That evening I head down to the Tool Forge and the Smeltery. I start using the Smeltery to pour iron, taking advantage of its ore-doubling properties.
Then I finish my Tinker's pickaxe: Iron head for mining ability, wooden handle for autorepair, and paper binding for an extra upgrade (at the cost of some durability). I upgrade it with Diamond for durability and Obsidian-level mining, and then three levels of Redstone for speed. Then I go off to branch mine and enjoy it.
It's ridiculously fast mining through the soft soapstone. After a bit I remember I want to use up my existing vanilla Iron pickaxe, which is fast enough, and soon breaks. Bye-bye!
I hit a diamond deposit and realize - wait, I should have made another Tinker's pickaxe with Luck for this. I consider leaving it for later, and then decide I'd probably forget about, and mine it out.
I break into a cave and uncharacteristically decide to explore it a bit. I don't encounter any mobs, but
After a while it branches into two passageways, one large. I'm not going to leave my back exposed in hardcore, and I don't want to go to the trouble of walling one off, so I go back to the tunnel and wall off the entrance.
A bit later I break into a lava pool, which connects to that cave with a passage you can't see here to the left. There's gold here (under the ledge to the left), which I need for Tinker's casts, so I wall it off, obsidianize the lava, which is next to the gold, and then mine out the gold, iron, and a couple blocks of obsidian.
By then dawn is approaching, so I stuff my haul and mining equipment into a chest for later processing and head upstairs.
Before I go I plant a couple of saplings in a pattern to produce an RTG tree, to show how it works. I changed the system for producing RTG trees from saplings. Before, a sapling could produce only an RTG tree with matching saplings that RTG placed in that biome. The parameters like size were hardcoded for each tree type. So if a player wanted a large pine in a plains, or didn't want a farmed tree to come up 30 blocks high in a forest, they were out of luck. I thought it would be better if the player could control what came up by what and how they planted.
So now RTG produces trees based on how many saplings are planted in a group. One alone grows as a vanilla trees. Groups of saplings produce RTG trees, and the more saplings the taller the tree, up to nine saplings in 3x3.
We'll see we get when I get back.
I'm going to go up on the left side of the unexplored area.
I pass through a lot of scenic RTG Forest. For some reason there are lots of turkeys here. With several already near my base, I'll not use these, so I decide to butcher a few.
But - the turkeys fight back! Well, not very effectively, but I'm still pretty shocked.
As I near the top of the unexplored area, I hit an Extreme Hills sub-biome ridge. I ascend to get a great view of a Mega Taiga right next to it.
Which I forgot to screenshot.
Here's an inside view. Big trees, close together. I continue about twice the map filling radius and then head back to home, lawnmowering the map.
I pass through another Extreme Hills sub-biome, although this one is low and more of a raised clearing. From here I can see this Forest Hills to the south (back towards home). The trees are relatively small again, including a lot of vanilla trees. Part of this is that I programmed trees to get smaller as the elevation increases. This is trying to improve on a vanilla technique, to make high elevations look more barren by having trees of given sizes stop generating above certain heights, with smaller trees (and shrubs) permitted higher. I think my approach gives a more natural appearance, since the effect is continuous rather than trees of a certain height being totally unaffected up to a particular height and then abruptly disappearing.
As I'm approaching my previously explored area near home, I come across this pretty sight: an RTG scenic lake at the base of an Extreme Hills sub-biome in a forest, with the whole scene made visible by a clearing (Plains sub-biome). I'm pleasantly surprised at the scenic variety created just by simple mixing of a couple of elements: forests, clearings, lakes, rivers, and outcroppings.
To be fair, I did walk through a fair amount of unremarkable forest to spot this, even if it's more attractive than vanilla forests. But I think it's clear the Geographicraft increased sub-biome variety is a big win here: with the vanilla sub-biome system the entire area above me would be a unbroken sweep of forest; none of the clearing and outcroppings I've just shown would exist. It would be pretty boring; even more so with vanilla forest and their short view distances.
Continuing on, the little lake connects to something like a stream with a view into the forest north of my base (across the river, where the chestnut trees and the birds are.) I'm - not really sure how this formed? It's too short for an RTG river and too shallow for a lake. But I think it's a good thing that the terrain system can pleasantly surprise even its creator.
I'm home late in the afternoon. I head in to put away my inventory, full of Harvestcraft garden products and other things I've collected like the turkey legs.
By the time I'm done it's dusk. I'd like to collect some of the crops I saw growing outside.
But it's too dark. Oh, hai, that group of saplings I planted has grown up into a smallish medium RTG Oak (is that sort of like the Dr. Seuss joke about northwestern east South Dakota?) I stretched out the trunk per Princess Garnet's suggestions, but that has also stretched out the extensions at the base. I'll have to adjust that.
I spend the first part of the evening cooking, as I've eaten all my "good" foods lately, making me "bored" with them (per the Spice of Life mod).
Apple yogurt, stuffed mushrooms, apple smoothie, meaty stew, cornbread, and biscuits and gravy. Oh great, now the *real* me is hungry!
Then I snooze, planning to head back out in the morning.
But there's a greeting party waiting for me. There's another just outside the door, too. And I don't have any ranged weaponry yet. So I decide to head down to the mines, and I'll spend the rest of the day doing home stuff since I'll not have enough day left for exploring (out to the top of the explored area and back took most of the day).
Next episode: back down and back out.
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.
So, to avoid the Creeper near my door, I head down to the Smeltery area and make a Tinker's pick with Luck, the Tinker's equivalent to vanilla Fortune. But it turns out even over two stacks of Lapis Lazuli don't suffice to get it beyond Luck 1. My fortune seems to be more mining in the future. But not right now.
I head topside where, as expected, the Creepers have despawned. Then I head a bit to the south to build a cow pen so I can start collecting leather towards an enchantment table. I build it near the forest edge, near where I remember some cows. Once I'm done;
Hmm. Seems my memory was a bit faulty. I find one cow off in the distance next to the river, and lure it into the pen. Then I go back for the second and - it's not there.
I even hunt around in the woods, to no avail.
Eventually I cross the river to the left and go hunting for cows there.
Hunh. this outcropping looks pretty good from this angle.
I find one but luring it across the river is SLOW. The cow keeps losing attention from me. And, of course, I get attacked by an eel or lamprey in the process. I kill it, but that's yet another delay.
While I' doing this, it seems Fall has deepen and the oak leaves have changed to a redder color. Even the climate says I'm being too slow.
Finally I get the second cow in the pen and start breeding. Phew!
This has used up the entire day, so it's inside for some more cooking.
Morning creepers are a big problem because with only one string so far I can't make a ranged weapon. Except - I can! Tinker's allows shuriken; not the most awesome ranged weapons but better than nothing. So I run down to make one.
But I can't make one at my tool station, because a Shuriken requires the tool *forge*, the upgrade to the Tool Station. Pretty pricey at 4 Iron blocks, but I've got enough Iron.
I make it from four iron blades and polish with diamond for extra uses. I could probably have come up with some more useful combination of blade abilities, but I was impatient and didn't want to hunt through my Tinker's manual.
Upstairs to snooze off the rest of the night, and then to the roof to check for targets.
Several, as it turns out.
I zap the skeleton in the water with three shuriken shots, then another skeleton in a pond. Unfortunately by the time they're both gone the spider I wanted has despawned. Darn.
Then, back out for another round of exploration, two strips up and down.
The forest is lovely in the late autumn colors.
This spot has some spawning trouble, although it doen't *look* problematic. I don't investigate the cause, but just continue on.
Eventually I come to the Roofed Forest I boated by on the other size in Episode 07. Fortunately I can finish my map without going in.
Then I head west through some shorter-treed forest, enjoying the fall colors.
I spot some water through the forest trees. Water means views, so I go over to check.
Finding this lovely lake nestled in the forest. Views like this are the main reason we added scenic lakes to RTG; otherwise it's hard to see in Forests. Now with the clearing and outcrops Geographicraft is adding there are other ways; but more options is still good.
Heading back south I come across this relatively large and tall outcropping, with two peaks. I climb to the tops to check the views.
The first is nice.
But the second, and higher, is truly spectacular. It's a creative flying-worthy view, but in survival.
I just plumped up Taiga trees some from existing RTG models because they weren't covering the ground adequately for maps. I'm not sure whether these generated under the old rules or the new, because they're fairly close to existing terrain, but I *think* they are new. Still not covering the ground well enough, though.
Then I come to the riverside Roofed Forest near my base. You can see the river below. I don't have to go into this to map it, either.
The view from the outcrop next to it is also spectacular. It's Red Granite, as I'd guessed. The big trees to the right are the Birch M trees.
Of course these open mixed plains and forests look great from the ground, too, in RTG.
And finally a quick round of paper collection before dusk. My large Paperbark orchard now produces a stack and a half paper per harvest.
And here's my current map. Almost done with the forested area to my north.
Next episode: a bit of mining, then finishing it off.
Before I go I plant a couple of saplings in a pattern to produce an RTG tree, to show how it works. I changed the system for producing RTG trees from saplings. Before, a sapling could produce only an RTG tree with matching saplings that RTG placed in that biome. The parameters like size were hardcoded for each tree type. So if a player wanted a large pine in a plains, or didn't want a farmed tree to come up 30 blocks high in a forest, they were out of luck. I thought it would be better if the player could control what came up by what and how they planted.
If I'm understanding this correctly, this now allows for in-game creation of foliage the way the terrain generation can create it, using the tools provided (read as, saplings), instead of having to manually create them? If so, I approve, as I feel this should be how it is by default. Vanilla mostly follows this, but there's some exceptions, two in particular that come to mind.
The trees found in regular swamp biomes can't be created this way. This might not be a major thing since they are essentially just wider (and "illegally so") oak trees and not truly unique otherwise, but it's still an exception. I think 1.19 missed an opportunity to recreate a formal swamp tree for regular swamps (differing from the oak). They could have done this and then kept the mangrove tree its own type, or simply made mangroves the "four sapling" version, either or. The trees in the mangrove forest are also way too dense. They could have been spread more, and then the recreated regular swamp tree could have been sprinkled in for variety.
The small bushes in jungles are another. While they're not trees, they are foliage.
You can manually recreate the above, of course, but I think the foliage you find the game creating should be possible to recreate with the tools (saplings) as well.
I did this with a jungle I created from scratch where regular forest used to exist in 1.16 era terrain. It was... a lot of effort.
I should also mention that I found this jungle is rather prone to monster spawns in the day (while this is 1.16 era terrain, the world is now in 1.19), so you were right that the 1.18 lighting changes don't change this part.
