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This has happened to me since version 1.2.5, but it seems that 90% of the time I spawn in a taiga/jungle biome and I'm sick of it. The oceans are way to large, I never find mountains, WAY TOO MANY SAVANNA BIOMES, it's not good. I have to go through 5+ seeds just to find a good one, and even the good ones still have horrid generation after about the first 500 blocks.

Quote from Zeno410

My Climate Control Mod will let you do any of that, and a lot else besides. You can have a 1.6-like world with giant continents separated by even more giant oceans by having large continents be the only landmass and an appropriate incidence (about 50, I'd guess, but you'd want to experiment). You can have mostly one-climate continents with small continents and full-size climate zones. There's a default for a high-variety oceanic world with more land overall than 1.6 (so really long ocean trips are very rare). And you can still do Pangeas if you want.

Does this mod you speak of have in game options, or do you have to like modify the file or something? There was a mod that you had to do it, i am not sure if it was yours. If so, that is what discouraged me from using it.

Quote from crazyaga

Finding all the biomes SHOULD be a very hard thing to do. if you could find all biomes easily, the game would be not as interesting.

If youll easily find all of the biomes each time you make a minecraft world, all of your worlds will feel samey. the difficulty of finding certain biomes makes things much more interesting imo. minecraft needs to have challenges to be interesting.

Let me put it in a simpler way: if you would find a mushroom island in every world you create, it wouldnt be exciting anymore to actually find them

This has a few problems in and of itself.

For one thing, the biomes are only really all that interesting to explore once, since multiple instances of the same biome are virtually identical. After this point, the only reason you'll want to go to that biome is for the resources or if you want to live there. Let me tell you, traveling through the same old set of plains, forest, birch forest, dark forest, etc. is NOT fun and is, in fact, extremely boring due to the fact that the "all instances of one biome look the same" effect is in full force when biome grouping is forcing only a small portion of the biomes to appear. It can be even worse if you happen to travel through an arid or polar climate, because in those biome groups there are only TWO main biomes (coldtaiga and ice plains for polar, desert and savanna for arid/tropical). It's especially bad if you don't particularly want to explore, as you're just running around on a horse or sprinting until you find what you want.

This makes about 93%? of the world look like filler. The 7% is made up of [X] M biomes and the rare biomes like jungles and mesas and whatnot. The situation is so bad that when I want to live in (or near) one of the rare biomes, I just generate worlds until I spawn in the correct biome (or the correct climate zone and use AMIDST to find the nearest instance of the rare biome and genning a new world if it isn't in 1km or so). Making the vast majority of your in-game world padding for the rare biomes is pretty bad game design; it's like making grinding necessary in an RPG or something, for an example.

It would be a MUCH better idea to make the "rare" biomes more common and add more of a reason to visit the "filler biomes" besides obtaining resources from them, whether it be by reimplementing height variation or adding a "proper" biome variation system (by that I mean, implementing biome variations in a way that isn't Jeb or Dinnerbone making a slight alteration to an existing biome, slapping an M on the end of the biome's name or giving it a new name, and calling it a day). Alternatively, giving players the ability to remove biome grouping in the custom world generator option would work, but it's an imperfect solution because it doesn't fix the problem, only provide a means to avoid it (or, better yet, alter and create custom biome groups; this provides essentially the same thing as removing biome grouping if you remove the existing biome groups and create a new group with every biome in it).

I may look at it, but there is one main thing that might influence me away from it, but it is not your fault. Amidst. I use that a lot and it doesn't seem I will be able to use it if I use your mod. Wow, I really wish amidst comes out with mod support.

^ I agree. I would like to use the new updates and new biomes but without the grouping. I am not personally bothered by Taiga directly touching a desert. I have seen it so much over the two and a half years I have been playing Minecraft, so I guess I have gotten used to it. Another option I would like to see is a "pre 1.7" ocean option because I also agree that they are no more than just lakes. For it to be an ocean, it has to be frigging big. They should have made oceans have more stuff in them instead of changing them to be smaller.

I actually quite like the new biome generation. I'd like to see some more snow perhaps but it doesn't really bother me to much.

The old generation also called for more ocean based features, such as like volcanoes in the middle of the ocean, and things like crescent islands.

That's why in 1.8 they're adding customizable worlds.

Can you describe these customize-able worlds? Is is it just that thing where you can pick either all of the biomes, or just one, and you can change how the land generates?

Quote from OverlordXcano

That's why in 1.8 they're adding customizable worlds.

But they don't allow you to customize everything; for example, what if you want cave systems like this?
(yes, that is vanilla pre-1.7 cave generation!)

Nope, you can only have no caves or the much smaller and more uniformly distributed cave systems in 1.7+; you can see why people like me can't accept this; currently the only way to fix this is to mod the game:

Despite it being very simple to change how they generate, and they obviously know what to change because they did so in 1.7. In fact, they are so lazy they didn't even allow us to change the size/frequency of other structures - despite the game already being coded to allow it (see Superflat, nothing prevents the changes from applying to default worlds)! I wouldn't even be surprised if the mod/plugin API doesn't provide any means to modify cave generation without directly editing the code (at least I can even mod snapshots; yes it is that easy, no MCP required).

Also, for biomes you can only either have variants of the 1.7 temperature system (with different biome sizes) or one biome; it isn't that hard to disable the temperature system (or allow us to change the size of the climate zones, down to one biome each, which is basically the same thing and would still get some separation of vastly different biomes; this would also probably be easier, just change some noise field parameter like when they change biome sizes).

Hey, master caver, what program did you use to map out caves like that?

Quote from RADIOACTIV56

Hey, master caver, what program did you use to map out caves like that?

I used Unmined, which still works even on the snapshots even though it hasn't been updated since 1.4.2 (shows new biomes as gray).

Also, for showing what I have actually explored (I don't use Unmined on worlds while playing them because I think it spoilers whats underground), I use MCMap, which also offers a good 3D isometric view:

In particular, it only maps caves (floors only) that contain torches, so aside from abandoned mineshafts and strongholds you won't see anything you haven't explored yet (I removed naturally generated torches so nothing at all shows until I explore it, I also modified MCMap itself (it is open source) to use a smaller, more realistic range around torches).