hear lava so I'm not making an Enchantment Table soon.
By this point I figure the day is about half done so I head back upstairs for farming.
Next episode: More base building.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
If it weren't for the forest clearing, you'd see almost none of this and it would look a lot like the previous pic. In RTG you might glimpse the Flower Forest from under the raised canopy but you wouldn't see the giant birches, the tree transition, or the hill (from here). With the vanilla shrub forests, you'd see nothing. And it would just be - Another Forest. Even though it's really not! Great stuff doesn't count if the player can't see it.
Yeah, no kidding. The vanilla forests aren't doing modern generation any favors. They're actually doing the opposite.
I know other biomes, and even whole dimensions, need work, but forests are sort of disappointing most of the time. Mega taigas and jungles are the only two that I feel are fine.
Plums!? I used to love those when I was young and forget they exist half of the time. Now I want some.
The struggle for food sounds real. While it might lean more survival, I'm sort of glad that's not a thing in vanilla. Too much micromanagement.
I know other biomes, and even whole dimensions, need work, but forests are sort of disappointing most of the time. Mega taigas and jungles are the only two that I feel are fine.
I find the food situation really interesting, and a nice challenge since Minecraft gets pretty easy once you know it. Unfortunately the challenge is very frontloaded, like most Minecraft challenges. Once there's a decent sized farm and some cows it's easy. But I do wish I'd lowered the challenge level, because it's distracting from and delaying the point of the journal, large-scale exploration.
The RTG team also thought Jungles and Mega Taiga were the best vanilla forested biomes. We didn't change Jungle trees at all, and Mega Taiga a lot less than most.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Topside is dreary because it's raining. My crops are still growing slowly, so I put torches next to them hoping they will grow at night. I think Hunger Overhaul makes crops not grow by torchlight, but just in case I'll put them in. It'll suppress spawns near base anyway.
My treefarming continues. RTG can "register" trees with a biome and then use them for saplings. This might be the RTG version of the vanilla large oak; which can vary in height and has a little more randomness than the vanilla version. It doesn't quite look like a vanilla oak to me but maybe I'm mistaken. Anyway, I chop it. I need the wood.
An annoying part of rain is it's hard to tell when it's getting dark. I see this rosyish tint to the western sky and head inside for the evening. As it turns out I could have stayed out another minute or so. Hopefully I'll find gold for a clock soon and can stop worrying about this.
I start on recipes a bit. I use the Salt and Milk to make Butter, which I bake with flour to get a biscuit, my first half-decent Harvestcraft food. I save it though, because I'm planning to make it into Biscuits and Gravy later, and I need to save it for exploring. I can survive at home now snacking on nuts from the trees, cooked Calamari, etc.
Then I head down to the mines.
THIS time I find Iron all over the place. I get 42 blocks in a fairly short mining expedition. You'll note I'm still using a stone pick because I wanted to save my limited Iron, and Soapstone is soft enough that it's still tolerably fast. I finish off two stone picks, and then I'm done with them, because now I've got enough Iron.
Topside I plant a few crops, check for growth (not much), and collect some paper from the paperbark trees, which are already producing since they're not nerfed by Hunger Overhaul.
I go out collecting tree crops, and stop at this small scenic lake on the Plum and Lemon side (south). I collect two of the squid.
Then I try to get this - eel? Lamprey? - from a hastily constructed platform, but I can't reach it. Then it starts raining, and I retreat to the farm area, because I don't know if the RTG forests "rainspawn" when the rain knocks the light level down a bit.
After a bit of crop work, I don't see any mobs spawning in the forest, so I risk a trip to the other side of the river for chestnuts, hazelnuts, and eggs. I keep a close eye out, though.
That evening I process some of my foods for better nutrition and efficiency.
Roasted Chestnut provides twice as much hunger relief, for example. I also juice some of my apples. I am definitely not facing starvation any more, although I'd like a set of fairly high quality food for exploration.
Then I finish my armor with iron, make some iron picks, and head down to mine. Right now I'm really hoping for gold for a clock.
My dropshaft was near a Soapstone/Eclogite junction.. I was also getting those two stones at my initial base in my Return to Minecraft Journal. This seems a bit ironic, since in this world I travelled some distance from spawn to - get the same kind of stones. Well, not Black Granite, and I'm thankful for that.
Earlier I'd been mining mostly with stone picks because I needed to conserve my iron, so I'd been mining in the soft Soapstone where the slower stone pick is tolerably fast. With iron picks, I'm willing to go for the slower Eclogite (similar in hardness to vanilla stone).
And I'm quickly rewarded with exactly what I was looking for! I toss it in the furnace and come back for more mining.
Before long I hit this lava fall. I can't snap it up - it's at least 4 blocks up from my floor. I really want a lava supply because that's the fuel for the Tinker's Smeltery. Suspecting a lava lake a couple of blocks up, I back up, staircase up a few blocks, and then head back out. But I don't find what I'm expecting.
Instead it's a ravine with a big lava lake. This is awesome for my Tinker's purposes, but - how is this producing a lava fall from above?
Oh. That's something separate, just one of those lone lava blocks. I head out on that ledge and get an angle to snap it up.
In retrospect I was *entirely* too casual about walking on a narrow ledge above a lava lake in a ravine, in hardcore, with no escape route should I fall in. I was just so obsessed with that annoying lavafall I forgot to think about safety. But I got away with it. This time.
By now it's day so I head up, with my new clock, to work on food and paper issues topside.
I take some seeds to breed the turkeys and pheasants but -
That's not what they want, either by hand or dropped. Later research reveals they are bred with *pumpkin* seeds, which is not a practical food in this modset since pumpkins are hard to grow (only 1/4 the year, and needing particular biomes for normal growth even then). I guess I'll have to grow them with eggs, if I do at all.
I explore a little further into the forest, sort of back to the big Mesa outcropping (you can see a bit on the left), finding yet another Flower Forest. This is my third in this area - one I saw on the other side of the outcropping in the first episode, one last episode, and this. I'll not want for pretty flowers.
Then back home to harvest paper from the Paperbark trees. They produce a *lot* and I've already nearly got the 40 I need for a max map so I can go exploring.
Another lovely sunset says it's time to go inside. I still greedily grab a ripened Corn crop before I do, though - to make some Cornbread for my upcoming trip, and then head downside.
First I head to where the lavafall was to make a room for a Tinker's Smeltery, right next to the ravine lava lake to provide fuel.
Planning ahead helps. I put a 3x3 hole in the floor where the base of the Smeltery will go. Initially I placed it right next to the corridor but then I realized it would be awkward to walk around (the walls are one block out to the side) and moved it back, putting the cobblestone where the original hole was.
Then I do a bit of branch mining until dawn. Come dawn I check hopefully for spiders, seeing none, and then head over to the Lemon/Plum side for food collection and a little more exploration.
I head further out and away from town (sorry no local map yet), checking the forest for lighting issues. I do find two single spots at skylight 7, so I might need to put a little more polish on my light tracker routines. Most of the problems occur right next to tree trunks with the wide bottoms, and could be caused by blocks with the trunk extensions that are supposed to provide lighting for other blocks. I'll have to take a look at that.
I come across a scenic lake, with a view of yet another Flower Forest. This is unusual - I haven't seen such a cluster of multiple Flower Forests in a relatively small area on my test flyarounds.
The scenic lakes are something else I improved in my recent partial overhaul of RTG - before you could see to the bottoms and it wasn't the best aesthetically. I made them just a little deeper and they look much more lakelike.
I find some nutmeg trees, normally too far from base to grow, but I guess they've grown a bit on times I came partway here. I take some to craft a tree to plant near home.
Then I cross the river to collect from the other bank. This is looking back toward the shack and the Seljuk Village and you can see I've gone far enough that they're beyond render distance. I grab some cherries from a Cherry tree and then head back because my inventory is full of the assorted things I've been collecting.
Next Episode: Final preps and out exploring.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
You got diamond awfully fast compared to me, and even iron.
A fully zoomed out map!? That's ambitious. I was wondering why you needed so much paper and forgot the cartographer table probably isn't a thing in the version you're using.
An annoying part of rain is it's hard to tell when it's getting dark. I see this rosyish tint to the western sky and head inside for the evening. As it turns out I could have stayed out another minute or so. Hopefully I'll find gold for a clock soon and can stop worrying about this.
Yeah, I used to look for the Red sky on the Western horizon to tell this too. I think the way the game handles the coloring and fog of sunsets in general is rather poor. During the day it looks fine; during the evening you start seeing the chunk edges beyond the fog for some reason.
This is one thing shaders give me that I wish they didn't, at least with the two shaders I've used regularly (BSL and Complimentary Reimagined). Even during rain, you can still tell the sun position because either you can just faintly see it in the sky behind the clouds, or you can faintly still see the direction the shadows are being cast in.
The scenic lakes are something else I improved in my recent partial overhaul of RTG - before you could see to the bottoms and it wasn't the best aesthetically. I made them just a little deeper and they look much more lakelike.
This is also something that disappoints me with vanilla water. It's often too transparent for my liking.
Being able to look into the distance near the horizon, and seeing the floor of an ocean which should be deep, with the kelp and all, and being able to see the chunk edges underwater... ungh, it all looks so visually unappealing me.
When I was tweaking settings of Complimentary Reimagined to get the water more opaque, I basically had to turn it all way past the "warning, visual anomalies might arise past this point" to get it even close to how I like it(and I've seen next to no visual anomalies anyway). When using BSL, I set the water is set to like 90% or even 95% opacity. In either case, it's far less transparent than vanilla water is. I even often do this for underwater, even though it sometimes impedes my visibility range.