Unrelated, but starting that 1.19 profile (compared to playing a lot of 1.20 lately) to get those pictures was... interesting. Just the speed of Mojang loading screen between 1.19 and 1.20 is quite different. And in 1.19, once the Mojang screen passes and it is at the title screen, there was definitely some frame rate hitching for around five or so seconds before settling. Perhaps worth mentioning OptiFine is involved in both cases though, but 1.19 definitely jumped out as quite a bit less "snappy" than 1.20, at least through the loading and menus (in game they feel a bit more similar though, with the exception of the issues 1.19 sometimes has when loading chunks and hitching due to the lighting aside, as that was improved in 1.20).
The trees are relatively small again, including a lot of vanilla trees. Part of this is that I programmed trees to get smaller as the elevation increases. This is trying to improve on a vanilla technique, to make high elevations look more barren by having trees of given sizes stop generating above certain heights, with smaller trees (and shrubs) permitted higher. I think my approach gives a more natural appearance, since the effect is continuous rather than trees of a certain height being totally unaffected up to a particular height and then abruptly disappearing.
I think this is a good approach in general, yes. I presume there's still some room for them to be smaller at lower elevation at times, and sometimes break this and be taller at higher elevations, though? Or is this a bit more of a firm rule?
Does this come into effect with user planted stuff or just the world generation?
I need to get caught up on the latest chapter still.
The trees found in regular swamp biomes can't be created this way. This might not be a major thing since they are essentially just wider (and "illegally so") oak trees and not truly unique otherwise, but it's still an exception.
The way I fixed this in TMCW was to have them share the same sapling and leaves as dark oak trees (referred to as "Dark/Swamp Oak"), except you grow them from a single sapling; in my "World1 custom client" I check the biome when a sapling grows, with oak saplings turning into "swamp oaks" (otherwise all vanilla blocks); various other sub-variants, like small jungle trees with vines and cocoa pods, likewise grow in their specific biomes in both modded versions; the chance of various "big tree" forms in TMCW also varies with the biome (at one point, before I added any new saplings, many of the tree variants in TMCW could only be grown in specific biomes; e.g. 2x2 big oaks only grew in "Big Oak Forest", otherwise they grew into a "Mega Tree", which now have their own sapling and leaves so now 2x2 oak saplings always create big oaks). Another interesting case is "bushes", like the ones covering the ground in jungles, which grow when there is insufficient space above for a normal tree (oak bushes have jungle logs in jungles, oak otherwise, I also have a spruce variant).
Yes, it might be better to add saplings and leaves for every variant of tree but then there would be dozens (there are currently 12; oak, spruce, birch, jungle, mega tree, dark/swamp oak, palm, acacia, and red/orange/yellow/brown "autumnal" saplings and leaves). I haven't added any new wood types either, other than "stick" (as in "Stick Planks", crafted from 4 sticks; originally I added a feature where you could craft 2 sticks into an oak plank block, enabling e.g. all-desert Superflat challenges where you get wood from dead bushes (also renewable via bonemealing them).
That seems like a relatively fair way to do it, although when you're modding just for yourself, you have that benefit even if people disagree with it.
I'm... indifferent about the stuff looking different depending on biome. There's pros and cons to that and I'm not sure which way I'd prefer it, honestly. That's why I asked about the trees respecting the height chance based on elevation if they were player grown. I'd similarly be indifferent regardless of the answer as there's pros and cons there.
But being able to us saplings to not have to manually make the foliage the game can create is only a benefit in my eyes.
Not to turn this too far into a separate discussion (or is it not since this thread was partly claimed to be showing off RTG changes?), but if RTG ever comes to 1.19+, I'd be interested in how mangrove swamps might be addressed.
This is from a picture many, many days old that I still need to make an update to my own world thread for, but here's how dense mangrove swamps tend to look now.
While swamps do tend to be pretty dense, I was sort of hoping Mojang would have taken some liberties here because they just feel like "new biome with bunched up trees so you just raid the edges for new wood instead of exploring them". They used teaser material showing a boat being used as exploration through them and that's barely possible with the ones the game offers. If they were less dense on average, and then had some of that regular density broken up even further with occasional "clearings" of just water or "wetlands", I would have found them better.
But doesn't that sound familiar? I'm wondering they felt that was too similar to the current swamps and would just be a mud/mangrove tree variation of them? I actually thought that's what they were doing; reworking swamps and not just adding a new type. I would understand if that was their concern, but the current ones just feel like I said above; bunched up trees that have little purpose to explore unless you want to raid the edge of it for new wood. And that's... unfortunate.
So if RTG even comes to a post-mangrove swamp version, I'd be interested to see what, if any, ideas on possible changes there might be. Sort of the same for cherry groves/cherry trees if it goes to 1.20+, but I almost feel those are well enough in their vanilla form. There might be room for adjusting those, but I don't feel like the biome is as bad off as some others (like the aforementioned mangrove swamps, and most forests in general).
If I'm understanding this correctly, this now allows for in-game creation of foliage the way the terrain generation can create it, using the tools provided (read as, saplings), instead of having to manually create them? If so, I approve, as I feel this should be how it is by default. Vanilla mostly follows this, but there's some exceptions, two in particular that come to mind.
The trees found in regular swamp biomes can't be created this way. This might not be a major thing since they are essentially just wider (and "illegally so") oak trees and not truly unique otherwise, but it's still an exception.
In general, being able to recreate the generated trees with saplings is more-or-less the goal, although I haven't (yet) done it for the Roofed Forest trees and reading your comment made me realize I'd entirely forgotten about the RTG Swamp Willow. Which is made of oak material, so I'm not sure how to do it - maybe one particular 3 oak sapling pattern? (that's about the size) With the Roofed Forest trees I haven't yet decided whether to make them variable height - abstractly it's appealing, but since they have split tops getting the density right over a large range of sizes would be tricky.
I did this with a jungle I created from scratch where regular forest used to exist in 1.16 era terrain. It was... a lot of effort.
I remember that. That must have taken some dedication. Or masochism. Or both. Certainly impressive.
I should also mention that I found this jungle is rather prone to monster spawns in the day (while this is 1.16 era terrain, the world is now in 1.19), so you were right that the 1.18 lighting changes don't change this part.
Yeah I anticipate being very careful next to the jungle in this world.
(Re: trees getting smaller with elevation) I think this is a good approach in general, yes. I presume there's still some room for them to be smaller at lower elevation at times, and sometimes break this and be taller at higher elevations, though? Or is this a bit more of a firm rule?
Does this come into effect with user planted stuff or just the world generation?
The amount the average tree shrinks with height is a set amount, but there's an additional random variation from tree to tree, plus the underlying noise can change from the bottom to the top of a hill (although generally not much).
It only affects generated trees. User trees are affected only by the sapling count, plus a little variability, about +- 2 blocks, for trees of more than 2 saplings. The rule I'm planning is 1 sapling = vanilla, 2 saplings = smallest RTG tree, 3 = smallest + 0-4 blocks, each addition sapling adds 5 blocks.
Ooh, maybe a 4x4 oak sapling pattern can give a swamp willow.
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.
In general, being able to recreate the generated trees with saplings is more-or-less the goal, although I haven't (yet) done it for the Roofed Forest trees and reading your comment made me realize I'd entirely forgotten about the RTG Swamp Willow. Which is made of oak material, so I'm not sure how to do it - maybe one particular 3 oak sapling pattern? (that's about the size) With the Roofed Forest trees I haven't yet decided whether to make them variable height - abstractly it's appealing, but since they have split tops getting the density right over a large range of sizes would be tricky.
I think that's one you could go either way with and it'd be good either way, in different ways.
It mostly depends on if you want to stick to the name and keep the canopy layer a consistent "roof" of if you want to bend that for variety sake. I think either could work, and while I'd even say the latter (variety in height) sounds nice, since other forests can exist for variety and these are supposed to be roofed forests, maybe going for a consistent height would be better.
It only affects generated trees. User trees are affected only by the sapling count, plus a little variability, about +- 2 blocks, for trees of more than 2 saplings. The rule I'm planning is 1 sapling = vanilla, 2 saplings = smallest RTG tree, 3 = smallest + 0-4 blocks, each addition sapling adds 5 blocks.
Ooh, maybe a 4x4 oak sapling pattern can give a swamp willow.
That sounds like it would quickly add up to a lot of samplings in some cases though. A stack of saplings for four trees?
On the other hand, sapling mix-match could word but could similarly be confusing.
I wouldn't know what to suggest there as the obvious one is adding saplings, but that's probably beyond the scope of a terrain generation mod.
Because of the higher leaf density, most regular forests in RTG are "roofed" as well, as long as they're not made of the large oaks, which have complicated canopies. The RTG Roofed Forests are often harder to traverse because their canopies are made of large round balls of leaves and there's a lot of up and down.
A stack of saplings (64) would generated 7 RTG trees. But remember these are jumbo giants, with trunks about 40 blocks high, with lots of leaves. They would still be farmable. I'll get around to chopping some of the larger trees soon just to see what the return is like.
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.
On my way to the mines for the night, I eat some food for that tiny bit of time efficiency. The particle effects from eating fall down the shaft to the bottom, which is either gross or funny depending on how you think about it. I tried to get a pic, but I wasn't fast enougy.
Then I spend most of the night tunnelling with my sped-up Tinker's pick and collecting ores with my lucky one. I head topside just before dawn.
I arrive to a pleasant sunrise but no mobs - I came up too late.
To get the last part of the gap just north of me on my maps I boat out past the Roofed Forest. I can get there faster by boat, and the views are better since it's more open than the mostly forested terrain overland.
As I'm getting off, though, the water is starting to freeze. I suspect it's now winter, although I'm not absolutely sure since I'm in a Taiga biome and maybe that's colder.
To get those last specks on the map I have to go right up to the edge of the Roofed Forest - but not in, and nothing comes out to bother me.
Then up along the edge, through the late fall Taiga.
At the top of the pass I once again end up going right up against a different Roofed Forest to pick up those last few dots, but again have no trouble.
Then I go east through some regular Forest, but with a Taiga feel because there are lots of spruces.
Did somebody mention wanting to see deer?
I spot a large group of cows and butcher the majority. Since I have cows at home I don't need them, but I do need the hides for an Enchantment Table.
The last bit to fill in here is the smallish Snowy area where the river ended in Episode 04. The mountains there are the ones flanking the attractive pass I showed at the end of that episode.
You can see Geographicraft complex sub-biomes at work here; that copse of Cold Taiga trees is a subbiome added to Ice Plains. Likewise Cold Taiga can have Ice Mountains outcroppings and Ice Plains clearing. I find it adds some interest to what's usually a pretty boring climate zone.
