I swear I don't have a problem with making new worlds! Which is funny because I used to have the opposite problem. But I'm okay with this. It seems like a common cause for starting new worlds all the time is because one loses drive in a given world, and starts a new world in response to that to try and force meaning into playing. That's not a problem for me at all. I haven't lost any motivation in any of my worlds. Instead, my new worlds are often created for unique purposes (and then as I only have finite time, I can't play them all). And that's what is happening here. I plan to continue my current active hardcore world, but I'm starting a new one, and this one is for trying RTG.
I've never dove into content modded Minecraft much, so this will be somewhat of a first for me. I've done some client side visual mods and shaders, but never anything with major content changes. My currently active world started as a "hardcore, but harder" compliment to my first hardcore world that ended up being too easy, but the restrictions on it made me abandon that direction and it became about exploring the 1.18+ era terrain generation. This world will likely serve a similar purpose, but it will be about RTG. I do intend to build and play a bit more as opposed to solely exploring (but that will of course be the purpose), because this will not be a hardcore world.
I'm not playing with any of my typical restrictions either, so this is largely just a survival world.
Here's the configuration of exact mods and versions. The short versions is that I'm playing 1.12.2 for RTG and the others are complimentary to that. I'm back to using the BSL shaders (my overall preference) as opposed to the Complimentary shaders I've used in my last few worlds. I figured I'd change it back for the variety, and because my mind is telling me the lighting of BSL will look a lot better with the trees and forests of RTG.
I change some configuration options for RTG, but it's not much? Or maybe some of the changes have farther reaching impacts than I think. What I change is shown in the video below. If I could redo it, I might disable villages, but I won't restart the world now to do that. Older (pre-1.14) villagers/villages feel less useful, but also because Underground Biome Constructs seems to be having an adverse impact on them. I can live with it though.
With the details out of the way, it's time to start the update proper!
Yes, I decided to go with the name Gaia again (or "RTG Gaia"). I felt like I could get away with reusing the name since it's for a different world type, so it's a Gaia in another universe of sorts.
I did "reroll" my seed once, since the first result had me start in a snowy biome and I didn't want that. While RTG has far, far smaller climate regions than modern vanilla versions, I still wanted a temperate start. The second random seed gave me that.
I did what I did with my last "pure hardcore" world (which has been shelved due to lack of time for now) and simply recorded the first full day, and I'll let that be my establishing entry. There's not much to say since it's a rather typical first day for Minecraft. The only noteworthy thing to add is that I try and make a bed with different wool colors and that doesn't work in 1.12 (when current versions get quality of like changes, going back to older versions that lack them can trip you up). Other than that, the main purpose is to establish the start of the world and show off a bit of RTG itself.
Further updates will be more in picture and text form so don't worry, I'm going to have a lot to say soon. Just not yet. For now I just want to establish the world, and a video felt better here.
Oh, and I'll be sort of trying to concurrently (meaning going back a forth) update this and my hardcore vanilla 1.20 Gaia world for a while. I still want to finish the Southern region in the other world before resting on it for a bit, and I'm almost at that point, but it's still quite a ways off, and that's before counting the stuff I need to do before resuming the mapping bits (I'm considering skipping that and just risking the adventure parts though...). But I don't intend to drop this first update and then shelve the world either. So this will go somewhere because I'm instantly in love with this, but updates just won't be very frequent out the gate until I finish the Southern region in my other world.
If you don't like the harlequin effect, there might be an option in the UBC config to turn it off. Set B:UBifyVillages=false . I haven't tested it with the 1.12 version, though, which isn't mine. Cobblestone might still change, and you don't want to turn that off because it will disrupt the looks of RTG hills and mountains.
My that shader makes RTG look extra nice. I'll have to try it and see if my system can handle it. What configs changes did you make?
I was wondering why you trundled all the way over to the the rocky hill as opposed to digging a few blocks down. For the exposed ores?
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.