I plant my new Nutmeg tree, harvest some crops, and cross the river to finish my food collection round. I need a bunch of eggs for a planned recipe.
While I'm there I check the forest on this side of the river for lighting errors too. I'm a little surprised the tree composition changes so much in a fairly short distance - across the river is an all-oak forest, and here there are quite a few birches mixed in.
I find two light level 7 spots here as well. This is a pic of one of the causative trees sets from underneath. You can see some light spots and that's the light tracker system blocking placements that would make things too dark. I suspect recursive decoration issues are causing this occasional problem. When I get to some smaller-treed forests (which don't have recursive generation) I'll do some more searches to try to pin down the cause. It is a fairly minor problem at present - five single blocks so far in render distance of my base with light level 7.
Then a desperate round of paperbark collection, actually *after* dusk, because I want to get started on maps and I have to get enough paper. Fortunately I get it done before any mobs spawn near me.
Inside I cook up my first high-power Harvestcraft meal, a Fish Dinner. This is what I needed the eggs for: 8 for the mayo and 8 for the batter.
And then, finally, it's map time! I try to make a good map to show the local area.
Level 0 is too small, although you can see the little almost-grid group of paperbark trees just below me.
Level 1 shows part of the Seljuk village, but my shack is still on the edge.
Level 2 *still* has my shack on the edge. That's a real pity, because this would be the right size to show my near-base area. I miss the abiliy of my old Explorercraft to let you pick a map's center.
Finally Level 3 has good centering, so I'll use this for my base area map. I make a copy and then expand one of them to Level 4.
I don't quite have enough high-quality food to go, so I go to sleep around midnight, hoping to catch a spider, but no luck - no mobs around in the morning.
I collect a little more of my crops, and then spend the rest of the day cranking out foods - two types of yogurt, cheese toast, the fish dinners and cornbread I'd made before, and finally converting my biscuits to biscuits and gravy.
I chop a few more trees, and then head down at dusk to cut another mine branch. I encounter a complicated area of UBified textures with coal and iron mixed together in a junction of Soapstone and Lignite. It was a lot of work to make Underground Biomes able to do this, but I'm glad I did it.
Back topside just before dawn, I make an Iron sword and a boat and do a check for spiders. No luck.
Well, time to get going.
I'm going to start with some river travel. RTG rivers are great for exploration and travel - although they curve, they continue going in roughly one direction for considerable distances; the banks are low and so you can see pretty well from them, and they are almost always wide enough for boating. I head east, away from the Seljuk town. The river soon runs into another river, and I take the northeast bound fork (the other fork looks to be the river/lake south of my base).
The scenery (here from that map location) is great. You can see that the different temperate biomes are all pretty compatible with each other - here plains, forest, birch forest, and birch forest hills. It's really a pity that vanilla has biomes relatively large and segregated from each other (didn't we learn segregation was bad back in the 60's?) You're seeing them more mixed up here partly because of the increased sub-biome variety in the new Geographicraft, although I'm not sure exactly how much is that new variety and how much is biomes just happening to be jumbled up a bit. I think that's a good thing, though, because when it's less obvious what's going on in the generation system the terrain feels more organic and real.
Admittedly some of the benefit is from RTG, which increases the blending of biomes by having their terrain and flora effect extend further from their official boundaries, but I did some tests of Geographicraft sub-biome variety with vanilla terrain and I still thought it was an improvement.
A bit further on is part of the Birch M/Flower Forest combo we glimpsed through a clearing in the last episode, with a backdrop of one "variety" Extreme Hills sub-biome, showing *that* blends in pretty well with the other temperate biomes too.
A little further up the river the terrain shifts to cool zone biomes, Taiga and Roofed Forest (which I moved to cool in Geographicraft for more variety in the zone.) Roofed Forests are pretty dangerous in RTG, but this river happens to be running on its edge so I'm fine.
Further on I spot this Millenaire building and get off to check on it.
Here's where it is on the map. The building is a Japanese culture shrine, but it's deserted. There are a lot of pumpkins in the Taiga nearby though, so I collect a bunch of those for breeding wild birds.
Here's another example of a clearing sub-biome providing a beautiful vista combining Taiga, Forest, and an Extreme Hills sub-biome. With the vanilla biome system you'd just see a lot of trees here. It helps even more that what you see is the RTG trees and more naturalistic slopes.
At this point I spotted a white bear and, concerned it was a polar bear, returned to the boat. I could *probably* take it but - I am playing hardcore.
A bit further on the climate changes again to Snowy. To the left is a mix of Ice Plains and Cold Taiga (the increased sub-biome variety applies to Snowy too, and is also a benefit there.) Ahead is Extreme Hills, now as a full biome and not a variety sub-biome. I collect some snow for Harvestcraft recipes and then climb up that hill to check out the view. The river ends because the canyons get problematic when rivers go through Extreme Hills.
I neglected to get a map shot of where this is so you'll have to settle for this map shot from when I got back home. I was near the tip of the explored area at the time.
The views are - everything I hoped for. I've wanted to build an Extreme Hills base with great views from way back when 1.7 was released, with the new "high plateaus" obviously intended for base building. Then I wanted it even more once I started playing with RTG and then even *more* after I designed the new RTG ridged mountain system. But - I've never done it (although in my To the Edge of the World journal I had a great view of an RTG-style BoP mountain). Maybe this time? This is really quite a spot.
Ahead of me is the ocean. Normally a destination for me but this is a land exploration journal so:
Next Episode: I return to base and try taking the river in the other direction.
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Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I suspect recursive decoration issues are causing this occasional problem.
How large are your trees (how far do they extend from their center coordinates?) Anything over 8 blocks (17x17 total), or any accesses to block data past that limit, can cause adjacent chunks to load unless you reduce the random offset (normally from 8 to 23 relative to the coordinates passed to the decorator methods, with an overall offset range of 0-31), as I did for my own "mega" trees; actually, vanilla will just trigger a crash if this happens (you discussed this yourself here; you blame Forge for not fixing the issue in vanilla but that would just mask the issue, as occurred when Mojang removed the check in 1.8; I actually caused the game to crash by making the size of an ore too large; which also causes decoration issues at more moderate scales (I'm guessing that at least the chunk coordinates are still fields so they end up pointing to the wrong chunk once it returns to the chunk that triggered another decoration call, or they just removed the "already decorating" check); "cascading worldgen" is also blamed for causing major performance issues in any modpacks, e.g. world load time of 5+ minutes, compared to just 15 seconds with the issues fixed).
Of note, the way I rewrote world generation in TMCW makes it impossible for decorations to load new chunks - they will simply get chopped off along chunk boundaries, or even wrap around, as my "WorldGenChunkCache" class caches a 2x2 or 3x3 set of chunks (3x3 is used for player-grown trees; I ensure the area is loaded before ticking blocks in a chunk, which fixes various issues caused by them as well) and I simply modulo the coordinates (the chunk array is 4x4 in size to enable using a bit mask for maximum speed; unused entries are set to an "empty" chunk which ignores any attempts to write to it and acts like air when read; a flag can be set to true during development which will notify me of any instances of accessing chunks outside the valid bounds):
public final Chunk getChunkFromChunkCoords(int posX, int posZ)
{
if (DebugHelper.RUNAWAY_CHECK) this.checkBounds(posX << 4, posZ << 4);
return this.chunkArray[(posX & 3) | (posZ & 3) << 2];
}
It is worth noting that even if chunks could be loaded the use of a chunk cache object for each chunk being decorated would preserve the original coordinates, I also properly fixed it in the modded version I use for my first world by just making the fields parameters which are passed to the methods as I haven't bothered refactoring all the code (the main reason in the case of TMCW was performance, or offsetting the impact of the additional content). Vanilla also had an actual issue with the generation of hidden lava blocks in the Nether, which bypasses BiomeDecorator so it didn't trigger the crash (or be noticed by Mojang; the removal of the check altogether means newer versions are more prone to such issues unless they added debug code like I did):
The Nether from one of my older worlds; note the jagged edges to the north and west, there are also a few to the south and east, which is due to lava springs flowing post-world generation and insufficient checks for loaded chunks:
For comparison, the Nether from a newer world shows no signs of chunks being loaded past the player's loaded area due to either cause (you can also see the lack of lighting errors, which were really that bad in vanilla, partly masked by the client being told to relight chunks, but that also caused lag):
Decorators which are directly called by a biome class, without using BiomeDecorator, are also subject to loading chunks without being noticed (for example, TMCWv1 had an issue with the lakes in the "tropical swamp" biome causing cascading worldgen as they were generated with the biome's own class; in this case it was to the south and east instead of the more typical northwest bias as I'd removed an internal (negative) offset when I modified a copy of the vanilla lake code).
Larger features are supposed to use the "structure" generator, which places them in chunk-sized pieces by iterating over a list stored in memory and checking if each structure, then each individual piece intersects the current chunk-sized area, although there are some limitations (you can't know what the terrain is like over the entire area, this is why villager buildings are often placed at strange altitudes and even caves are affected by this; if there is water along a chunk boundary they will generate normally in the chunk on the other side, leaving a flat wall and/or water that doesn't flow into the cave; I fixed this by changing the way caves interact with water to a per-block instead of per-segment basis and have a post-generation step in the decoration stage which checks for water source blocks next to air along chunk boundaries and places ground blocks next to them. My own "custom" structures, including modified versions of desert/jungle temples and witch huts, are also all limited to 32x32 blocks so they can be placed all at once, I also go past the bounds of the central chunk-sized area (but not the overall 32x32 area) to enable more accurate measurement of the ground level for village buildings).