I once again forgot my bed, so I'm not going to tackle the area above and to my right. It's pretty mountainous anyway. I am going to try to get some of the area below and to my right, because along that river next to the desert below it is the second Seljuk town, and I can sleep in one of their beds.
First I pick up that sprinkling of dots just south of the pass to the ocean. I find an interesting Taiga valley stretching into the mountains, but then I have to cross the mountains to the sea. Fortunately my Extreme Hills biome has passes, by design, and I find one here, although it's far more rugged than the super-easy one I showed in Episode 04.
Then down the coast, but this time up against the mountains as much as is practical.
Here's a good view of the offshore forest island I passed in Episode 05.
There's a flatter inland area that lets me map most of it. By this time it's getting late and I need to cross that ridge ahead of me to get to the second Seljuk village. This time I can't find a pass but it's not that high and I just brute force across.
Nice view of the double town from on top.
RTG had been barring trees in a huge area around vanilla villages to prevent things like this. I turned it off because the empty areas were just too big. But, now I would like to find a different way to prevent this. I think this is an RTG tree and I could just make it stop when it hits the house wall, although that won't fix every problem. But if I can fix enough, it becomes tolerable.
The village has a few farms and I collect some beetroot, and, more importantly, carrots.
I spend the night on a straw bed in this hospitable Seljuk herdsman's house.
In the morning I try to check out the village's trades, but it seems I can't get anybody's attention. Hello, some service here?
Eventually I find the trader but she doesn't have any trades the village near my base doesn't have.
And now I must reveal the awful purpose of the carrot collecting.
Rabbit hides. This is pretty unpleasant since I have a pet rabbit, but it's the best way to get rabbit pelts I must have for a Traveller's Knapsack (a backpack, essentially) so - goodbye, Fluffy! (sniff)
Then it's time to explore the vast desert.
Because Plains is a Hot zone biome, and Plains can have forested sub-biomes, you can get things like this. I haven't decided whether I like them or not, but it would be tricky to take them out.
I find a Desert Temple but the last time I looted one of these I accidentally set off the traps, so in Hardcore I'll just let it be.
After I finish mapping the desert area, it's time to go home. I take the opportunity to put some terrain on my sadly neglected level 3 base area map.
A little pleasure boating on the lake SE of my base.
And home just at sunset. Uhoh, the Millenaires are getting grumpy. I'm tempted to aggravate things just to see what would happen. Will I take the path of good and play diplomat? Or just be lazy and ignore it? Find out soon!
Next episode: More pre-winter exploration
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.
Because of the higher leaf density, most regular forests in RTG are "roofed" as well, as long as they're not made of the large oaks, which have complicated canopies. The RTG Roofed Forests are often harder to traverse because their canopies are made of large round balls of leaves and there's a lot of up and down.
A stack of saplings (64) would generated 7 RTG trees. But remember these are jumbo giants, with trunks about 40 blocks high, with lots of leaves. They would still be farmable. I'll get around to chopping some of the larger trees soon just to see what the return is like.
Oh, wait, really? Hm. For some reason i was imagining the roofed forests would be taller with canopies more even as opposed to normal forests, which I though would be harder to traverse (well, far easier than vanilla, but in short forms I figured they would be the only thing approaching "hard to traverse" instead of roofed forests).
Now I'm wondering if I see more examples of roofed forests because the one you showed doesn't look like it would be difficult to ever traverse?
But yeah, I knew regular forests were also "roofed" to a degree. But I meant the consistent and taller canopies of them sort of gave them a unique identity, so maybe it would be better to keep them as such (since you floated the thought about varying them instead).
RTG had been barring trees in a huge area around vanilla villages to prevent things like this. I turned it off because the empty areas were just too big. But, now I would like to find a different way to prevent this. I think this is an RTG tree and I could just make it stop when it hits the house wall, although that won't fix every problem. But if I can fix enough, it becomes tolerable.
This isn't as easy to fix as just making trees stop at obstacles; it is possible that the tree generated before the house; you'd think that finding a dungeon overwritten by a lake, or tall grass/flowers placed on sand, would be impossible from looking at the code (it places lakes/sand before dungeons/plants) but again the way the game decorates chunks rears its ugly head; in order to fix some of these myself I added code that removes plants and/or fills in cut-off tree trunks above lakes and sand; as for preventing trees from generating too close to structures, the method that places part of a structure in a chunk returns true if it placed something and vanilla uses this to prevent lakes from generating within villages (until 1.13 broke it; these issues probably contributed to the eventual removal of water lakes).
Here are some examples of my own structures within forested biomes, all of which disable tree decoration (mansions use a more complicated method which always disables/modifies decoration in a 3x3 chunk area around a possible mansion; the center chunk is entirely disabled while the outer chunks have only half or 3/4 of the chunk decorated; if it does not actually generate then the whole area gets filled in when the center chunk is decorated):
Another view at an angle:
The code I'm referring to looks like this (vanilla just sets a flag which I named "generatedVillage", I also do not completely disable lakes, only restrict them to 8 blocks below the surface, this is also true of water lakes in deserts); the second piece of code is how I disable trees in clunks with a structure (in this case just a single chunk with the structure centered within it):
if (this.villageGenerator.generateStructuresInChunk(chunkCache, chunkX, chunkZ, bb))
{
maxLakeHeight = lakeGroundLevel - 8;
generatedVillage = true;
}
int trees = this.theBiomeDecoratorTMCW.treesPerChunk;
if (isTempleChunk) this.theBiomeDecoratorTMCW.treesPerChunk = -999;
super.addDecorations(chunkCache, chunkX, chunkZ);
if (isTempleChunk) this.theBiomeDecoratorTMCW.treesPerChunk = trees;
During the night I go downstairs to make a tinker's axe and and tinker's shovel. Iron head, wooden handle, paper binding, polished with diamond for durability. I speed up the axe; the shovel I don't bother with yet. Towards the morning I head topside, spend some time prepping map supplies, and sleep hoping to catch mobs in the morning.
Mobs yes, but nothing useful.
No ice on the river, so I guess it's not winter yet, at least outside of cool biomes like Taiga. So I'll try to squeeze in some more exploration.
First I head west with my level 3 base area map, getting more on it so I can use it to describe activity around my base. The scattered brown dots below and behind are the Seljuk village, still not so visible in spite of a lot of buildings. The gray areas in front of me are the Savanna M rock formations. When I reach the west edge, also the west edge fo my level 4 map, I continue on and make a new level 4 map.
Heading south along the new map's east edge I spot this little combination of M biomes: Sunflower Plains and Birch Forest M. I'm starting to feel Birch Forest M needs something distinctive on the ground. Maybe some more flowers?
From the southeast corner of the map I can see the end of this large plains area with some interesting terrain; but it's off the map so this will wait for another day.
Mind the gap!
I continue east along the south edge of the map, moving a bit north to avoid an Extreme Hill. I enter this Birch Forest with lots of oaks.
Next is a very small hot zone, with a Mesa and a Desert.
In my last world ravines were so rare I wasn't sure they could generate and now 2 of them show up in a few minutes.
Then a Flower Forest next to - vanilla dark oaks? I am briekly concrned about a bug or omission before I remember I left Rooed Forest M with vanilla dark oaks for variety.
I come across this wide river which - connects to the sea? I wasn't expecting a sea connection here, but Geographicraft can surprise me, so I get in a boat to check it out even though it's to the south and on the next map. In retrospect, I should have made another map as I had map supplies on me but I just didn't think about it.
But it's not the ocean, it's a HUGE scenic lake. I turn around and continue along the south side of the map I've been working on.
Now I'm in a section of scrub forest with pretty much just vanilla trees. In a world with nothing but this it's stultifying but here it's kind of refreshing.
Here a little clearing provides a view of the transition to quasi-vanilla Taiga. This is the kind of improvement Geographicraft's increased sub-biome variety provides if RTG is not installed.
Then a transition to Swamp in late-autumn foliage. I don't know if Serene Seasons can do biome-specific color changes (these are just oak leaves) but the bright maple leaf-y color is odd in a swamp. I'd think a dingy orange or yellow would be better.
I climb a tall RTG swamp willow to sleep the night.
I briefly pass through a forest, now back to small RTG Oaks (the ones similar to vanilla large oaks)
but then it's back to Swamp, which is rather a slog, as you all know.
Right as I reach the corner I have to go into another bit of Roofed Forest M, here showing the M(ountainous) aspect of the biome. The Serene Season fall colors are a huge improvement over vanilla candy apple green. Vanilla Roofed Forest is less dangerous than RTG Roofed Forest, and I don't have trouble.
Now I head a bit north, planning to make a parallel pass back to the east and home.
And I come to another Great Plains vista. But soon I hit a river and decide to do some river boating instead.
The first fork takes me to the river I crossed earlier. I got back a lot faster than I got out, because of the speed of boating plus not having to deal with swamp. There's a Millenaire Inn along the way but they sell only food I don't need (at high prices) and buy only meat and a Millenaire food I can't currently grow. So I ignore them.
Then I take that other river branch to the north.
This heads north through a number of pleasant almost-vanilla scenes. I pass a Norman village on the river, but I don't stop as my inventory is nearly full and I'm aiming for home now.
The river forks and I veer right, into this Swamp. But I'm on a boat in a river, and it's not much of an obstacle. I see a Jungle in the distance, which is good since it should provide some Jungle resourses.
The river continues into a forest and connects to a scenic lake with this great mountain view.
And finally I reach the headwaters of the river. I can't continue boating, but there's the Jungle right there, so I get out and start looking for resources.
Next episode: findings and back home.
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.
In my last world ravines were so rare I wasn't sure they could generate and now 2 of them show up in a few minutes.
For every surface ravine you find there are 10-20 more underground; on average one ravine generates every 50 chunks, or a 113x113 block area; interestingly, it wasn't until 1.18 that were they made less common (despite the ground becoming more than twice as deep, 52 to 116 layers between lava-sea levels), so i see 1.18 as completing what started in 1.7 (1.13 did improve things a bit by removing code that made mineshafts less common within 1280 blocks of 0,0; this means that even 1.6.4 has less mineshafts within 512 blocks, but still less than if than otherwise, as I did in my "world1 custom client" so the caving experience is unaffected by where you are in the world, as mineshafts, and ravines to a lesser extent, contribute to most of the large-scale interconnectivity).