I'd say I don't want to change anything unless I know what other impacts it could have, but I'd be completely contradicting the fact that I changed some settings to begin with! I'll try turning it off for villages and see if causes any issues. I didn't see any other villages on the map I looked at earlier so I shouldn't have any partial villages generated near the edge of the explored areas yet.
I went for that hill for a number of reasons. First was because I wanted to check it out because it was new to me. I saw a new stone color/type. I didn't even know if whatever it was would work in place of regular stone but I thought there was a chance it would. The thought of possible surface resources was another reason, yes, but not the primary one. The final reason was because I ultimately felt wanted to explore that way anyway since I figured open fields were a safer bet to find sheep, and that was my big priority next. Forest or ocean was surrounding me in most other directions, but the field went North and East. I figured I'd just gather my stone there and then continue right by it either way looking for sheep.
The shader changes are numerous. BSL is a great shader when it comes to lighting and shadows (but I feel like it's outdone by other shaders in other areas), but it has a "hazy Blue" lean by default. Most shaders do have that hazy look by default because most of them lean heavily into exaggerating the effects because that's part of their appeal. Similar to how TVs are set with bright and vivid settings on the display floor or out of the box. It makes things "pop" and catches your eye, but to some people it looks overdone (and awful at times). I'm one of those people who finds it overdone and desires to set it back down. I mostly want shaders for the improved lighting and the shadows as it radically changes the look and feel of the atmosphere of the game, but I want all of that stuff with some of the clarity and sharpness back.
If you're interested in my exact full set of changes, they are here.
That needs be saved as a text file with the same exact name as the compressed shader file. For example, My shaders are named "BSL_v8.2.zip" and the text file is named "BSL_v8.2.zip.txt" (the bold is the actual name and the rest is the file extension that are hidden by default). BSL seems to be up to version 8.2.08 whereas I'm still using 8.2, so if you download the latest version, I'm not sure how much of my settings for 8.2 will carry over.
If you've never tried shaders, I'd recommend experimenting because what I like might not be what you like. For example, my underwater settings my be too restrictive in vision brightness or distance for some people.
Shaders need a lot of graphics hardware. By default Minecraft mostly wants a good CPU and not so much on graphics. So if it performs poorly, it's likely because the video chip might not be too performant (or my settings might also be too high, so you can try the lower presets and see if they help).
Be aware that if you play with v-sync and use shaders, you'll possibly run into an issue where if you can't maintain enough frames to match your refresh rate, you'll get frame rate drops to a fraction (often a third, half, or two thirds) of your refresh rate. You can enable triple buffering for OpenGL applications to work around this (this will increase VRAM use and slightly increase input delay). This would be done in the driver settings of whatever your video hardware is. I know both nVidia and AMD allow this because I've done it on both, but I'm not sure about Intel.
One clarification on "showing off RTG": some of the desirable features are from RTG, Geographicraft, and Underground Biomes working together. #1 example is the hill Princess Garnet mined. That there was a hill in a plains biome at all is Geo. The hill's shape and surface variability are RTG. The non-vanilla stone is UB.
Likewise some open woodland areas that show up in this modset result from Geo's subbiomes and increased biome border complexity, again mixed with RTG's trees.
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.
Mhm, and that's why I asked about what you felt were good complimentary mods before setting it up (as well as listing it in the first post). It seems a few of these were made in mind with one another, even if they can work alone. RTG certainly isn't the only thing at play here, but it's definitely the main one I'm interested in.
I tried the other two on their own before I had the current version of RTG playing well, and they didn't seem to do much on their own (but something I'm wondering is if either needs configured as I saw not in-game options to do so, but you make it sound like they are in effect here so it sounds like all is well with them). It seems like RTG is doing the majority of the terrain generation and decorator layer overhaul, which is where my real interest is, especially the latter. Those trees...
This first update will be mostly about exploring RTG's terrain and generation, and sharing some thoughts about it. I don't attempt to "progress" yet.
Picking up where the video ended is the start of the second day.
To start, I decide to head towards that little hill I gathered my first stone on and get some pictures of the landscape.