I'm not sure the exact maximum extent of these trees, because there's a lot of randomness in their generation, and it depends partially on their also variable size; but it's definitely more than 8 blocks. It's not a choice, as they'e look pretty cruddy if they weren't that big, especially oak-ish trees with their outspread limbs. I knew they'd generate some recursive generation but also knew it would be manageable.
Recursive generation is not a problem per se, as long as you don't get runaway recursion; I've been allowing mods to generate recursively since whenever. Just placing blocks is no problem at all. There can be a problem with routines that look around the world to determine things (like lighting) but the routines could be rewritten to deal with that. Another solution I used for a while was to delay decoration until there's a larger neighborhood available around it, but now that Forge is taking a more active role in scheduling that stuff I'm reluctant to try to intervene.
Using a structure system would be quite complicated, as the random number seeds would have to be saved somehow so the generation would be the same in the other chunks. Maybe the pieces could be generated in advance and saved but there isn't a place in the generation system to save a structure piece and then later guarantee the chunk will be generated and the piece placed. Again, it's possible in the abstract but again, I'm reluctant to tussle with Forge, which is playing a pretty complicated game with chunk loading these days.
I'm looking at my code right now and the light level 7 areas next to trunks look like some kind of bug. They shouldn't be happening and I'm reviewing my code to see what needs to be fixed. In the next episode I do actually find *one* area which was almost certainly triggered by recursive generation. I know a way to fix it, although the priority is low because it's really rare, the first I've found in many hours of plays. Vanilla lighting bugs are far more common, and not something I can fix.
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Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
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Curse PremiumI haven't posted to my Returning to Minecraft Journal for a while. It's not because I've lost interest in the world or playing it, but I got inspired by some discussions here to work on improving forest variety in Realistic Terrain Generation. And I did, and it worked out pretty well. But, once I got started, it TOTALLY snowballed. Next I thought "you know, the RTG Oaks don't look very oak-y". So I developed a fractal tree design with more of an "oak" feel (spread-out extended limbs). But that developed a problem Minecraft has with big trees - they make things too dark beneath them, and you get dayspawning, which I am only OK with in limited circumstances.
So - next I wrote a light tracking routing that trims trees as they are placed so it's not too dark underneath. It wasn't perfect, but it helped a lot. And then I decided I wanted more than one style of Oak tree so I took another RTG tree model (based on vanilla large Oak) and adapted it to this fractal design system and the light tracking. And then I realized because of interactions I had to rewrite ALL the RTG trees to use the light tracker AND modify the light tracker to take account of trees already placed.
Then, I wanted a Birch Tree using the new system, so I wrote a birch-style tree (with limbs going more up than they do in the Oaks). And then I had to adapt almost all the RTG biomes to use the new trees designs and systems. I do respect the aesthetics of the old RTG designs, so Taiga and Mega Taiga are still close to the old system.
And THEN the new lighting system was just not doing well enough, so I redesigned it, which turned out far more complex than I had thought. It's still not perfect, but the error rate is below the vanilla lighting bug rate, so I'll leave it for now.
Along the way I changed Geographicraft to implement an old idea I had, to ramp up the attractiveness and interest of biomes by having a greater variety of (compatible) sub-biomes. In vanilla the only sub-biome for Forest (or relatives like Birch Forest) is the matching Forest Hills. I figured it would be more interesting if sometimes there were clearings to see from (Plains sub-biome) or bare knolls as landmarks (Extreme Hills sub-biomes). The old Zeno design standard of "something to see, something to see from". Likewise Plains can have Forest Hills, Forest, or Extreme Hills sub-biomes, Ice Plains can have Cold Tundra, Cold Tundra can have Ice Plains, etc.
And finally, I did a number of more changes, which I'll discuss as they come up in the journal.
And, in my obviously totally unbiased opinion, I think it came out really well, Really, really, well. So much so that I want to show it off. But, in my existing journal you wouldn't see so much of the new stuff, as I have BoP installed and all those BoP biomes swamp out the vanilla ones. I could have turned off BoP, using Geographicraft to block chunk walls, and sailed to a new continent there, but I decided I didn't want to alter the logic of that world.
So, I'm making a new journal to demo the new changes.
I've shortened my mod list a bit for this journal: I pulled out Psi and Astral Sorcery since I'm already demoing them in my other journal and I don't want to distract from exploration and scenery. I did leave in Millenaire just to see what Millenaire is like at start and with a lower power level. I also changed my Geographicraft setting to have *only* large continents; I do want some seaside scenery and travel; but I think these changes can make the old vanilla generation pretty interesting even on a large scale and I want to test and/or demonstrate that with some very large scale land exploration. I'm also using the new Geographicraft climate defaults of 3 Hot/2 Warm/2 Cool/3 Icy because I though the old 2/1/1/2 produced too much Hot and Icy climates.
Enough intro. Here we go!
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
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Curse PremiumEpisode 01: Some Things Old and Some Things New
Hardcore setting (back to old habits), RTG worldtype, new world!
Well... Not as dramatic as I'd hoped. A nice Taiga forest compared to vanilla, but Taiga is not all that different from previous RTG versions. I did want to keep Pink's tall trees, and they fit best in conifer forests, so here they are. I *did* make Taiga vary in tree size and density, but you can't see that from one place, obviously.
I'm in a village, and RTG doesn't generate any trees next to villages to avoid buildings being built into trees and vice versa. I should probably see if I can relax that restrictions a bit.
Vanilla villages are normally an easy start, except that they don't have beds. A quick glance around reveals no sheep, so I'll have to travel.
First, though, I want some wood.
A bad thing about the big pretty trees is that they take some work to chop. Later in the game that's not much of an issue, but it is at the start. Of course you can chop out the lower trunk, but we all hate leaving the rest of the tree hanging in midair, so I've put a number of features into forest to provide some easier-to-get wood.
One of these is "saplings" - currently one in 10 trees is shorter than the expected height. If short enough, it becomes a vanilla tree. I chop one of these, but it's kind of a pain, and I have to nerdpole up several blocks to finish it. I'm also getting some kind of bug where the wood blocks don't drop when chopped and have to get chopped again.
I then switch to another wood source, inherited from earlier RTG versions. Large RTG trees generally have thickened trunk bases. So you can shave off the extensions without uglifying the tree. I trim trunks until my initial wood axe breaks. I have almost a stack at that point, so it's time to explore. Before too long I see some Plains and as I reach them:
Wow. This is the kind of thing I wrote my part of RTG for. That formation is from Savanna M, and is not all that different from earlier RTGs, although it's somewhat taller than it would have been in earlier version because I though it needed a bit more oomph after realizing it needed to be bigger to be a good backdrop for a larger building. This is a really big and showy Savanna M, though; I did quite a few creative flyarounds for testing before starting this journal and this is better than any of them.
Off to the left you can see a forest with the new large Oaks. But you'll have to wait a bit for a closeup, because I want to get some stone from the Plateau M first.
I head over, grabbing Harvestcraft gardens as I go. The start to this game will be a bit unusual as with Hunger Overhaul *and* Spice of Life installed early game food is a big issue. In my Return to Minecraft journal it was less of an issue because Harvestcraft just plastered many biomes with gardens; but I cut that way back and I've got to work this time.
And to add to the scenery, there's a Flower Forest too. This could be a nice place for a base just to see all this, but - no sheep yet, so I want to keep going.
As I approach the Savanna M rock formation, I'm informed of a Millenaire Seljuk village. This is pretty useful, as Seljuk villages have beds. I decide to check it out after getting some stone.
The plateau M has several exposed coal deposits, so the very early game fuel shortage is not happening in this journal. I chop enough stone for a stone pick, stone sword, and a furnace, plus a bunch of coal.
I get through the Plateau M without having to climb over, using this pretty - and pretty unusual - slot canyon.
Past it I see the Seljuk village to the south, with some big new-style Oaks as background.
Looking back you can see the new density variability at work in the Savanna. On the left the trees are quite dense, almost an Acacia forest, and on the right they're very sparse. The big flat-topped Acacias are based on a design Pink made but didn't actually have going in the 1.12 version. I did modify them to be somewhat more symmetrical.
The Seljuk village extends into the Forest and so here's a closeup of the new fractal Oaks. These are pretty big (remember, RTG forest vary). As you see, every tree is different and I think it adds a great organic feel to forests.
The Seljuk village has (straw) beds and I could sleep in those - but I feel wierd about crashing somebody's house like that. Which is pretty weird in itself, since the occupants are not real people. As it turns out, tthough, there's a group of four sheep at the edge of the village so I just slaughter three of them for the wool for my own bed.
Normally at this stage it would be time to start mining. But, as I said, my modset makes food a big issue early in the game, so first:
To the river to plant some crops. Outside the Seljuk village, because Millenaire villages will sometimes rip up something you put in the village to build their own stuff. I really don't want *that*.
I make a hoe, mow down a lot of grass, and plant everything I have that will grow in Summer - Onions, Bell Peppers, Corn, Peas, and (fortunately) vanilla Wheat. I also grab and replant some Sugarcane along the river. I'm using Serene Seasons, so that's yet another food limitation I've got to deal with - not everything will grow at any time.
aaannnnd... The sun is setting. Time to head into the village to get some sleep. I slap down a few more crops at the river's edge before heading in.