Here is an example of how common ravines are; green indicates areas that reached sea level, if not actually breaking the surface, which may be higher up or be underwater; the scale of the map is 2048x2048 blocks so this shows just how many ravines I explore per level 4 map (perhaps 90% of what is shown as they may be isolated from any caves/mineshafts and are inaccessible unless they reach the surface and I happen to run across it):
Also, for comparison, this is a similar area from TMCW, the most noticeable difference is the variation in size, with the largest ravines being up to 368 blocks long and 50 blocks wide, compared to 112 and 15 in vanilla, but not as relatively deep (vanilla fixes the width-height ratio at 3, I vary this from 3-5, with wider ravines scaled down to a maximum depth of about 70); I chose this area for having such a ravine, with a volume of nearly 600,000 blocks, 20 times the largest in vanilla (there are 38 ravines total which are at least that large; in my last world I found 79 with the largest two each being about 400,000 blocks). There are also some smaller ravines as well, and others that "wriggle" around more (if they look like worms to you the method used to generate caves and ravines is called "Perlin worms", if not actually using Perlin noise in the case of Minecraft):
I would like to see them in vanilla Minecraft one day, though that model seems a bit out of place for that. It seems too fancy even compared to the original horse, which itself was "downgraded" to fit in with the rest of the game.
You can see Geographicraft complex sub-biomes at work here; that copse of Cold Taiga trees is a subbiome added to Ice Plains. Likewise Cold Taiga can have Ice Mountains outcroppings and Ice Plains clearing. I find it adds some interest to what's usually a pretty boring climate zone.
I used to feel the same, but there was something about those areas I liked.
It took until 1.7 that i realized what that was, and that was the larger scale of them compared to everything else in 1.6 and before, which was too small of a scale. unfortunately, 1.7 swung the pendulum too far the other way, so both feel like they are at extremes and I think the real balance is in the middle (but maybe more towards the modern scale).
Because Plains is a Hot zone biome, and Plains can have forested sub-biomes, you can get things like this. I haven't decided whether I like them or not, but it would be tricky to take them out.
Wait, how come plains are hot?
In either case, I think those look fine, especially if it's not an overly common occurence. Something I always like seeing in vanilla is how foliage from different temperature biomes might cross the boundary and end up a blend of colors. Green trees blending into the almost Yellow coloring over a desert looked pretty.
It might not be realistic, but Minecraft shouldn't be strictly trying to be in every single way, either.
I find a Desert Temple but the last time I looted one of these I accidentally set off the traps, so in Hardcore I'll just let it be.
Reminds me of something for my upcoming update.
Speaking of which, i have a massive trove of pictures and content I'm sitting on for updates. Like ~250 pictures. I'm probably going to split it into two or even three updates.
I'm also a chapter behind on this thread but I had a lot of replies to this update so I'll read it a bit later.
There is no strict definition of a biome's temperature within the code; the game just throws biomes into one of four lists, with some in multiple lists, including Plains, which is in all but "snowy":
private final Biome[] mediumBiomes = new Biome[] {Biomes.FOREST, Biomes.ROOFED_FOREST, Biomes.EXTREME_HILLS, Biomes.PLAINS, Biomes.BIRCH_FOREST, Biomes.SWAMPLAND};
private final Biome[] coldBiomes = new Biome[] {Biomes.FOREST, Biomes.EXTREME_HILLS, Biomes.TAIGA, Biomes.PLAINS};
private final Biome[] iceBiomes = new Biome[] {Biomes.ICE_PLAINS, Biomes.ICE_PLAINS, Biomes.ICE_PLAINS, Biomes.COLD_TAIGA};
I discovered this myself when I first tried to make 1.7 generate biomes randomly by altering their "temperature" properties but that only affects colors and precipitation type, then I tried altering a "temperature category" method which returned one of four values, also to no effect (I never looked into what the game used this for), only then did I find the "GenLayerBiomes" class with the actual lists; biomes which do not appear in the lists shown, such as Jungle, are added in their own methods (Jungle is added in a way so they can span multiple "biome units", special "M" biomes are added by "mutating" their parent biome, "sub-biomes" are likewise are smaller-scale mutations, and "edge", such as Beach, is added between a biome and another biome).
Also, some biomes are listed more than once so they will be more common; e.g. snowy starts out as 3/4 Ice Plains and 1/4 Cold Taiga. Vanilla 1.6.4 handles snowy areas a bit differently, it reads a biome from the list of all "normal" biomes as usual then converts all but Taiga (1/7 of biomes, so they are rarer than in 1.7) into Ice Plains (I find it a bit odd that you say they were too small in 1.6 when they were in fact full-sized biomes. the fact that Ice Plains were so large also makes their Ice Mountains sub-biomes tend to be larger; they are certainly large enough for me, as I spent like half a year of daily gameplay exploring an Ice Plains area):
biome = this.allowedBiomes[this.nextInt(this.allowedBiomes.length)].biomeID;
if (biome != Biomes.taiga) biome = Biomes.icePlains;
In TMCW I turn 40% of "snowy climate zones" into a "cold" biome pulled from its own list and 30% of biomes into any other biome, excluding "hot" biomes in a biome exclusion list, which are turned into a "cold" biome. "Hot climate zones" receive a similar treatment; climate zones are also much, much smaller than in vanilla, just a few biomes across, but also much more common, one per level 4 map sized area (they are more like concentrations of a few "cold/hot" biomes than recognizable climate zones). Examples can be seen in this map of the seed I played on, with clusters of hot biomes near the left-center and upper-right and cold near the lower-right; the map is 3072x3072 blocks. Of course, while extremes are excluded within "climate zones" they are otherwise not, aside from ocean/land extremes so you don't have Frozen Ocean next to Desert and vice-versa).
Is that still applicable for modern versions? 1.7 certainly clustered savannas and deserts endlessly, but 1.18+ does not. It seems to uses deserts and badlands as a hot counterpart to the permanently snowy cold regions. It seems like there's a "hot" and "cold" extreme, with tree or maybe just two steps in the middle. But I've noticed some sort of pattern.
Deserts and badlands are the hottest zone.
Savannas, jungles, sparse jungles, and mangrove swamps seem like typical warm zones.
Plains and most forests seem to be temperate zones.
Taiga, Mega Taiga, roofed forests (?) and swamps (?) seem to be typical cool zones. Not sure on the last two as they might be temperate instead and can be be mixed in with warm or cool maybe? Kind of going off how I see those two near taigas/mega taigas a lot, which themselves seem "cool".
Permanent snow biomes like ice spikes, snowy plains, taigas, seem to be the coldest zones.
Some biomes do seem to be capable of being valid for multiple zones, but I don't think I've ever seen plains as in with the hottest ones.
That's to say nothing of some of the ones that go off other factors like elevation or whatever the game uses. For example, some older biomes like the "extreme hills" are gone as a formal biome, but still exist as plateaus have replaced them, which can be "painted over" with pretty much any biome (and when done so with plains, that's basically the new "extreme hills"), some of these biomes which only occur based on being at higher altitude. Meadows (basically flower plains) or cherry groves are such examples, and might be used along with plains at higher altitudes, snowy taigas might surround mountain peaks which themselves might be frozen peaks or jagged peaks, and so on.
1.18 is quite a bit different than 1.7, even if it uses a climate system too. I did not like 1.7. I like 1.18+. The latter is still on the larger scale, especially for your tastes, but they're not at all the same. The way biomes are a layer that overlays the terrain now makes worlds feel more untuitive, varied, and is a massive difference.
But I can only describe what I observe. It's possible all the warmer (what I'm calling warm and hot) are actually just in the same warm category and some other factor is used to further split them. But that wouldn't matter; effectively there's a definite split where plains would never be in with the hottest biomes, at least not as a normal happening (strange rarities exist, such as that tiny ice spikes I've had in the middle of a plains and near a cherry grove).
But either way, I think Zeno is working with 1.12 or something no newer than that (?) so I figured it was manually made a hot biome in the terrain mod being used. That's why I asked.
The new biome placement system is complicated, but deserts now require being really dry as well as hot. That makes them less common. Savanna is hot and medium, jungle and Mangrove Swamp hot and wet. Roughly the old system of zones is now two co-existing and independent zones, temperature and humidity. In addition, there are now 5 levels in each zone system, rather than 4. So instead of 4 zones, there are 5x5 = 25. Within each zone, the biome chosen is also influenced by terrain and weirdness.
You are right that many biomes occur in more than one of these 25 zones, especially the "general" biomes like Forest, Plains, and Savanna. Honestly, with the much greater complexity of the new biome system they should have split some of those into multiple biomes with different personalities. (Or even better, making biomes much less important or tossing them altogether).
A Humidity x Temperature system had been done multiple times in mods, including Highlands and Alternate Terrain Generation (which IMO is the spiritual ancestor of the 1.18 system). I actually wrote one for Geographicraft as well, but never released it, because I found vanilla just didn't have enough biomes to make it work well. Many groupings only had one or two plausible biomes, so biome sizes ended up much larger, often more the size of climate zones (which is a problem with the 1.18 system too, like with your massive Mangrove Swamp). There was also a complication in that some biomes had to be reassigned, like moving Jungle from Warm to Hot, and I was concerned that would confuse users, plus created problems turning it off and on.
This journal is indeed in (modded) 1.12. The assignment of Plains to hot zone, along with temperate, is specifically coded into Geographicraft, but I was doing it to mimic vanilla, which generates Plains in hot zone, per the code MasterCoder referenced. It's very easily changed in Geographicraft, and Plains doesn't quite fit in a hot zone, but vanilla hot zones get kind of boring with the small biome set, so I left it. With biome mods added, I think it's better to move Plains to only temperate because then there are enough extra biomes to make the zone interesting. I forgot in my Return to Minecraft journal; although with BoP installed there's just so many biomes it doesn't really matter.
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.
Roughly the old system of zones is now two co-existing and independent zones, temperature and humidity. In addition, there are now 5 levels in each zone system, rather than 4. So instead of 4 zones, there are 5x5 = 25. Within each zone, the biome chosen is also influenced by terrain and weirdness.
Ah, so as I started thinking near the end of my reply, there's now more layers to the climate system and it's not as simple as hot or not. I thought I remember getting that idea from somewhere.
All I could do was describe the behavior I witnessed in action (whereby there's certain typical groupings depending on the criteria, and how elevation is also a factor for some), even if I wasn't sure what the literal code that resulted in it was.
But there was no doubt in my mind that what I was witnessing 1.18+ doing is a very different breed than what 1.7+ was doing, despite both having a climate system.
Honestly, with the much greater complexity of the new biome system they should have split some of those into multiple biomes with different personalities. (Or even better, making biomes much less important or tossing them altogether).
I've been more and more agreeing with the latter, but didn't they somewhat do the former, even if only a bit? Wouldn't meadows be an example of this, which are sort of flower plains at medium altitudes? Again, a very limited example but it seems they toyed with the idea? Or maybe you're referring to something else (or having taken the idea further).