It's no secret that I love what Minecraft does since 1.18 as far as terrain generation goes, so this is comparatively smooth and flat. But it measures up to its namesake of being more realistic, and it's probably more fair to keep in mind this comes from the era of 1.7 to 1.17 terrain generation, which was... rough, so this was an improvement on what the norm of the time.
What I like least about vanilla Minecraft is its decorator layer, especially the trees. That's the big reason I'm interested in trying this to begin with. And I'm fawning over all of this. It might have been noticeable in the video but I stopped a few times to simply look at the trees.
I head back towards my formal spawn spot and get a picture looking just North of the hill, back towards the area I was when I passed my first night.
I now decide to explore the other direction the plains/clearing leads. I notice the forest here is thin (and the trees are tall enough to see through!). There's more plains beyond it, but I'm hit my first realization of a much smaller climate zone. I can observe a desert temple beyond this, which means there's desert to the North.
Just past the clearing is this exposed circular cave room (?) and a single exposed iron, my first. This appears to be a slightly lighter stone type.
Another first... well, sort of, is this zombie that emerges from the attached cave. I decide to let the sun do its thing here. My first spotted mob was actually a witch in the ravine at the very start of the world, which I found coincidental since I made that post right after Zeno had an encounter with one. My first sort-of encounter was with this zombie, but my first combat encounter will wait for another day.
I'm not sure what implications my changes to the cave settings made. I raised cave chance from 10 to 30, which was still on the lower end of the slider, and cave density from 7 to 10, putting it near the middle. I'm not sure if that made them vastly more common and larger, or if RTG defaults to very few caves and it only mildly increased them? Any input here? Surface openings seem rare so far, but... I'm comparing to what I'm used to with modern vanilla, where they are everywhere, and I've only been playing this world for a single day, so perhaps it's early to judge.
I gather the iron and it's unfortunately just one piece, but there's coal beneath it, which I do gather. I'm constantly checking the same cave for other mobs. I just jumped in without an immediate exit path, which I'd not have done if this was hardcore. I can afford to be a bit more careless, especially so early, I figure?
Further North is an adorably small forest.
It's here that I discovered these random farm and wheat spots aren't from the zero size villages, since I have village size at 2 and clearly villages spawn, yet these remain.
I notice a "large birch" tree nearby. I like this. I wouldn't have imagined this was necessary or would turn out good, because I like the unique ones better. But I like it.
From here I head back towards the village to get some more pictures.
First and foremost... flowers! There's a lot to say here.
There was an opportunity to say this earlier, but I waited until now to talk about the flowers all at once.
How I feel about the flower placement in general is complicated, but I need to explain how I already feel about it with vanilla for this to have context.
With RTG, it seems like very often, only a single flower is placed. I think numerous flowers would make more sense.
However, I'm not thrilled with vanilla's general flower placement either. I sort of like single types over multiple when it comes to small batches.
The above seem to be RTG's take on flower forests. I do like this better than the vanilla flower forests, but the big reason isn't because of the flowers themselves, but rather the forests. Something that always sat confusingly with me was why they are in forests. I never understood why Mojang went that route with them. Why are they not in fields instead? Fields could have used additional variety more than forests (especially when 1.7 released as the overworld was comprised so much of forest so forests needed reduced in amount), and especially in vanilla where forest canopies are so low to the ground, it doesn't work well. It works far better here as a result of the better trees and forests.
But I think having vast fields of singular flower types and grass would work, perhaps especially for RTG which leans into smaller biomes sizes (and the inclusion of sub biomes) in general. Go to about the 17 minute mark in the following video for an example of how a single flower field biome might work.
Again, with RTG doing smaller biomes, I imagine there's lots of room to do this without them overwhelming the world too much. Not all flowers would need this dedicated field. The dandelion and poppy (rose?) might not need it. Double tall flowers might be excessive. Tulips and some others, though, yes please.
The flower forests could (and should), of course, remain as-is too.
But in general, there's so much potential for flowers otherwise. The single flowers are too disappointing, and merely following Mojang's poor solution of spamming all types in a forest, even if it works ten times better due to RTG's forests, seems like a minimal solution.