(The tree bits hanging in midair are from the village removing parts of a tree trunk. Somebody needs to talk to the Seljuks about treechopping aesthetics)
I bed down in the town hall, so as not to invade any sim villager's privacy. The villagers do provide a quality of life service - once it's possible to sleep, they switch to "off to sleep", so I know *exactly* when I can go to bed.
Next morning I mow some grass in the village and then head to the river to plant it.
Food is already a significant issue - I'm to "peckish" and, unlike vanilla, with Hunger Overhaul you continue to get hungrier even if you just stay in place. I've got to get my food going, and soon.
I have gotten some freezes as well as that wood-not-dropping bug, so I drop my view distance from 24 to 16, hoping that will fix them. I won't have any big vistas to show for a bit.
Several key Harvestcraft cooking implements need bricks, so I search the river for a clay deposit, eventually finding one. I make a shovel and dive to collect - unfortunately staying down too long and taking some damage. I certainly didn't need *that*.
I roast the clay to brick, make a Harvestcraft Pot, use that to convert my raw mutton from the sheep into pork, and then make *that* into Seed Soup. Not a *great* food, but still enough to fix two shanks of hunger, and two bowls has me back in decent shape.
Then over to the Forest to get a bit more wood. I plan to use it for a starter house, and maybe to trade with the Seljuks.
Plus I get some apples I can use for a Harvestcraft Apple Tree. There's a couple of fruit trees in the Forest, but I'm not sure they're close enough to grow consistently. I'll plant this next to my farming area so I know it will grow and fruit. I get a Harvestcraft Bee Queen too.
Across the river is one of the new outcroppings you can see in forests and plains. This is a Geographicraft-RTG combined endeavour - Geographicraft places them and RTG makes them pretty.
Dang, where does the day go? I've got a day length doubler mod installed, and it's *still* too short! I got some more sugarcane, and some Spice Leaf, so I plant those before heading into town.
And dang it, there's some of the psycho eels in the water! I thought I'd shut that off. And, indeed, in the config, natural spawning *is* off. Maybe that doesn't stop initial spawning? I kill these from shore - it's something else to eat.
And, finally, a nice sunset shot of the Seljuk village against the Savanna M rock formations, before I head into town to sleep the night.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I was wondering what happened to your journal! Glad to hear you've been cooking up something.
Harvestcraft gardens annoy me with default settings, they're just everywhere like weeds. I cut their spawns way back as well, and sometimes stop them spreading as well.
Wow, I like the terrain so far. I find 1.18 vanilla worldgen "too big" in a way I'm not sure how to express clearly - it's abstractly pretty to look at but it's just not as enjoyable to live in or build in as the older smaller-scale generation. Whatever you're doing is generating terrain I'd really enjoy working with. That rock outcrop is ideal for a castle.
Are those huge trees renewable by growing from saplings or do they only spawn in worldgen?
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
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Curse PremiumWith my current settings, the terrain does feel a little smaller than the current vanilla style. My initial pics were at a view distance of 24, which usually gives really nice pictures, but which sometimes looks a bit crowded, especially when looking across climate borders. I thought about increasing the climate zone size back to vanilla's 1000 blocks, because Geographicraft does other things to make extreme climates easier to find; increasing the base frequency of extreme climates, and using a smarter smoothing system that doesn't erase as many. In the end I didn't, though.
Right now RTG is still using the old sapling system, where saplings will grow into old-style RTG trees (basically very large conifers) but only in biomes where those trees appear. So the trees you see are currently non-renewable; an Oak sapling in the Forest would become one of those giant conifers instead, but made of oak materials. In the Plains or Savanna, they would just become vanilla oaks.
I am planning to replace that system with a patterning system where the number of saplings planted in a group will determine the size and type of a tree. I haven't exactly figured out how to decide how big a tree to make, though. Generally trees come in "small" (about 7-19 high trunk, but varies by tree type), "medium" (14-30, same), and "large" (21-40). I'm thinking something like 2-3 saplings together make a "small" tree (upper or lower half of distribution), 4-5 make a "medium", and 6 or more a "large". I may trim the ranges just a little; in initial generation a 19 can be a "small" but will be a "medium" 80% of the time. So maybe something like ranges of 8-17 small, 16-26 medium, and 25+ large. Those ranges aren't yet set in stone; I'm thinking of pushing "medium" size down a bit, both for worldgen and for saplings.
The trees around the Seljuk village are almost all "tall". They're actually not too representative of an "average" RTG forest, but it is good flash for the journal.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
My solution to the issue of "Minecraft lighting system is too limited to make giant trees practical" was to modify the way the game handles the light opacity of leaves in biomes with large trees; since only integer values are allowed and leaves are already at the lowest non-zero value I made it so the game treats most leaves as if they are air (opacity = 0); a single layer of leaves, no matter how large, will never go dark underneath, but there are generally many such layers so the overall result is reduced light diffusion (there are still some areas dark enough for mobs to spawn, even with a reduced light level of 5 or less, but pitch-black or nearly so areas are much less likely, it also helps that due to the size of the trees and chunk decoration limitations (to avoid cascading worldgen, or in my rewrite of worldgen, cut-off trees along chunk borders) I also offset the trees to be closer to the center of a populated chunk, increasing the spacing between adjacent trees):
Mega Forest, I did find one spot with a light level of 5, the upper threshold for mob spawning, but it was generally higher; the "mob counts" shows the number of hostile mobs counting towards the "surface" and "cave" caps, with 1-2 mobs shown as being on the surface (this means zero sky light or below sea level); the trees are so tall that many poke through the clouds. The impact of my changes to the light opacity of leaves shows up in the difference between "block" and "light" in the "Top:" row, where "block" is the highest non-air block and "light" is the highest sky light diffusing block, which may be 1-2 less:
TMCW Mega Taiga, I did not find any areas that were too dark with a quick look around:
Big Oak Forest, the trees are generally much smaller, similar to larger big oak trees in vanilla, as well as the occasional extra large variant with a 2x2 trunk (fun fact: this form is hidden in the vanilla code); I did not find any areas that were too dark here either (there are 5 "surface" mobs on the "mob counts" but they might have wandered out of a cave), I was standing next to one of the 2x2 trees:
One issue with this method is that if you grow the trees outside of their native biomes they will block light as usual, but that isn't as big of an issue with more isolated trees, as players may prefer for looks, and lighting up the area isn't such an issue as with an entire biome. This also shows that even a small decrease in the maximum light level for mob spawning (from 7 to 5) can make a big difference, as I did find many areas between 6-7. Note also that brightness was set to Bright so Moody will look a lot darker (but who plays on that anyway? I even made the game default to Bright, and of course, a block light level of 0 (no block or sky light) is always pitch black, negating a common complaint of being able to see in the dark - many people can even easily see on Moody because they don't know how to set their display).
A more significant issue to me was how slow they made world generation; on my old computer it took half a minute or more to generate a Superflat world with the biome set to Mega Forest and the game could not keep up with Creative flight at a render distance of 8 (this did not noticeably impact actual gameplay though), even on a newer computer it was still much slower than a more normal biome, leading me to refactor the lighting engine to be as fast as possible, to the point where the same Superflat world, or a normal world, now only takes a few seconds to generate (a lot of this was by deferring most sky light updates until after world generation, e.g. instead of updating sky light maps, etc whenever a new section is loaded do all that at the end). I've seen other mods which add big trees simply make them fully transparent to light to avoid performance issues (example: Redwoods, which says "5 seconds to generate spawn without light diffusing and 40 seconds with", so lighting alone can account for 80-90% of the total time taken to generate a world; even block changes like stone to ores can be massively sped up by using stripped-down "setBlock" methods and/or directly accessing chunks, if not just because of lighting).
Also, the issue you have with blocks reappearing after breaking them is a classic symptom of server lag, as you may have guessed reducing the render distance can help (or the entity simulation distance, as entity ticking is the single biggest cause of increased server load with higher render distances; e.g. 8 chunks gets 1.33 ms with 159 entities and 16 chunks gets 2.92 ms with 415 entities, and 415 / 159 * 1.33 = 3.47:
16 chunks; notably, client tick time is still the same since the server doesn't send any additional entities to the client, as indicated by the "E:" value (most are limited to within 80 blocks and are visible from even less so it doesn't matter):
Of course, as shown in these examples 24 chunks would still be peanuts in terms of server load; I'd be curious as to what is actually consuming so much tick time.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Why... why must you allow me to see such forests!? Such trees? Why!?
Now I'm going to want them.
And to make a new world.
And that's not good right now haha.
I'll just watch your world.
I was wondering most of the way through wow that's a lot to accomplish in one day" until you mentioned a longer day cycle. i wish vanilla offered options for day ratios (even if it was simply a few presets like half the vanilla length, normal length, times and a half the vanilla length, and twice the vanilla length).
At first I was wondering what so many of the structures were. That village being to overwrite stuff doesn't sit well with me. I suppose it's to make them seem more "alive" but that's bad form if it overwrites stuff. Some people already think the villages make the game seem more alive than they should, and while I don't agree with that (they are simply too frequent in occurrence is all), I definitely don't think they need to feel that much more lively either.
Building should be left for the player. I'm not saying the concept couldn't work, but it should never overwrite stuff... and I'm not sure it has a way to know, so maybe just disallowing it it's for the best.
I'm excited this is hardcore too, though I'm not sure if this harder start due to the hunger changes gets offset and becomes easier later. In any case... survive.
I do. I guess I'm the opposite because I almost can't enjoy it at bright. It looks close to downright awful to me, and even the now called "default" (the middle of the slider) is brighter than I prefer, but at least night doesn't look very ambient bright there.