This journal is indeed in (modded) 1.12. The assignment of Plains to hot zone, along with temperate, is specifically coded into Geographicraft, but I was doing it to mimic vanilla, which generates Plains in hot zone, per the code MasterCoder referenced. It's very easily changed in Geographicraft, and Plains doesn't quite fit in a hot zone, but vanilla hot zones get kind of boring with the small biome set, so I left it.
Ah, okay, that makes sense. Even in 1.18 you can see how the system wants more biomes than the game has to prevent variety on a smaller scale from lacking.
I was just wondering because in my mind, a hot plains is a savanna more or less, and that seems to be how 1.18+ does it. I may have seen plains bione flirt into a hot zone? I'm not sure. I have an area that is savanna, sparse jungle, and jungle with a plains near them. But I'm not sure if that is a formal "hot" or "temperate" area (there's forests next to it so in my mind it was just a temperate area next to a hot one but maybe I'm wrong?), nor do I know of a way to find out which it is.
Yes, Meadow is a kind of split-off of Plains, although driven by altitude variation rather than climate variation. I think it's more coincidental - they wanted an alpine meadow and that's where they put it. My idea would be more that Plains would be split into Great Plains (no trees, just shrubs for playability), Plains, and Oak Savanna (plains with more oak trees). Forest would be a more-open Forest, current Forest, and something like old growth Forest. But, yeah, moving away from biomes for decorations (flora) to climate and noise-based is definitely the way to go, based on my experiences in this journal. I'm tempted to tackle flowers and grass density now, although I'm not sure it's worth it unless other people are interested in these approaches for modded 1.12.
You can find out what "zone" you're supposed to be in with F3 and consulting the breakdown in the Overworld Generation Explanation - although it's pretty complicated. Maybe not an option for your current journal, since you are avoiding F3 for its quasi-cheating function, but that's how to do it. You could get some idea by looking for nearby biomes and seeing where they are in the inland biomes table further down in that section (you have to click to expand the table, it's hidden by default)
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.
So that's what all of that new F3 stuff covering the screen is now!?
Most of my self imposed restrictions in hardcore world are there for purpose, rather than for themselves. In other words, I'd bend a rule if it wasn't breaking the purpose of it.
An area well in that rectangular region I've mapped and almost know like the back of my hand, and of a spot that is some hundred of blocks North from spawn, isn't something I'll "gain" anything gameplay related from with an F3 image on the surface. I try to avoid bringing it up at all if I can, obviously, but I'll bend it in rare circumstances if it's for non-gameplay stuff like this.
It definitely is confusing though. If you think you can figure this out...
Here's how it looks on a map. I'm wondering if those are temperate continuations of the forests near then, like the first image, or if they are "hot plains" and grouped like in the second.
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse PremiumEpisode 08: A Few Changes
That evening I head down to the Tool Forge and the Smeltery. I start using the Smeltery to pour iron, taking advantage of its ore-doubling properties.
Then I finish my Tinker's pickaxe: Iron head for mining ability, wooden handle for autorepair, and paper binding for an extra upgrade (at the cost of some durability). I upgrade it with Diamond for durability and Obsidian-level mining, and then three levels of Redstone for speed. Then I go off to branch mine and enjoy it.
It's ridiculously fast mining through the soft soapstone. After a bit I remember I want to use up my existing vanilla Iron pickaxe, which is fast enough, and soon breaks. Bye-bye!
I hit a diamond deposit and realize - wait, I should have made another Tinker's pickaxe with Luck for this. I consider leaving it for later, and then decide I'd probably forget about, and mine it out.
I break into a cave and uncharacteristically decide to explore it a bit. I don't encounter any mobs, but
After a while it branches into two passageways, one large. I'm not going to leave my back exposed in hardcore, and I don't want to go to the trouble of walling one off, so I go back to the tunnel and wall off the entrance.
A bit later I break into a lava pool, which connects to that cave with a passage you can't see here to the left. There's gold here (under the ledge to the left), which I need for Tinker's casts, so I wall it off, obsidianize the lava, which is next to the gold, and then mine out the gold, iron, and a couple blocks of obsidian.
By then dawn is approaching, so I stuff my haul and mining equipment into a chest for later processing and head upstairs.
Before I go I plant a couple of saplings in a pattern to produce an RTG tree, to show how it works. I changed the system for producing RTG trees from saplings. Before, a sapling could produce only an RTG tree with matching saplings that RTG placed in that biome. The parameters like size were hardcoded for each tree type. So if a player wanted a large pine in a plains, or didn't want a farmed tree to come up 30 blocks high in a forest, they were out of luck. I thought it would be better if the player could control what came up by what and how they planted.
So now RTG produces trees based on how many saplings are planted in a group. One alone grows as a vanilla trees. Groups of saplings produce RTG trees, and the more saplings the taller the tree, up to nine saplings in 3x3.
We'll see we get when I get back.
I'm going to go up on the left side of the unexplored area.
I pass through a lot of scenic RTG Forest. For some reason there are lots of turkeys here. With several already near my base, I'll not use these, so I decide to butcher a few.
But - the turkeys fight back! Well, not very effectively, but I'm still pretty shocked.
As I near the top of the unexplored area, I hit an Extreme Hills sub-biome ridge. I ascend to get a great view of a Mega Taiga right next to it.
Which I forgot to screenshot.
Here's an inside view. Big trees, close together. I continue about twice the map filling radius and then head back to home, lawnmowering the map.
I pass through another Extreme Hills sub-biome, although this one is low and more of a raised clearing. From here I can see this Forest Hills to the south (back towards home). The trees are relatively small again, including a lot of vanilla trees. Part of this is that I programmed trees to get smaller as the elevation increases. This is trying to improve on a vanilla technique, to make high elevations look more barren by having trees of given sizes stop generating above certain heights, with smaller trees (and shrubs) permitted higher. I think my approach gives a more natural appearance, since the effect is continuous rather than trees of a certain height being totally unaffected up to a particular height and then abruptly disappearing.
As I'm approaching my previously explored area near home, I come across this pretty sight: an RTG scenic lake at the base of an Extreme Hills sub-biome in a forest, with the whole scene made visible by a clearing (Plains sub-biome). I'm pleasantly surprised at the scenic variety created just by simple mixing of a couple of elements: forests, clearings, lakes, rivers, and outcroppings.
To be fair, I did walk through a fair amount of unremarkable forest to spot this, even if it's more attractive than vanilla forests. But I think it's clear the Geographicraft increased sub-biome variety is a big win here: with the vanilla sub-biome system the entire area above me would be a unbroken sweep of forest; none of the clearing and outcroppings I've just shown would exist. It would be pretty boring; even more so with vanilla forest and their short view distances.
Continuing on, the little lake connects to something like a stream with a view into the forest north of my base (across the river, where the chestnut trees and the birds are.) I'm - not really sure how this formed? It's too short for an RTG river and too shallow for a lake. But I think it's a good thing that the terrain system can pleasantly surprise even its creator.
I'm home late in the afternoon. I head in to put away my inventory, full of Harvestcraft garden products and other things I've collected like the turkey legs.
By the time I'm done it's dusk. I'd like to collect some of the crops I saw growing outside.
But it's too dark. Oh, hai, that group of saplings I planted has grown up into a smallish medium RTG Oak (is that sort of like the Dr. Seuss joke about northwestern east South Dakota?) I stretched out the trunk per Princess Garnet's suggestions, but that has also stretched out the extensions at the base. I'll have to adjust that.
I spend the first part of the evening cooking, as I've eaten all my "good" foods lately, making me "bored" with them (per the Spice of Life mod).
Apple yogurt, stuffed mushrooms, apple smoothie, meaty stew, cornbread, and biscuits and gravy. Oh great, now the *real* me is hungry!
Then I snooze, planning to head back out in the morning.
But there's a greeting party waiting for me. There's another just outside the door, too. And I don't have any ranged weaponry yet. So I decide to head down to the mines, and I'll spend the rest of the day doing home stuff since I'll not have enough day left for exploring (out to the top of the explored area and back took most of the day).
Next episode: back down and back out.
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.
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse PremiumEpisode 09: Loving Living Leaves
So, to avoid the Creeper near my door, I head down to the Smeltery area and make a Tinker's pick with Luck, the Tinker's equivalent to vanilla Fortune. But it turns out even over two stacks of Lapis Lazuli don't suffice to get it beyond Luck 1. My fortune seems to be more mining in the future. But not right now.
I head topside where, as expected, the Creepers have despawned. Then I head a bit to the south to build a cow pen so I can start collecting leather towards an enchantment table. I build it near the forest edge, near where I remember some cows. Once I'm done;
Hmm. Seems my memory was a bit faulty. I find one cow off in the distance next to the river, and lure it into the pen. Then I go back for the second and - it's not there.
I even hunt around in the woods, to no avail.
Eventually I cross the river to the left and go hunting for cows there.
Hunh. this outcropping looks pretty good from this angle.
I find one but luring it across the river is SLOW. The cow keeps losing attention from me. And, of course, I get attacked by an eel or lamprey in the process. I kill it, but that's yet another delay.
While I' doing this, it seems Fall has deepen and the oak leaves have changed to a redder color. Even the climate says I'm being too slow.
Finally I get the second cow in the pen and start breeding. Phew!
This has used up the entire day, so it's inside for some more cooking.
Morning creepers are a big problem because with only one string so far I can't make a ranged weapon. Except - I can! Tinker's allows shuriken; not the most awesome ranged weapons but better than nothing. So I run down to make one.
But I can't make one at my tool station, because a Shuriken requires the tool *forge*, the upgrade to the Tool Station. Pretty pricey at 4 Iron blocks, but I've got enough Iron.
I make it from four iron blades and polish with diamond for extra uses. I could probably have come up with some more useful combination of blade abilities, but I was impatient and didn't want to hunt through my Tinker's manual.
Upstairs to snooze off the rest of the night, and then to the roof to check for targets.
Several, as it turns out.
I zap the skeleton in the water with three shuriken shots, then another skeleton in a pond. Unfortunately by the time they're both gone the spider I wanted has despawned. Darn.
Then, back out for another round of exploration, two strips up and down.
The forest is lovely in the late autumn colors.
This spot has some spawning trouble, although it doen't *look* problematic. I don't investigate the cause, but just continue on.
Eventually I come to the Roofed Forest I boated by on the other size in Episode 07. Fortunately I can finish my map without going in.
Then I head west through some shorter-treed forest, enjoying the fall colors.
I spot some water through the forest trees. Water means views, so I go over to check.