It's less that there's anything wrong with things though, and more that I see so much more potential for how flowers could be done.
Moving on from flowers...
Here's the village. I touched upon this already but the mismatched stone just seems odd. I did disable it, but this village will remain as an original.
Here's more flowers after saying I was moving on from them, yes, but the overall thing I'm showing here was just the mix of various things going on, from the numerous forest types, the tall canopies, the flowers, and the forest not being as dense or deep in some spots (such as where I am). It being a "strip" and seeing through it is nice... but I wonder if RTG does this a bit too much due to the biome sizes being so tiny. But that might be a me thing, as my preference leans more towards larger in general.
There's a sand dune visible beyond in the direction of the desert too.
The novelty factor is doing some work on me, but I do find it a bit too smooth. But again, that's a bit of me thing. I like the general ruggedness and altitude variation modern vanilla does. I think comparing it to that all the time is unfair. The namesake is "realistic" and it nails that.
The plus side is even though I might prefer one thing over another, that doesn't mean I dislike the other one. There is ample flat space for building, for example.
Not much to say here; it's a sideways log! But it's new to me.
I can't remember why, but I headed back towards the hill near spawn, which explains these backtrack pictures. I then merely headed back through the plains North of spawn towards the same desert.
I don't mean to repeat this so often as though I'm criticizing it, so I apologize for mentioning it so much, but I'm surprised to see the desert end so soon in spots. There's a swamp to the West, more forest beyond the desert (the big thing attracting me is those trees!), and a river. The latter interrupts my attention. I love the idea of the foliage along the river banks, even if it doesn't happen everywhere. In the desert, this gives it an oasis feel.
Moving on to those trees that captivated me originally...
Oh my goodness! This is quickly becoming "it's going to be hard to go back to vanilla trees" and this is already giving me ideas. I won't share them yet though, as I have some ideas I may utilize them for later.
The unique trees to the left beyond the swamp catch my attention too. I'm not sure if they are the same as these or something different. I'm thinking the latter, but as they are along the fog edge I'm unsure. I haven't drawn closer to them as of yet to investigate them. Instead I head along the desert edge to the East (right).
This matches exactly what I said birch forests should be in vanilla. Well, I also think they should be nearly flooded with grass, but that aside, the trees almost match exactly what I want from a birch forest.
I shift East over the dune and find my first palm tree!
I think a dedicated beach biome (much deeper than normal beaches) with a chance of more of these would be lovely.
To the East is a plains which feels out of place to me, but again... I'm used to modern vanilla here. Beyond that is another... mountain (hill?) with a medium (?) forest to its South (right).
I head back towards the dune and the river runs through here. They feel a little bit too straight for my liking. I also definitely think wider on average is a plus. This is quite a bit smaller than most of what modern vanilla has going on (even if modern vanilla overdoes placement and has its own huge flaws).
But that hole in the sane dune catches my eye. That's a deep and wide dune at that point. Why can I see daylight through it? Soon it becomes apparent...
It's the "1.8+ era" occlusion culling at work. I'm not sure when this happening was improved upon, but I almost never see it anymore. When I started in 1.16, I want to say it was already reduced, so I'd want to guess 1.13 or 1.15 reduced this.
I look South back towards the village because the treeline attracts my eyes. I also head back there.
I'm thinking of possibly building here. The flat Green area, the tree line, the flowers, spots of forest being thin, canopies being high, and even a desert nearby. I'm in love! But it's merely one spot of a few that have already come to mind, so it's in competition with a few others.
I plan to explore more, and maybe start progressing (gathering early supplies, materials, upgrading gear, and building) in the next few sessions, but I might not get too heavily into that until finishing the Southern region in my other world. Which I'm drawing close to doing. So I'll be able to progress more here in the not too distant future. For now, I wanted to catch up on my initial exploring and share my initial impressions.
There's a slash in one the image markups that shouldn't be there, which turns the whole thing into plaintext.
So, a bunch of comments:
First, I have already put in the configs to widen and deepen the rivers. I plan to release them once I am done debugging to very strange bugs in mesa generation.