I've only found above moody truly desirable when playing on my TV, which is probably because it's a lower end panel type (TN). I have its backlight set low and the brightness set low, as it looks fine there for media, but PC use is a different story, and this seemingly extends to Minecraft despite being a game. Certain areas (underground, the nether, or just night time) looks almost too dark unless the brightness is at least in the middle, and it's a problem of the display brightness being too low/panel quality not right.
LCDs, even the best ones, just do dark colors poorly no matter what (the day OLED is cheap enough and burn-in issues are firmly gone is the day I'm happy) but I've noticed most common LCD panels do it especially poorly, so some people may try and set them real dark to compensate for this drawback, and it might look good sometimes, but most of the time it does the opposite and either makes it worse or introduces new issues. My TV is like that. If your display is set low on brightness then that's probably what's happening. Since the game doesn't treat a light level of 0 as truly dark, it should be (barely) visible, and this is how it is on my display. If it's actually too dark for you to see, it's Black crush, most likely resulting from the brightness and/or backlight being set too low. That or you've got a ton of ambient light overpowering it (I can see more clearly in these barely light areas with low ambient light, but when sun is flooding in it gets overpowered, and that's normal to an extent).
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Curse PremiumChanging leaf opacity isn't an option for RTG, as one of its purposes and selling points is that it doesn't add or change any blocks, so you can use a pre-generated world for a vanilla server, or have it on a server for vanilla clients.
There is certainly something going on to cause the lag and I'm just stumped at present. I was stationary for a while and still getting the lag near start, so I don't see how worldgen could be doing it. Millenaire can slow things, but never *that* much IME, and there was nothing Millenaire near spawn.
I'm trying to sell my changes. Sorry you're getting swept up by the pretty trees, although I'm glad you like them because I value your opinion. There is a chance I'll eventually try to move these trees (without the rest of RTG) to a modern (post-1.18) MC version, although I'm not going to ride the update treadmill so it would be bound to a particular version, whatever I pick.
The building you've seen was at worldgen. For a building to be placed, what's there has to be removed, at least to a certain extent. Millenaire does remove more than absolutely necessary; these trees could have been left intact above the building. Millenaire villager do build during the game as well, but I think having the Millenaire villagers build is a good thing - it gives them something to do and a sort of motivation missing in the aimless vanilla villagers.
Yes, hardcore is exciting, and appropriate for a world that's only supposed to be moderate duration. The stacking of food difficulty (Hunger Overhaul slowing growth plus Spice of Life requiring variety plus Serene Seasons applying season and biome restrictions) is really making it hard for me, though; I'm finding it much more difficult than in my Return to Minecraft journal and I'm really obsessing about food (and needing to) even after several days. The difference seems to be the Harvestcraft gardens, which had ridiculously higher spawning *and* faster spreading; at some points I was clearcutting significant swathes of them. Now that I think about it, that was a lot of food even if each vegetable is just a "morsel".
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I do have some very aggressive settings (very low gamma set in Windows "display calibration tool") but I can still see in dark caves in vanilla, if just barely; my settings actually try to replicate what I experienced on an older computer/monitor, which was even darker and I never changed any settings. Also, the display calibration tool claims that my display gamma is way too high at the default setting, and everything, not just Minecraft, looks washed-out, no matter the brightness setting. I also see people post screenshots from Alpha/Beta and they are just impossibly dark to me, as if torches only had a light level of 8 or it decreased by 2-3 per block instead of 1 (which I know is not the case, the game just had a very aggressive non-linear brightness scale). Another thing about how I set my display is that I don't use any of the included "color presets" (this includes things like "splendid"), and have the color temperature set to "user", which looks a like brighter (and whiter / less blue) than the standard "sRGB" mode (the individual RGB color values can be adjusted and are all set to 100).
Interestingly, the creator of Optifine, which originally added a brightness slider before it was added to vanilla (no idea if their implementation is what was actually used), claims that properly calibrated m9nitors will be too dark at night (light level 4, which should be 4/15 or 26.7% of full brightness on a linear scale), with my settings, and modification (aside from a light level of 0 levels 1-4 or so are also slightly darker to smoothen the transition):
I also tend to place new torches when the light level has dropped to 2-3, with additional torches placed in remaining darker areas so they look like the rest of the area (this also happens to be just about perfect in terms of deterring mob spawning; two torches placed when the light level of one drops to 2-3 results in 8-9 between them; assuming you place them to see, as I do, I can't see how the changes to make mobs only spawn in complete darkness could have any impact on torch usage, and indeed, my own change in TMCW (light level 5 instead of 7, this was done to match my "cave maps", which map caves lit up with a light level of 6+ from a torch) never had any effect since a light level of 7 is already starting to look too dark in a place like a base), while the occasional missed spot in a cave doesn't matter. Even if you place new torches in the first block with a light level of 0 you'll still get 7 between them, and then there is the issue of not getting being able to see any danger until the last second).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Like them? I need them! Haha.
Overall, it all looks fantastic, but I'm going on limited example based on what I can see.
If I had to try and give critique to something, it's the oak trees in particular seem a bit different than I would have expected an improved oak in Minecraft might look like. But that might be more a matter of "it doesn't what I envisioned" and not so much "they have flaws". So they don't look bad. They actually look great. They just sort of don't match what I would have envisioned (and again that might be a me thing). I'm not sure I can pin down why either because they look good on their own. If I had to guess, maybe there's not enough examples of branches starting lower, or maybe it's more specifically the branches not spreading out from the main trunk as much, and not being as full of leaves could be why. I'm just trying to imagine trees in my area and how they are (yours are more of branches with thin layers of leaves surrounding them as soon as they split from the main trunk, but the ones I see are big branches with no leaves at first which themselves split and have clusters of leaves off them), but I can only imagine how these sorts of changes would present challenges. Getting realistic looking trees when you have blocks as the smallest layer to work with is tough, and leaf decay and performance are concerns, and if you create trees with wider tops, the space between trees on the ground has to be much larger (which makes it less dense of a forest) or else all the canopies just smash together.
So with those things in mind, your results are probably better. Realistic oaks might not translate too well in Minecraft as-is.
The birch in particular looks nice. Would it possible to have more variants? In particular, I'm thinking of sometimes how they grow in split "Y" shapes (but not symmetrically) as opposed to just an "I" shape.
But I like the trees on the whole. When I think of forests, that is pretty much what I think of. Not what vanilla has going on with ground level canopies.
Oh, okay. I presumed what was going on was the villagers building after the fact. I thought you mentioned something in your other world that make me think this was happening (or maybe it was?). As neat as it sounded, it also sounded like something I wouldn't like.
Yeah, at the end of the day, set it how you like because you're the one using it. Unless you're using hardware to calibrate the display settings (and almost nobody does, and few people even have a need to), then it's not going to be "correct" so much as "how you like it". But that's fine.
I was just weighing in because a lot of LCDs just... don't do this well, so the problem is with them to begin with and is very widespread.
Depending on what "too dark" meant, I might find that incorrect.
If it meant "difficult to see" maybe. Especially if ambient light is overpowering it. During mid-day (referring to real life, not in-game), at least on a sunny day, the ambient light will overpower my display and if I'm in areas of low light like the nether, underground, or just above ground at night, then yes, it becomes difficult for me to see as well. That's not because the display isn't showing a difference between these lower values bit simply because ambient light is overpowering it (the solution is raising the brightness at these times or changing your ambient lighting, but I hate completely shutting curtains/blinds during the day), so I often raise brightness a tad during the day to compensate for this very reason.
But if it meant "a light level of 4 looks no brighter than anything less" ignoring the above ambient factor, then that's wrong, at least inherently. If a PC is showing Black (0) and just above Black (literally anything above 0) as the same, that's what Black crush is. They are supposed to be different colors, after all, not the same. Saying they should be the same if properly tuned is incorrect.
Now that might be partially correct despite that because on some (or honestly, most) displays, even proper calibration (or otherwise any tweaking of the settings) probably won't entirely eliminate it, because as I mentioned part of the issue is LCDs being rather bad at this to begin with. TN panels in particular are downright awful at this and even a "properly calibrated" one will just be a lesser level of wrong, so to speak.
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Curse PremiumFirst off, I think you'll like the medium oak design better. I'll try to explore and find a good spot to discuss it soon.
Pretty much all of the issues you've brought up are ones I've wrestled with or at least thought about. I wanted to make the branches more "splitty" to get more leaves on the end but I got aesthetic problems because the branches are made of one-block log pieces and when the branchings happen more often it starts to look like just a 3D jumble of wood blocks. There are leaves on all stages of this model's branches because this model can place blocks diagonally and the treefelling mods can get confused by that. I found sticking leaves on those diagonal junctions helped the treefelling mods recognize the whole thing as one tree.
The medium tree model has branches that connect orthogonally so those connections are not an issue and the interior areas can be leaf-free. The branches do end up looking kind of chunky, though.
There are also limits on how far the branches can spread because if they spread too far they go into adjacent chunks and that creates problems for the Minecraft generation system. Some such spreading is tolerable but too much starts to create very problematic worldgen lag or even crash Minecraft altogether. I've already had to make the oak shorter than birches or spruces because they spread more. The branches you see on the trees here are pretty much the longest that can be done without completely overhauling the MC decoration system.
Lower branches on really big trees also start to get limited by the lighttracking system. I have branches stop if they would cause lighting problems and below the top canopy a lot of branches get aborted because they'd make it too dark.