Finding this lovely lake nestled in the forest. Views like this are the main reason we added scenic lakes to RTG; otherwise it's hard to see in Forests. Now with the clearing and outcrops Geographicraft is adding there are other ways; but more options is still good.
Heading back south I come across this relatively large and tall outcropping, with two peaks. I climb to the tops to check the views.
The first is nice.
But the second, and higher, is truly spectacular. It's a creative flying-worthy view, but in survival.
I just plumped up Taiga trees some from existing RTG models because they weren't covering the ground adequately for maps. I'm not sure whether these generated under the old rules or the new, because they're fairly close to existing terrain, but I *think* they are new. Still not covering the ground well enough, though.
Then I come to the riverside Roofed Forest near my base. You can see the river below. I don't have to go into this to map it, either.
The view from the outcrop next to it is also spectacular. It's Red Granite, as I'd guessed. The big trees to the right are the Birch M trees.
Of course these open mixed plains and forests look great from the ground, too, in RTG.
And finally a quick round of paper collection before dusk. My large Paperbark orchard now produces a stack and a half paper per harvest.
And here's my current map. Almost done with the forested area to my north.
Next episode: a bit of mining, then finishing it off.
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 I'm understanding this correctly, this now allows for in-game creation of foliage the way the terrain generation can create it, using the tools provided (read as, saplings), instead of having to manually create them? If so, I approve, as I feel this should be how it is by default. Vanilla mostly follows this, but there's some exceptions, two in particular that come to mind.
The trees found in regular swamp biomes can't be created this way. This might not be a major thing since they are essentially just wider (and "illegally so") oak trees and not truly unique otherwise, but it's still an exception. I think 1.19 missed an opportunity to recreate a formal swamp tree for regular swamps (differing from the oak). They could have done this and then kept the mangrove tree its own type, or simply made mangroves the "four sapling" version, either or. The trees in the mangrove forest are also way too dense. They could have been spread more, and then the recreated regular swamp tree could have been sprinkled in for variety.
The small bushes in jungles are another. While they're not trees, they are foliage.
You can manually recreate the above, of course, but I think the foliage you find the game creating should be possible to recreate with the tools (saplings) as well.
I did this with a jungle I created from scratch where regular forest used to exist in 1.16 era terrain. It was... a lot of effort.
I should also mention that I found this jungle is rather prone to monster spawns in the day (while this is 1.16 era terrain, the world is now in 1.19), so you were right that the 1.18 lighting changes don't change this part.
Unrelated, but starting that 1.19 profile (compared to playing a lot of 1.20 lately) to get those pictures was... interesting. Just the speed of Mojang loading screen between 1.19 and 1.20 is quite different. And in 1.19, once the Mojang screen passes and it is at the title screen, there was definitely some frame rate hitching for around five or so seconds before settling. Perhaps worth mentioning OptiFine is involved in both cases though, but 1.19 definitely jumped out as quite a bit less "snappy" than 1.20, at least through the loading and menus (in game they feel a bit more similar though, with the exception of the issues 1.19 sometimes has when loading chunks and hitching due to the lighting aside, as that was improved in 1.20).
I think this is a good approach in general, yes. I presume there's still some room for them to be smaller at lower elevation at times, and sometimes break this and be taller at higher elevations, though? Or is this a bit more of a firm rule?
Does this come into effect with user planted stuff or just the world generation?
I need to get caught up on the latest chapter still.
The way I fixed this in TMCW was to have them share the same sapling and leaves as dark oak trees (referred to as "Dark/Swamp Oak"), except you grow them from a single sapling; in my "World1 custom client" I check the biome when a sapling grows, with oak saplings turning into "swamp oaks" (otherwise all vanilla blocks); various other sub-variants, like small jungle trees with vines and cocoa pods, likewise grow in their specific biomes in both modded versions; the chance of various "big tree" forms in TMCW also varies with the biome (at one point, before I added any new saplings, many of the tree variants in TMCW could only be grown in specific biomes; e.g. 2x2 big oaks only grew in "Big Oak Forest", otherwise they grew into a "Mega Tree", which now have their own sapling and leaves so now 2x2 oak saplings always create big oaks). Another interesting case is "bushes", like the ones covering the ground in jungles, which grow when there is insufficient space above for a normal tree (oak bushes have jungle logs in jungles, oak otherwise, I also have a spruce variant).
Yes, it might be better to add saplings and leaves for every variant of tree but then there would be dozens (there are currently 12; oak, spruce, birch, jungle, mega tree, dark/swamp oak, palm, acacia, and red/orange/yellow/brown "autumnal" saplings and leaves). I haven't added any new wood types either, other than "stick" (as in "Stick Planks", crafted from 4 sticks; originally I added a feature where you could craft 2 sticks into an oak plank block, enabling e.g. all-desert Superflat challenges where you get wood from dead bushes (also renewable via bonemealing them).
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?
That seems like a relatively fair way to do it, although when you're modding just for yourself, you have that benefit even if people disagree with it.
I'm... indifferent about the stuff looking different depending on biome. There's pros and cons to that and I'm not sure which way I'd prefer it, honestly. That's why I asked about the trees respecting the height chance based on elevation if they were player grown. I'd similarly be indifferent regardless of the answer as there's pros and cons there.
But being able to us saplings to not have to manually make the foliage the game can create is only a benefit in my eyes.
Not to turn this too far into a separate discussion (or is it not since this thread was partly claimed to be showing off RTG changes?), but if RTG ever comes to 1.19+, I'd be interested in how mangrove swamps might be addressed.
This is from a picture many, many days old that I still need to make an update to my own world thread for, but here's how dense mangrove swamps tend to look now.
While swamps do tend to be pretty dense, I was sort of hoping Mojang would have taken some liberties here because they just feel like "new biome with bunched up trees so you just raid the edges for new wood instead of exploring them". They used teaser material showing a boat being used as exploration through them and that's barely possible with the ones the game offers. If they were less dense on average, and then had some of that regular density broken up even further with occasional "clearings" of just water or "wetlands", I would have found them better.
But doesn't that sound familiar? I'm wondering they felt that was too similar to the current swamps and would just be a mud/mangrove tree variation of them? I actually thought that's what they were doing; reworking swamps and not just adding a new type. I would understand if that was their concern, but the current ones just feel like I said above; bunched up trees that have little purpose to explore unless you want to raid the edge of it for new wood. And that's... unfortunate.
So if RTG even comes to a post-mangrove swamp version, I'd be interested to see what, if any, ideas on possible changes there might be. Sort of the same for cherry groves/cherry trees if it goes to 1.20+, but I almost feel those are well enough in their vanilla form. There might be room for adjusting those, but I don't feel like the biome is as bad off as some others (like the aforementioned mangrove swamps, and most forests in general).
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse PremiumIn general, being able to recreate the generated trees with saplings is more-or-less the goal, although I haven't (yet) done it for the Roofed Forest trees and reading your comment made me realize I'd entirely forgotten about the RTG Swamp Willow. Which is made of oak material, so I'm not sure how to do it - maybe one particular 3 oak sapling pattern? (that's about the size) With the Roofed Forest trees I haven't yet decided whether to make them variable height - abstractly it's appealing, but since they have split tops getting the density right over a large range of sizes would be tricky.
I remember that. That must have taken some dedication. Or masochism. Or both. Certainly impressive.
Yeah I anticipate being very careful next to the jungle in this world.
The amount the average tree shrinks with height is a set amount, but there's an additional random variation from tree to tree, plus the underlying noise can change from the bottom to the top of a hill (although generally not much).
It only affects generated trees. User trees are affected only by the sapling count, plus a little variability, about +- 2 blocks, for trees of more than 2 saplings. The rule I'm planning is 1 sapling = vanilla, 2 saplings = smallest RTG tree, 3 = smallest + 0-4 blocks, each addition sapling adds 5 blocks.
Ooh, maybe a 4x4 oak sapling pattern can give a swamp willow.
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 think that's one you could go either way with and it'd be good either way, in different ways.
It mostly depends on if you want to stick to the name and keep the canopy layer a consistent "roof" of if you want to bend that for variety sake. I think either could work, and while I'd even say the latter (variety in height) sounds nice, since other forests can exist for variety and these are supposed to be roofed forests, maybe going for a consistent height would be better.
That sounds like it would quickly add up to a lot of samplings in some cases though. A stack of saplings for four trees?
On the other hand, sapling mix-match could word but could similarly be confusing.
I wouldn't know what to suggest there as the obvious one is adding saplings, but that's probably beyond the scope of a terrain generation mod.
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse PremiumBecause of the higher leaf density, most regular forests in RTG are "roofed" as well, as long as they're not made of the large oaks, which have complicated canopies. The RTG Roofed Forests are often harder to traverse because their canopies are made of large round balls of leaves and there's a lot of up and down.
A stack of saplings (64) would generated 7 RTG trees. But remember these are jumbo giants, with trunks about 40 blocks high, with lots of leaves. They would still be farmable. I'll get around to chopping some of the larger trees soon just to see what the return is like.
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.
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse PremiumEpisode 10: Seasons and Seasoning
On my way to the mines for the night, I eat some food for that tiny bit of time efficiency. The particle effects from eating fall down the shaft to the bottom, which is either gross or funny depending on how you think about it. I tried to get a pic, but I wasn't fast enougy.
Then I spend most of the night tunnelling with my sped-up Tinker's pick and collecting ores with my lucky one. I head topside just before dawn.
I arrive to a pleasant sunrise but no mobs - I came up too late.
To get the last part of the gap just north of me on my maps I boat out past the Roofed Forest. I can get there faster by boat, and the views are better since it's more open than the mostly forested terrain overland.
As I'm getting off, though, the water is starting to freeze. I suspect it's now winter, although I'm not absolutely sure since I'm in a Taiga biome and maybe that's colder.
To get those last specks on the map I have to go right up to the edge of the Roofed Forest - but not in, and nothing comes out to bother me.
Then up along the edge, through the late fall Taiga.
At the top of the pass I once again end up going right up against a different Roofed Forest to pick up those last few dots, but again have no trouble.
Then I go east through some regular Forest, but with a Taiga feel because there are lots of spruces.
Did somebody mention wanting to see deer?
I spot a large group of cows and butcher the majority. Since I have cows at home I don't need them, but I do need the hides for an Enchantment Table.
The last bit to fill in here is the smallish Snowy area where the river ended in Episode 04. The mountains there are the ones flanking the attractive pass I showed at the end of that episode.
You can see Geographicraft complex sub-biomes at work here; that copse of Cold Taiga trees is a subbiome added to Ice Plains. Likewise Cold Taiga can have Ice Mountains outcroppings and Ice Plains clearing. I find it adds some interest to what's usually a pretty boring climate zone.