Incidentally, my canopies *can* run together and it's not really a problem. Just for fun, I've crossed an entire oak forest on treetops. But forest density varies, and these big oaks space out a bit more because initially I overestimated their expected space (my forest algos place trees based on how much space they want, not just on crude counts) but I liked having them a bit more spread and left them that way.
I thought about y-splits and I *could* do them but I was concerned about making the trees too hard to chop, because the player would need to ascend multiple branches going up at >45 degree angles, and would no longer be able to nerdpole since they're not straight up. But then again I've not yet felled any of the really big trees and am doing fine with treefarming based on the occasional smaller trees I have felled, so maybe it would be OK to make the big trees more-or-less decorative. These really big oaks actually *do* sometimes have y-splits at the very top, but only of shorter leaf-only branches.
Incidentally, there *are* two different birch models but they ended up not looking all that different. You've mostly been seeing the Silver Birch (the larger), which (in my design) spreads more widely and has lots of weeping terminal leaf branches. The other design I made, River Birch, has branches going up more, out less, and no weeping. Both have the diagonally connected branches because birch trees just don't have chonky branches like oaks often do.
I'll see if I can push this large oak design more in the directions you suggest. It's more or less what I want too, it's just that this is the closest I've been able to come so far.
Oh, and Millenaire villagers *do* build after generation; but this village hasn't yet collected enough to do it (or hadn't, they may have started by now).
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I figured there were a lot more challenges than what I was aware of, which is why I was shy to want to make criticism.
Overall I think the trees look great, especially with knowing the sacrifices they have to make and why.
As for birches being difficult to cut, that may indeed be true, but I also wish Minecraft would sometimes veer towards making things look better and not keeping everything rapidly accessible. Sure, everything shouldn't give up accessibility for form, but I think there's a lot of room between them. Right now, the game's default trees, at least the one block trunk ones, all seem to cater to "can I be cut down looking straight up", and that's mostly a yes for all of the older ones, the large oak aside (and sadly, that's get complaints despite being so uncommon). It's not like the majority of trees get chopped. But many of the new trees (mangrove swamp tree especially, but also cherry) have slightly veered from this, which makes me happy.
And I wasn't necessary meaning a literal "Y" shape in that it followed those exact angles. Think more of a "V" stacked on top of some "I"s with more "I"s on top (of course with various branches coming off". I've seen trees that have the main trunk sort of split in two and them split from there. Sort of what the Acacia trees already do, just a different form and different angles.
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Curse PremiumEpisode 02: Food Frenzies
Come morning I head back out to the fields for more setup. I knock over some Harvestcraft gardens for crops, kill a few eels from shore for food, plant some oak saplings for wood, and plant more crops along the banks of the river.
What can I say? It's a nice place to work.
Then I start on a small fishing shack as a starter base. I don't have a good precise plan; I want a slanting roof, a dock on the river, and a small room behind it. I think I'll make the roof from Spruce and the rest from Oak. I don't have enough Oak wood yet, though.
I start what will be a drop shaft from what will be the corner of the shack. The stone is soft Soapstone (yay!) and in a great stroke of luck I find a 6 iron deposit only nine blocks down. I race upstairs to smelt it and the moment I have 3 ingots I immediately fashion a bucket and dash across the river -
Because I want milk. Milk and other dairy products aren't edible by themselves, *but* they are a great enhancer for a huge variety of foods, especially flour products, which probably will be the basis for my diet for a while.
I get a couple buckets, each of which makes 8 fresh milk. I also find there are pheasants *and* turkeys there, and collect a few eggs, and find a pawpaw,a chestnut, and a hazelnut tree. These are all great resources because they work through the winter, and the variety is a big help.
In spite of the huge trees and the fairly high density here, there are no dayspawning spots, thanks to my light tracking routines. I still have to be very careful the first time through, though, because while problems with my light tracking are very rare (I didn't actually see any pretesting) vanilla lighting bugs *do* happen with some frequency and they can definitely permit spawning. I saw a lot of *that* in my testing; it can be cleared up by placing and demolishing a block or a torch, but you do have to do it!
Dusk approaches, so I retreat to the town to sleep as my shack isn't yet secure.
Next day I start with more of the same, except:
One of my saplings has grown up very oddly. This turns out to be a bug in one of the RTG tree routines; there are actually leaves and a trunk there, but the notification flags weren't set right and they don't appear until save/reload. It takes a bit to track down the problem, but it's an easy fix.
And, it turns out, a similar issue was the primary reason for the odd blocks-not-dropping problem at the start of the journal. Also fixed.
I spot another squid and jump in to kill it for calimari, but
I get attacked by a psycho eel. Except it's not an eel; from the pic it's a lamprey. Well, *that's* why my config changes weren't working!. I can restrict these obnoxious visitors to more appropriate places like swamps now.
I have a heck of a time killing it, though. I just can't find its hit box in the water. Only after I climb out does it die. I hope it was me and just not suffocation. Fortunately it does little damage and I'm down only 3 1/2 hearts.
Some more lumberjacking, and
Where *do* these days go? So glad I'm not on vanilla day lengths.
With a decent wood supply, the next day I build my shack. Here I'm putting in trapdoor stairs so I can get out of the water but block it afterwards so mobs can't climb in. On the left you can see I am using fences for my windows; I don't want to bother with glass right now.
Initially I'd been thinking of leaving the water side open but I realize skellies could shoot in. So I put in a fence wall - so I can still see *something*, and double doors to access the dock.
Very crude, but it will do for now.
Then some more lumberjacking, and then I explore a bit in the other direction.
Finding a Lemon tree, a Plum tree (here) and an avocado. With a bunch of fruit and nut trees, plus milk products, plus respawning squid, survivability looks pretty good although I'm spending a lot of time going around to my various food sources.
And FINALLY a few of my crops are starting to ripen (here a raspberry).
That night I spend in the shack, now secure enough for sleeping to be reasonable.
Next morning, I switch to mining as I want some iron for some more Harvestcraft cooking utensils. I'm saving my iron pick for now, so it takes quite a while to get to diamond level with a stone pick. I hear a LOT of zombie noises, but fortunately no breakouts.
I don't have a clock, and don't want to miss out on a day, so I head back topside for the rest of the day. While there, I investigate a Harvestcraft cobweb tree. I had always assumed it took shears to harvest them -
But it doesn't. Just right-click for string. I collect some string, and then decide not to use it, because this is just *too* easy.
Next day, back to the mine to start a baseline for branch mining. I find some lapis lazuli (not yet useful) but then:
Diamond! Plus another iron deposit, which I'd been having trouble finding. I take the iron upstairs to finish my Harvestcraft kitchen tools.
While it's smelting, I cross the river to where the turkeys and pheasant are to collect the food resources there. I go a little further into the forest, finding:
One of the forest clearings Geographicraft can put into forests now (with the MoreComplexSubbiomes flag, not currently on by default, although I'm thinking about it). I think it's obvious how this can generate some really nice scenery, and fight the "another forest" problem at the same time. There's a Flower Forest in the distance, and beyond that some extra-extra large Birch trees which are probably some version of Birch Forest M, rising up on some kind of hill to the right. Also, to the left of the birch trees you can see a couple of RTG Oaks with a rounder shape than the ones in the foreground with their insouciantly outflung branches. That's probably RTG transitioning to smaller trees; those are the "medium" RTG oaks.
If it weren't for the forest clearing, you'd see almost none of this and it would look a lot like the previous pic. In RTG you might glimpse the Flower Forest from under the raised canopy but you wouldn't see the giant birches, the tree transition, or the hill (from here). With the vanilla shrub forests, you'd see nothing. And it would just be - Another Forest. Even though it's really not! Great stuff doesn't count if the player can't see it.
Back home I finally get my first wheat crops so it's time to start thinking about recipes. I'll need some high-quality foods for exploring as otherwise I'll get too hungry.
Now that I have a safe space, I stay up all that night making the Harvestcraft kitchen utensils like the Skillet, Mortar and Pestle, Bakeware, etc. I forgot to make Salt, one of the near-essential ingredients, but it turns out I can reach through a small gap in my fence wall to the river to pull out water so I make a stack of that too.
I also make a Paperbark tree: I want to get exploring *soon* and it's obvious the sugarcane isn't going to grow fast enough to do it this Serene Seasons year. I'm having some fun wrestling with the food situation, but I wanted to write about the new terrain generation. So I'm going to make a Paperback grove like in my Return to Minecraft Journal. That should generate paper fast enough for some maps by the time I have enough food.
I look at some of the recipes I might be able to make but night is over before I get to actually making any. I debate whether I should risk spider-hunting with no armor and a stone sword -
But when I check for mobs outside there's a creeper waiting. I guess the day will start with a stint in the mines.
Still not finding much Iron, but I do find 8 Diamonds, which I figure I can afford to use for a breastplate. I've yet to even hear lava so I'm not making an Enchantment Table soon.
By this point I figure the day is about half done so I head back upstairs for farming.
Next episode: More base building.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Plums!? I used to love those when I was young and forget they exist half of the time. Now I want some.
The struggle for food sounds real. While it might lean more survival, I'm sort of glad that's not a thing in vanilla. Too much micromanagement.
The diamonds really needed a picture, especially for your first one(s). It's not the same without.
Yeah, no kidding. The vanilla forests aren't doing modern generation any favors. They're actually doing the opposite.
I know other biomes, and even whole dimensions, need work, but forests are sort of disappointing most of the time. Mega taigas and jungles are the only two that I feel are fine.