I once again forgot my bed, so I'm not going to tackle the area above and to my right. It's pretty mountainous anyway. I am going to try to get some of the area below and to my right, because along that river next to the desert below it is the second Seljuk town, and I can sleep in one of their beds.
First I pick up that sprinkling of dots just south of the pass to the ocean. I find an interesting Taiga valley stretching into the mountains, but then I have to cross the mountains to the sea. Fortunately my Extreme Hills biome has passes, by design, and I find one here, although it's far more rugged than the super-easy one I showed in Episode 04.
Then down the coast, but this time up against the mountains as much as is practical.
Here's a good view of the offshore forest island I passed in Episode 05.
There's a flatter inland area that lets me map most of it. By this time it's getting late and I need to cross that ridge ahead of me to get to the second Seljuk village. This time I can't find a pass but it's not that high and I just brute force across.
Nice view of the double town from on top.
RTG had been barring trees in a huge area around vanilla villages to prevent things like this. I turned it off because the empty areas were just too big. But, now I would like to find a different way to prevent this. I think this is an RTG tree and I could just make it stop when it hits the house wall, although that won't fix every problem. But if I can fix enough, it becomes tolerable.
The village has a few farms and I collect some beetroot, and, more importantly, carrots.
I spend the night on a straw bed in this hospitable Seljuk herdsman's house.
In the morning I try to check out the village's trades, but it seems I can't get anybody's attention. Hello, some service here?
Eventually I find the trader but she doesn't have any trades the village near my base doesn't have.
And now I must reveal the awful purpose of the carrot collecting.
Rabbit hides. This is pretty unpleasant since I have a pet rabbit, but it's the best way to get rabbit pelts I must have for a Traveller's Knapsack (a backpack, essentially) so - goodbye, Fluffy! (sniff)
Then it's time to explore the vast desert.
Because Plains is a Hot zone biome, and Plains can have forested sub-biomes, you can get things like this. I haven't decided whether I like them or not, but it would be tricky to take them out.
I find a Desert Temple but the last time I looted one of these I accidentally set off the traps, so in Hardcore I'll just let it be.
After I finish mapping the desert area, it's time to go home. I take the opportunity to put some terrain on my sadly neglected level 3 base area map.
A little pleasure boating on the lake SE of my base.
And home just at sunset. Uhoh, the Millenaires are getting grumpy. I'm tempted to aggravate things just to see what would happen. Will I take the path of good and play diplomat? Or just be lazy and ignore it? Find out soon!
Next episode: More pre-winter exploration
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.
Oh, wait, really? Hm. For some reason i was imagining the roofed forests would be taller with canopies more even as opposed to normal forests, which I though would be harder to traverse (well, far easier than vanilla, but in short forms I figured they would be the only thing approaching "hard to traverse" instead of roofed forests).
Now I'm wondering if I see more examples of roofed forests because the one you showed doesn't look like it would be difficult to ever traverse?
But yeah, I knew regular forests were also "roofed" to a degree. But I meant the consistent and taller canopies of them sort of gave them a unique identity, so maybe it would be better to keep them as such (since you floated the thought about varying them instead).
This isn't as easy to fix as just making trees stop at obstacles; it is possible that the tree generated before the house; you'd think that finding a dungeon overwritten by a lake, or tall grass/flowers placed on sand, would be impossible from looking at the code (it places lakes/sand before dungeons/plants) but again the way the game decorates chunks rears its ugly head; in order to fix some of these myself I added code that removes plants and/or fills in cut-off tree trunks above lakes and sand; as for preventing trees from generating too close to structures, the method that places part of a structure in a chunk returns true if it placed something and vanilla uses this to prevent lakes from generating within villages (until 1.13 broke it; these issues probably contributed to the eventual removal of water lakes).
Here are some examples of my own structures within forested biomes, all of which disable tree decoration (mansions use a more complicated method which always disables/modifies decoration in a 3x3 chunk area around a possible mansion; the center chunk is entirely disabled while the outer chunks have only half or 3/4 of the chunk decorated; if it does not actually generate then the whole area gets filled in when the center chunk is decorated):
Another view at an angle:
The code I'm referring to looks like this (vanilla just sets a flag which I named "generatedVillage", I also do not completely disable lakes, only restrict them to 8 blocks below the surface, this is also true of water lakes in deserts); the second piece of code is how I disable trees in clunks with a structure (in this case just a single chunk with the structure centered within it):
if (this.villageGenerator.generateStructuresInChunk(chunkCache, chunkX, chunkZ, bb)) { maxLakeHeight = lakeGroundLevel - 8; generatedVillage = true; } int trees = this.theBiomeDecoratorTMCW.treesPerChunk; if (isTempleChunk) this.theBiomeDecoratorTMCW.treesPerChunk = -999; super.addDecorations(chunkCache, chunkX, chunkZ); if (isTempleChunk) this.theBiomeDecoratorTMCW.treesPerChunk = trees;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?
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse PremiumEpisode 11: Fluvially Following Fall Foliage
During the night I go downstairs to make a tinker's axe and and tinker's shovel. Iron head, wooden handle, paper binding, polished with diamond for durability. I speed up the axe; the shovel I don't bother with yet. Towards the morning I head topside, spend some time prepping map supplies, and sleep hoping to catch mobs in the morning.
Mobs yes, but nothing useful.
First I head west with my level 3 base area map, getting more on it so I can use it to describe activity around my base. The scattered brown dots below and behind are the Seljuk village, still not so visible in spite of a lot of buildings. The gray areas in front of me are the Savanna M rock formations. When I reach the west edge, also the west edge fo my level 4 map, I continue on and make a new level 4 map.
Heading south along the new map's east edge I spot this little combination of M biomes: Sunflower Plains and Birch Forest M. I'm starting to feel Birch Forest M needs something distinctive on the ground. Maybe some more flowers?
From the southeast corner of the map I can see the end of this large plains area with some interesting terrain; but it's off the map so this will wait for another day.
Mind the gap!
I continue east along the south edge of the map, moving a bit north to avoid an Extreme Hill. I enter this Birch Forest with lots of oaks.
Next is a very small hot zone, with a Mesa and a Desert.
In my last world ravines were so rare I wasn't sure they could generate and now 2 of them show up in a few minutes.
Then a Flower Forest next to - vanilla dark oaks? I am briekly concrned about a bug or omission before I remember I left Rooed Forest M with vanilla dark oaks for variety.
I come across this wide river which - connects to the sea? I wasn't expecting a sea connection here, but Geographicraft can surprise me, so I get in a boat to check it out even though it's to the south and on the next map. In retrospect, I should have made another map as I had map supplies on me but I just didn't think about it.
But it's not the ocean, it's a HUGE scenic lake. I turn around and continue along the south side of the map I've been working on.
Now I'm in a section of scrub forest with pretty much just vanilla trees. In a world with nothing but this it's stultifying but here it's kind of refreshing.
Here a little clearing provides a view of the transition to quasi-vanilla Taiga. This is the kind of improvement Geographicraft's increased sub-biome variety provides if RTG is not installed.
Then a transition to Swamp in late-autumn foliage. I don't know if Serene Seasons can do biome-specific color changes (these are just oak leaves) but the bright maple leaf-y color is odd in a swamp. I'd think a dingy orange or yellow would be better.
I climb a tall RTG swamp willow to sleep the night.
I briefly pass through a forest, now back to small RTG Oaks (the ones similar to vanilla large oaks)
but then it's back to Swamp, which is rather a slog, as you all know.
Right as I reach the corner I have to go into another bit of Roofed Forest M, here showing the M(ountainous) aspect of the biome. The Serene Season fall colors are a huge improvement over vanilla candy apple green. Vanilla Roofed Forest is less dangerous than RTG Roofed Forest, and I don't have trouble.
Now I head a bit north, planning to make a parallel pass back to the east and home.
And I come to another Great Plains vista. But soon I hit a river and decide to do some river boating instead.
The first fork takes me to the river I crossed earlier. I got back a lot faster than I got out, because of the speed of boating plus not having to deal with swamp. There's a Millenaire Inn along the way but they sell only food I don't need (at high prices) and buy only meat and a Millenaire food I can't currently grow. So I ignore them.
Then I take that other river branch to the north.
This heads north through a number of pleasant almost-vanilla scenes. I pass a Norman village on the river, but I don't stop as my inventory is nearly full and I'm aiming for home now.
The river forks and I veer right, into this Swamp. But I'm on a boat in a river, and it's not much of an obstacle. I see a Jungle in the distance, which is good since it should provide some Jungle resourses.
The river continues into a forest and connects to a scenic lake with this great mountain view.
And finally I reach the headwaters of the river. I can't continue boating, but there's the Jungle right there, so I get out and start looking for resources.
Next episode: findings and back home.
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.
For every surface ravine you find there are 10-20 more underground; on average one ravine generates every 50 chunks, or a 113x113 block area; interestingly, it wasn't until 1.18 that were they made less common (despite the ground becoming more than twice as deep, 52 to 116 layers between lava-sea levels), so i see 1.18 as completing what started in 1.7 (1.13 did improve things a bit by removing code that made mineshafts less common within 1280 blocks of 0,0; this means that even 1.6.4 has less mineshafts within 512 blocks, but still less than if than otherwise, as I did in my "world1 custom client" so the caving experience is unaffected by where you are in the world, as mineshafts, and ravines to a lesser extent, contribute to most of the large-scale interconnectivity).
Here is an example of how common ravines are; green indicates areas that reached sea level, if not actually breaking the surface, which may be higher up or be underwater; the scale of the map is 2048x2048 blocks so this shows just how many ravines I explore per level 4 map (perhaps 90% of what is shown as they may be isolated from any caves/mineshafts and are inaccessible unless they reach the surface and I happen to run across it):
Also, for comparison, this is a similar area from TMCW, the most noticeable difference is the variation in size, with the largest ravines being up to 368 blocks long and 50 blocks wide, compared to 112 and 15 in vanilla, but not as relatively deep (vanilla fixes the width-height ratio at 3, I vary this from 3-5, with wider ravines scaled down to a maximum depth of about 70); I chose this area for having such a ravine, with a volume of nearly 600,000 blocks, 20 times the largest in vanilla (there are 38 ravines total which are at least that large; in my last world I found 79 with the largest two each being about 400,000 blocks). There are also some smaller ravines as well, and others that "wriggle" around more (if they look like worms to you the method used to generate caves and ravines is called "Perlin worms", if not actually using Perlin noise in the case of Minecraft):
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?
Yes! haha.
I would like to see them in vanilla Minecraft one day, though that model seems a bit out of place for that. It seems too fancy even compared to the original horse, which itself was "downgraded" to fit in with the rest of the game.
I used to feel the same, but there was something about those areas I liked.
It took until 1.7 that i realized what that was, and that was the larger scale of them compared to everything else in 1.6 and before, which was too small of a scale. unfortunately, 1.7 swung the pendulum too far the other way, so both feel like they are at extremes and I think the real balance is in the middle (but maybe more towards the modern scale).
Okay I feel better now about doing this!
Wait, how come plains are hot?
In either case, I think those look fine, especially if it's not an overly common occurence. Something I always like seeing in vanilla is how foliage from different temperature biomes might cross the boundary and end up a blend of colors. Green trees blending into the almost Yellow coloring over a desert looked pretty.
It might not be realistic, but Minecraft shouldn't be strictly trying to be in every single way, either.
Reminds me of something for my upcoming update.
Speaking of which, i have a massive trove of pictures and content I'm sitting on for updates. Like ~250 pictures. I'm probably going to split it into two or even three updates.
I'm also a chapter behind on this thread but I had a lot of replies to this update so I'll read it a bit later.
There is no strict definition of a biome's temperature within the code; the game just throws biomes into one of four lists, with some in multiple lists, including Plains, which is in all but "snowy":
I discovered this myself when I first tried to make 1.7 generate biomes randomly by altering their "temperature" properties but that only affects colors and precipitation type, then I tried altering a "temperature category" method which returned one of four values, also to no effect (I never looked into what the game used this for), only then did I find the "GenLayerBiomes" class with the actual lists; biomes which do not appear in the lists shown, such as Jungle, are added in their own methods (Jungle is added in a way so they can span multiple "biome units", special "M" biomes are added by "mutating" their parent biome, "sub-biomes" are likewise are smaller-scale mutations, and "edge", such as Beach, is added between a biome and another biome).
Also, some biomes are listed more than once so they will be more common; e.g. snowy starts out as 3/4 Ice Plains and 1/4 Cold Taiga. Vanilla 1.6.4 handles snowy areas a bit differently, it reads a biome from the list of all "normal" biomes as usual then converts all but Taiga (1/7 of biomes, so they are rarer than in 1.7) into Ice Plains (I find it a bit odd that you say they were too small in 1.6 when they were in fact full-sized biomes. the fact that Ice Plains were so large also makes their Ice Mountains sub-biomes tend to be larger; they are certainly large enough for me, as I spent like half a year of daily gameplay exploring an Ice Plains area):
In TMCW I turn 40% of "snowy climate zones" into a "cold" biome pulled from its own list and 30% of biomes into any other biome, excluding "hot" biomes in a biome exclusion list, which are turned into a "cold" biome. "Hot climate zones" receive a similar treatment; climate zones are also much, much smaller than in vanilla, just a few biomes across, but also much more common, one per level 4 map sized area (they are more like concentrations of a few "cold/hot" biomes than recognizable climate zones). Examples can be seen in this map of the seed I played on, with clusters of hot biomes near the left-center and upper-right and cold near the lower-right; the map is 3072x3072 blocks. Of course, while extremes are excluded within "climate zones" they are otherwise not, aside from ocean/land extremes so you don't have Frozen Ocean next to Desert and vice-versa).
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?
Is that still applicable for modern versions? 1.7 certainly clustered savannas and deserts endlessly, but 1.18+ does not. It seems to uses deserts and badlands as a hot counterpart to the permanently snowy cold regions. It seems like there's a "hot" and "cold" extreme, with tree or maybe just two steps in the middle. But I've noticed some sort of pattern.
Deserts and badlands are the hottest zone.
Savannas, jungles, sparse jungles, and mangrove swamps seem like typical warm zones.
Plains and most forests seem to be temperate zones.
Taiga, Mega Taiga, roofed forests (?) and swamps (?) seem to be typical cool zones. Not sure on the last two as they might be temperate instead and can be be mixed in with warm or cool maybe? Kind of going off how I see those two near taigas/mega taigas a lot, which themselves seem "cool".
Permanent snow biomes like ice spikes, snowy plains, taigas, seem to be the coldest zones.
Some biomes do seem to be capable of being valid for multiple zones, but I don't think I've ever seen plains as in with the hottest ones.
That's to say nothing of some of the ones that go off other factors like elevation or whatever the game uses. For example, some older biomes like the "extreme hills" are gone as a formal biome, but still exist as plateaus have replaced them, which can be "painted over" with pretty much any biome (and when done so with plains, that's basically the new "extreme hills"), some of these biomes which only occur based on being at higher altitude. Meadows (basically flower plains) or cherry groves are such examples, and might be used along with plains at higher altitudes, snowy taigas might surround mountain peaks which themselves might be frozen peaks or jagged peaks, and so on.
1.18 is quite a bit different than 1.7, even if it uses a climate system too. I did not like 1.7. I like 1.18+. The latter is still on the larger scale, especially for your tastes, but they're not at all the same. The way biomes are a layer that overlays the terrain now makes worlds feel more untuitive, varied, and is a massive difference.
But I can only describe what I observe. It's possible all the warmer (what I'm calling warm and hot) are actually just in the same warm category and some other factor is used to further split them. But that wouldn't matter; effectively there's a definite split where plains would never be in with the hottest biomes, at least not as a normal happening (strange rarities exist, such as that tiny ice spikes I've had in the middle of a plains and near a cherry grove).
But either way, I think Zeno is working with 1.12 or something no newer than that (?) so I figured it was manually made a hot biome in the terrain mod being used. That's why I asked.
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse PremiumThe new biome placement system is complicated, but deserts now require being really dry as well as hot. That makes them less common. Savanna is hot and medium, jungle and Mangrove Swamp hot and wet. Roughly the old system of zones is now two co-existing and independent zones, temperature and humidity. In addition, there are now 5 levels in each zone system, rather than 4. So instead of 4 zones, there are 5x5 = 25. Within each zone, the biome chosen is also influenced by terrain and weirdness.
You are right that many biomes occur in more than one of these 25 zones, especially the "general" biomes like Forest, Plains, and Savanna. Honestly, with the much greater complexity of the new biome system they should have split some of those into multiple biomes with different personalities. (Or even better, making biomes much less important or tossing them altogether).
A Humidity x Temperature system had been done multiple times in mods, including Highlands and Alternate Terrain Generation (which IMO is the spiritual ancestor of the 1.18 system). I actually wrote one for Geographicraft as well, but never released it, because I found vanilla just didn't have enough biomes to make it work well. Many groupings only had one or two plausible biomes, so biome sizes ended up much larger, often more the size of climate zones (which is a problem with the 1.18 system too, like with your massive Mangrove Swamp). There was also a complication in that some biomes had to be reassigned, like moving Jungle from Warm to Hot, and I was concerned that would confuse users, plus created problems turning it off and on.
This journal is indeed in (modded) 1.12. The assignment of Plains to hot zone, along with temperate, is specifically coded into Geographicraft, but I was doing it to mimic vanilla, which generates Plains in hot zone, per the code MasterCoder referenced. It's very easily changed in Geographicraft, and Plains doesn't quite fit in a hot zone, but vanilla hot zones get kind of boring with the small biome set, so I left it. With biome mods added, I think it's better to move Plains to only temperate because then there are enough extra biomes to make the zone interesting. I forgot in my Return to Minecraft journal; although with BoP installed there's just so many biomes it doesn't really matter.
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.
Ah, so as I started thinking near the end of my reply, there's now more layers to the climate system and it's not as simple as hot or not. I thought I remember getting that idea from somewhere.
All I could do was describe the behavior I witnessed in action (whereby there's certain typical groupings depending on the criteria, and how elevation is also a factor for some), even if I wasn't sure what the literal code that resulted in it was.
But there was no doubt in my mind that what I was witnessing 1.18+ doing is a very different breed than what 1.7+ was doing, despite both having a climate system.
I've been more and more agreeing with the latter, but didn't they somewhat do the former, even if only a bit? Wouldn't meadows be an example of this, which are sort of flower plains at medium altitudes? Again, a very limited example but it seems they toyed with the idea? Or maybe you're referring to something else (or having taken the idea further).
Ah, okay, that makes sense. Even in 1.18 you can see how the system wants more biomes than the game has to prevent variety on a smaller scale from lacking.
I was just wondering because in my mind, a hot plains is a savanna more or less, and that seems to be how 1.18+ does it. I may have seen plains bione flirt into a hot zone? I'm not sure. I have an area that is savanna, sparse jungle, and jungle with a plains near them. But I'm not sure if that is a formal "hot" or "temperate" area (there's forests next to it so in my mind it was just a temperate area next to a hot one but maybe I'm wrong?), nor do I know of a way to find out which it is.
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
Curse PremiumYes, Meadow is a kind of split-off of Plains, although driven by altitude variation rather than climate variation. I think it's more coincidental - they wanted an alpine meadow and that's where they put it. My idea would be more that Plains would be split into Great Plains (no trees, just shrubs for playability), Plains, and Oak Savanna (plains with more oak trees). Forest would be a more-open Forest, current Forest, and something like old growth Forest. But, yeah, moving away from biomes for decorations (flora) to climate and noise-based is definitely the way to go, based on my experiences in this journal. I'm tempted to tackle flowers and grass density now, although I'm not sure it's worth it unless other people are interested in these approaches for modded 1.12.
You can find out what "zone" you're supposed to be in with F3 and consulting the breakdown in the Overworld Generation Explanation - although it's pretty complicated. Maybe not an option for your current journal, since you are avoiding F3 for its quasi-cheating function, but that's how to do it. You could get some idea by looking for nearby biomes and seeing where they are in the inland biomes table further down in that section (you have to click to expand the table, it's hidden by default)
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.
So that's what all of that new F3 stuff covering the screen is now!?
Most of my self imposed restrictions in hardcore world are there for purpose, rather than for themselves. In other words, I'd bend a rule if it wasn't breaking the purpose of it.
An area well in that rectangular region I've mapped and almost know like the back of my hand, and of a spot that is some hundred of blocks North from spawn, isn't something I'll "gain" anything gameplay related from with an F3 image on the surface. I try to avoid bringing it up at all if I can, obviously, but I'll bend it in rare circumstances if it's for non-gameplay stuff like this.
It definitely is confusing though. If you think you can figure this out...
Here's how it looks on a map. I'm wondering if those are temperate continuations of the forests near then, like the first image, or if they are "hot plains" and grouped like in the second.
Would those be "hot plains" like yours is then?
Also need to get caught up on your last chapter.