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Curse PremiumI find the food situation really interesting, and a nice challenge since Minecraft gets pretty easy once you know it. Unfortunately the challenge is very frontloaded, like most Minecraft challenges. Once there's a decent sized farm and some cows it's easy. But I do wish I'd lowered the challenge level, because it's distracting from and delaying the point of the journal, large-scale exploration.
The RTG team also thought Jungles and Mega Taiga were the best vanilla forested biomes. We didn't change Jungle trees at all, and Mega Taiga a lot less than most.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
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Curse PremiumEpisode 03: Base Basics and Basic Baking
Topside is dreary because it's raining. My crops are still growing slowly, so I put torches next to them hoping they will grow at night. I think Hunger Overhaul makes crops not grow by torchlight, but just in case I'll put them in. It'll suppress spawns near base anyway.
My treefarming continues. RTG can "register" trees with a biome and then use them for saplings. This might be the RTG version of the vanilla large oak; which can vary in height and has a little more randomness than the vanilla version. It doesn't quite look like a vanilla oak to me but maybe I'm mistaken. Anyway, I chop it. I need the wood.
An annoying part of rain is it's hard to tell when it's getting dark. I see this rosyish tint to the western sky and head inside for the evening. As it turns out I could have stayed out another minute or so. Hopefully I'll find gold for a clock soon and can stop worrying about this.
I start on recipes a bit. I use the Salt and Milk to make Butter, which I bake with flour to get a biscuit, my first half-decent Harvestcraft food. I save it though, because I'm planning to make it into Biscuits and Gravy later, and I need to save it for exploring. I can survive at home now snacking on nuts from the trees, cooked Calamari, etc.
Then I head down to the mines.
THIS time I find Iron all over the place. I get 42 blocks in a fairly short mining expedition. You'll note I'm still using a stone pick because I wanted to save my limited Iron, and Soapstone is soft enough that it's still tolerably fast. I finish off two stone picks, and then I'm done with them, because now I've got enough Iron.
Topside I plant a few crops, check for growth (not much), and collect some paper from the paperbark trees, which are already producing since they're not nerfed by Hunger Overhaul.
I go out collecting tree crops, and stop at this small scenic lake on the Plum and Lemon side (south). I collect two of the squid.
Then I try to get this - eel? Lamprey? - from a hastily constructed platform, but I can't reach it. Then it starts raining, and I retreat to the farm area, because I don't know if the RTG forests "rainspawn" when the rain knocks the light level down a bit.
After a bit of crop work, I don't see any mobs spawning in the forest, so I risk a trip to the other side of the river for chestnuts, hazelnuts, and eggs. I keep a close eye out, though.
That evening I process some of my foods for better nutrition and efficiency.
Roasted Chestnut provides twice as much hunger relief, for example. I also juice some of my apples. I am definitely not facing starvation any more, although I'd like a set of fairly high quality food for exploration.
Then I finish my armor with iron, make some iron picks, and head down to mine. Right now I'm really hoping for gold for a clock.
My dropshaft was near a Soapstone/Eclogite junction.. I was also getting those two stones at my initial base in my Return to Minecraft Journal. This seems a bit ironic, since in this world I travelled some distance from spawn to - get the same kind of stones. Well, not Black Granite, and I'm thankful for that.
Earlier I'd been mining mostly with stone picks because I needed to conserve my iron, so I'd been mining in the soft Soapstone where the slower stone pick is tolerably fast. With iron picks, I'm willing to go for the slower Eclogite (similar in hardness to vanilla stone).
And I'm quickly rewarded with exactly what I was looking for! I toss it in the furnace and come back for more mining.
Before long I hit this lava fall. I can't snap it up - it's at least 4 blocks up from my floor. I really want a lava supply because that's the fuel for the Tinker's Smeltery. Suspecting a lava lake a couple of blocks up, I back up, staircase up a few blocks, and then head back out. But I don't find what I'm expecting.
Instead it's a ravine with a big lava lake. This is awesome for my Tinker's purposes, but - how is this producing a lava fall from above?
Oh. That's something separate, just one of those lone lava blocks. I head out on that ledge and get an angle to snap it up.
In retrospect I was *entirely* too casual about walking on a narrow ledge above a lava lake in a ravine, in hardcore, with no escape route should I fall in. I was just so obsessed with that annoying lavafall I forgot to think about safety. But I got away with it. This time.
By now it's day so I head up, with my new clock, to work on food and paper issues topside.
I take some seeds to breed the turkeys and pheasants but -
That's not what they want, either by hand or dropped. Later research reveals they are bred with *pumpkin* seeds, which is not a practical food in this modset since pumpkins are hard to grow (only 1/4 the year, and needing particular biomes for normal growth even then). I guess I'll have to grow them with eggs, if I do at all.
I explore a little further into the forest, sort of back to the big Mesa outcropping (you can see a bit on the left), finding yet another Flower Forest. This is my third in this area - one I saw on the other side of the outcropping in the first episode, one last episode, and this. I'll not want for pretty flowers.
Then back home to harvest paper from the Paperbark trees. They produce a *lot* and I've already nearly got the 40 I need for a max map so I can go exploring.
Another lovely sunset says it's time to go inside. I still greedily grab a ripened Corn crop before I do, though - to make some Cornbread for my upcoming trip, and then head downside.
First I head to where the lavafall was to make a room for a Tinker's Smeltery, right next to the ravine lava lake to provide fuel.
Planning ahead helps. I put a 3x3 hole in the floor where the base of the Smeltery will go. Initially I placed it right next to the corridor but then I realized it would be awkward to walk around (the walls are one block out to the side) and moved it back, putting the cobblestone where the original hole was.
Then I do a bit of branch mining until dawn. Come dawn I check hopefully for spiders, seeing none, and then head over to the Lemon/Plum side for food collection and a little more exploration.
I head further out and away from town (sorry no local map yet), checking the forest for lighting issues. I do find two single spots at skylight 7, so I might need to put a little more polish on my light tracker routines. Most of the problems occur right next to tree trunks with the wide bottoms, and could be caused by blocks with the trunk extensions that are supposed to provide lighting for other blocks. I'll have to take a look at that.
I come across a scenic lake, with a view of yet another Flower Forest. This is unusual - I haven't seen such a cluster of multiple Flower Forests in a relatively small area on my test flyarounds.
The scenic lakes are something else I improved in my recent partial overhaul of RTG - before you could see to the bottoms and it wasn't the best aesthetically. I made them just a little deeper and they look much more lakelike.
I find some nutmeg trees, normally too far from base to grow, but I guess they've grown a bit on times I came partway here. I take some to craft a tree to plant near home.
Then I cross the river to collect from the other bank. This is looking back toward the shack and the Seljuk Village and you can see I've gone far enough that they're beyond render distance. I grab some cherries from a Cherry tree and then head back because my inventory is full of the assorted things I've been collecting.
Next Episode: Final preps and out exploring.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
You got diamond awfully fast compared to me, and even iron.
A fully zoomed out map!? That's ambitious. I was wondering why you needed so much paper and forgot the cartographer table probably isn't a thing in the version you're using.
Yeah, I used to look for the Red sky on the Western horizon to tell this too. I think the way the game handles the coloring and fog of sunsets in general is rather poor. During the day it looks fine; during the evening you start seeing the chunk edges beyond the fog for some reason.
This is one thing shaders give me that I wish they didn't, at least with the two shaders I've used regularly (BSL and Complimentary Reimagined). Even during rain, you can still tell the sun position because either you can just faintly see it in the sky behind the clouds, or you can faintly still see the direction the shadows are being cast in.
This is also something that disappoints me with vanilla water. It's often too transparent for my liking.
Being able to look into the distance near the horizon, and seeing the floor of an ocean which should be deep, with the kelp and all, and being able to see the chunk edges underwater... ungh, it all looks so visually unappealing me.
When I was tweaking settings of Complimentary Reimagined to get the water more opaque, I basically had to turn it all way past the "warning, visual anomalies might arise past this point" to get it even close to how I like it(and I've seen next to no visual anomalies anyway). When using BSL, I set the water is set to like 90% or even 95% opacity. In either case, it's far less transparent than vanilla water is. I even often do this for underwater, even though it sometimes impedes my visibility range.
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Curse PremiumEpisode 04: Viewing New Vistas
I plant my new Nutmeg tree, harvest some crops, and cross the river to finish my food collection round. I need a bunch of eggs for a planned recipe.
While I'm there I check the forest on this side of the river for lighting errors too. I'm a little surprised the tree composition changes so much in a fairly short distance - across the river is an all-oak forest, and here there are quite a few birches mixed in.
I find two light level 7 spots here as well. This is a pic of one of the causative trees sets from underneath. You can see some light spots and that's the light tracker system blocking placements that would make things too dark. I suspect recursive decoration issues are causing this occasional problem. When I get to some smaller-treed forests (which don't have recursive generation) I'll do some more searches to try to pin down the cause. It is a fairly minor problem at present - five single blocks so far in render distance of my base with light level 7.
Then a desperate round of paperbark collection, actually *after* dusk, because I want to get started on maps and I have to get enough paper. Fortunately I get it done before any mobs spawn near me.
Inside I cook up my first high-power Harvestcraft meal, a Fish Dinner. This is what I needed the eggs for: 8 for the mayo and 8 for the batter.
And then, finally, it's map time! I try to make a good map to show the local area.
Level 0 is too small, although you can see the little almost-grid group of paperbark trees just below me.
Level 1 shows part of the Seljuk village, but my shack is still on the edge.
Level 2 *still* has my shack on the edge. That's a real pity, because this would be the right size to show my near-base area. I miss the abiliy of my old Explorercraft to let you pick a map's center.
Finally Level 3 has good centering, so I'll use this for my base area map. I make a copy and then expand one of them to Level 4.
I don't quite have enough high-quality food to go, so I go to sleep around midnight, hoping to catch a spider, but no luck - no mobs around in the morning.
I collect a little more of my crops, and then spend the rest of the day cranking out foods - two types of yogurt, cheese toast, the fish dinners and cornbread I'd made before, and finally converting my biscuits to biscuits and gravy.
I chop a few more trees, and then head down at dusk to cut another mine branch. I encounter a complicated area of UBified textures with coal and iron mixed together in a junction of Soapstone and Lignite. It was a lot of work to make Underground Biomes able to do this, but I'm glad I did it.
Back topside just before dawn, I make an Iron sword and a boat and do a check for spiders. No luck.
Well, time to get going.
I'm going to start with some river travel. RTG rivers are great for exploration and travel - although they curve, they continue going in roughly one direction for considerable distances; the banks are low and so you can see pretty well from them, and they are almost always wide enough for boating. I head east, away from the Seljuk town. The river soon runs into another river, and I take the northeast bound fork (the other fork looks to be the river/lake south of my base).
The scenery (here from that map location) is great. You can see that the different temperate biomes are all pretty compatible with each other - here plains, forest, birch forest, and birch forest hills. It's really a pity that vanilla has biomes relatively large and segregated from each other (didn't we learn segregation was bad back in the 60's?) You're seeing them more mixed up here partly because of the increased sub-biome variety in the new Geographicraft, although I'm not sure exactly how much is that new variety and how much is biomes just happening to be jumbled up a bit. I think that's a good thing, though, because when it's less obvious what's going on in the generation system the terrain feels more organic and real.
Admittedly some of the benefit is from RTG, which increases the blending of biomes by having their terrain and flora effect extend further from their official boundaries, but I did some tests of Geographicraft sub-biome variety with vanilla terrain and I still thought it was an improvement.
A bit further on is part of the Birch M/Flower Forest combo we glimpsed through a clearing in the last episode, with a backdrop of one "variety" Extreme Hills sub-biome, showing *that* blends in pretty well with the other temperate biomes too.
A little further up the river the terrain shifts to cool zone biomes, Taiga and Roofed Forest (which I moved to cool in Geographicraft for more variety in the zone.) Roofed Forests are pretty dangerous in RTG, but this river happens to be running on its edge so I'm fine.
Further on I spot this Millenaire building and get off to check on it.
Here's where it is on the map. The building is a Japanese culture shrine, but it's deserted. There are a lot of pumpkins in the Taiga nearby though, so I collect a bunch of those for breeding wild birds.
Here's another example of a clearing sub-biome providing a beautiful vista combining Taiga, Forest, and an Extreme Hills sub-biome. With the vanilla biome system you'd just see a lot of trees here. It helps even more that what you see is the RTG trees and more naturalistic slopes.
At this point I spotted a white bear and, concerned it was a polar bear, returned to the boat. I could *probably* take it but - I am playing hardcore.
A bit further on the climate changes again to Snowy. To the left is a mix of Ice Plains and Cold Taiga (the increased sub-biome variety applies to Snowy too, and is also a benefit there.) Ahead is Extreme Hills, now as a full biome and not a variety sub-biome. I collect some snow for Harvestcraft recipes and then climb up that hill to check out the view. The river ends because the canyons get problematic when rivers go through Extreme Hills.
I neglected to get a map shot of where this is so you'll have to settle for this map shot from when I got back home. I was near the tip of the explored area at the time.
The views are - everything I hoped for. I've wanted to build an Extreme Hills base with great views from way back when 1.7 was released, with the new "high plateaus" obviously intended for base building. Then I wanted it even more once I started playing with RTG and then even *more* after I designed the new RTG ridged mountain system. But - I've never done it (although in my To the Edge of the World journal I had a great view of an RTG-style BoP mountain). Maybe this time? This is really quite a spot.
Ahead of me is the ocean. Normally a destination for me but this is a land exploration journal so:
Next Episode: I return to base and try taking the river in the other direction.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
How large are your trees (how far do they extend from their center coordinates?) Anything over 8 blocks (17x17 total), or any accesses to block data past that limit, can cause adjacent chunks to load unless you reduce the random offset (normally from 8 to 23 relative to the coordinates passed to the decorator methods, with an overall offset range of 0-31), as I did for my own "mega" trees; actually, vanilla will just trigger a crash if this happens (you discussed this yourself here; you blame Forge for not fixing the issue in vanilla but that would just mask the issue, as occurred when Mojang removed the check in 1.8; I actually caused the game to crash by making the size of an ore too large; which also causes decoration issues at more moderate scales (I'm guessing that at least the chunk coordinates are still fields so they end up pointing to the wrong chunk once it returns to the chunk that triggered another decoration call, or they just removed the "already decorating" check); "cascading worldgen" is also blamed for causing major performance issues in any modpacks, e.g. world load time of 5+ minutes, compared to just 15 seconds with the issues fixed).
Of note, the way I rewrote world generation in TMCW makes it impossible for decorations to load new chunks - they will simply get chopped off along chunk boundaries, or even wrap around, as my "WorldGenChunkCache" class caches a 2x2 or 3x3 set of chunks (3x3 is used for player-grown trees; I ensure the area is loaded before ticking blocks in a chunk, which fixes various issues caused by them as well) and I simply modulo the coordinates (the chunk array is 4x4 in size to enable using a bit mask for maximum speed; unused entries are set to an "empty" chunk which ignores any attempts to write to it and acts like air when read; a flag can be set to true during development which will notify me of any instances of accessing chunks outside the valid bounds):
public final Chunk getChunkFromChunkCoords(int posX, int posZ) { if (DebugHelper.RUNAWAY_CHECK) this.checkBounds(posX << 4, posZ << 4); return this.chunkArray[(posX & 3) | (posZ & 3) << 2]; }It is worth noting that even if chunks could be loaded the use of a chunk cache object for each chunk being decorated would preserve the original coordinates, I also properly fixed it in the modded version I use for my first world by just making the fields parameters which are passed to the methods as I haven't bothered refactoring all the code (the main reason in the case of TMCW was performance, or offsetting the impact of the additional content). Vanilla also had an actual issue with the generation of hidden lava blocks in the Nether, which bypasses BiomeDecorator so it didn't trigger the crash (or be noticed by Mojang; the removal of the check altogether means newer versions are more prone to such issues unless they added debug code like I did):
For comparison, the Nether from a newer world shows no signs of chunks being loaded past the player's loaded area due to either cause (you can also see the lack of lighting errors, which were really that bad in vanilla, partly masked by the client being told to relight chunks, but that also caused lag):
Decorators which are directly called by a biome class, without using BiomeDecorator, are also subject to loading chunks without being noticed (for example, TMCWv1 had an issue with the lakes in the "tropical swamp" biome causing cascading worldgen as they were generated with the biome's own class; in this case it was to the south and east instead of the more typical northwest bias as I'd removed an internal (negative) offset when I modified a copy of the vanilla lake code).
Larger features are supposed to use the "structure" generator, which places them in chunk-sized pieces by iterating over a list stored in memory and checking if each structure, then each individual piece intersects the current chunk-sized area, although there are some limitations (you can't know what the terrain is like over the entire area, this is why villager buildings are often placed at strange altitudes and even caves are affected by this; if there is water along a chunk boundary they will generate normally in the chunk on the other side, leaving a flat wall and/or water that doesn't flow into the cave; I fixed this by changing the way caves interact with water to a per-block instead of per-segment basis and have a post-generation step in the decoration stage which checks for water source blocks next to air along chunk boundaries and places ground blocks next to them. My own "custom" structures, including modified versions of desert/jungle temples and witch huts, are also all limited to 32x32 blocks so they can be placed all at once, I also go past the bounds of the central chunk-sized area (but not the overall 32x32 area) to enable more accurate measurement of the ground level for village buildings).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
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Curse PremiumI'm not sure the exact maximum extent of these trees, because there's a lot of randomness in their generation, and it depends partially on their also variable size; but it's definitely more than 8 blocks. It's not a choice, as they'e look pretty cruddy if they weren't that big, especially oak-ish trees with their outspread limbs. I knew they'd generate some recursive generation but also knew it would be manageable.
Recursive generation is not a problem per se, as long as you don't get runaway recursion; I've been allowing mods to generate recursively since whenever. Just placing blocks is no problem at all. There can be a problem with routines that look around the world to determine things (like lighting) but the routines could be rewritten to deal with that. Another solution I used for a while was to delay decoration until there's a larger neighborhood available around it, but now that Forge is taking a more active role in scheduling that stuff I'm reluctant to try to intervene.
Using a structure system would be quite complicated, as the random number seeds would have to be saved somehow so the generation would be the same in the other chunks. Maybe the pieces could be generated in advance and saved but there isn't a place in the generation system to save a structure piece and then later guarantee the chunk will be generated and the piece placed. Again, it's possible in the abstract but again, I'm reluctant to tussle with Forge, which is playing a pretty complicated game with chunk loading these days.
I'm looking at my code right now and the light level 7 areas next to trunks look like some kind of bug. They shouldn't be happening and I'm reviewing my code to see what needs to be fixed. In the next episode I do actually find *one* area which was almost certainly triggered by recursive generation. I know a way to fix it, although the priority is low because it's really rare, the first I've found in many hours of plays. Vanilla lighting bugs are far more common, and not something I can fix.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.