If the configs get changed in an existing world, it will create discontinuities across the exploration boundary when it's changed (the terrain will just jump or drop across that chunk boundary.) I don't know if you want to endure the changes, or start a new world with what you want, since you haven't really started yet.
You talk about biome changes, but there is a division of labor where. RTG doesn't place biomes anywhere except some minor adjustments to beach and river biomes to make them fit. RTG just puts biomes where the layout system tells it to. That can be vanilla, or Geographicraft, or BiomeTweaker scripts, or anything else that will place biomes in a RTG worldtype. (BoP, for example, only places its biomes in the BoP worldtype, but with a one-line change, it could place into RTG, and RTG would happily plop down biomes wherever BoP wanted it too.) I actually think some of the biome mods like Biomes You Go actually do that.
Since you're running Geo, Geo is doing the biome placement. Some of the things you talk about can be changed. Plains showing up in hot regions (as vanilla did at the time) can be stopped by changing
S:"Plains climate"=PLAINS
in the Geographicraft.cfg file
to:
S:"Plains climate"=MEDIUM
(medium is COOL and WARM)
Note: Geo keeps a separate config for each world (because otherwise my dozens of test worlds turned into disasters). The config in the general config is for new worlds. Once created, a world's config is in the worldspecificconfig folder in the worlds' save folder.
Geo can also make bigger climate zones (by setting B:"Half Zone Size"=false), roughly as large as 1.7 era vanilla, although Geo is smarter and manages to place more of them so they are not quite as hard to find.
The thin forest strips is another Geo doing; but it's not as common as you seem to experience. That shows up mostly with forest sub-biomes within plains (unique to Geo). Geo also places full-biome forests, and they can be quite large, although with default settings they'll have some clearings in them.
RTG generation is smoother than I'd like, too. You'll probably notice Extreme Hills is much more rumpled than the various XXX Hills. I was kind of thinking about moving over some of the techniques I developed for Extreme Hills, but I didn't do it before I started posting, and I don't want to change it now because changing that would also create terrain discontinuities. One of the headaches of terrain mods is that generally any change creates problems in ongoing world, so if you improve things and then somebody uses it on an existing world, it will damage the world.
There are not *that* many new tree types. There are 3 types each for Taiga, Birch, and Oak, plus two for Acacia. Basically "small, medium, and large". The three Taiga trees are not all that different. Birch and Oak smalls are the same structure (the Cypress-y trees). So that leaves the four; large and small, Birch and Oak, which are pretty different. So, really, 6 types. That said, they can vary a lot in size and that affects their overall shapes, plus most are fractal, so there are differences in detail.
In terms of flowers: I haven't been paying attention to the flower code. Back in the day RTG just used vanilla placement. I'm not sure how it's working now. Offhand, generally single flowers doesn't seem right; but maybe they're placed late and get crowded out by other things. I've thought about applying forest-style noise techniques to flowers (so abundance and type would vary from place to place). But, I haven't done anything about it.
Caves are another thing where I haven't looked at the relevant code for ages. I have no idea how they compare to vanilla. I do remember some discussions about caves messing up the terrain, so maybe it is low?
Villages are a headache with UB (this is not an RTG issue, other than UB is really good for mountains) because cobble gets converted, I think even with that setting off. I've thought about hacking into the code and changing the stones used, and I did that long ago in 1.7, but villages are much more complex code-wise in 1.12 even and I'm reluctant to shoulder that.
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.
There's a slash in one the image markups that shouldn't be there, which turns the whole thing into plaintext.
Oh my goodness, I love you! It works! Sorry if that's inappropriate but I'm so happy now.
I'm still confused why it happened to begin with. Shouldn't the one tag have merely stopped just that one image from showing, not the whole post worth? Oh well, some things are best not questioned I guess? That soothes a lot of future concern at least.
Anyway, moving on...
My apologies if I get things mixed up a lot. I'll have to try and remember that there's a lot more at work here than just RTG. I guess I have it in my mind that its doing most of what I see, since things seemed pretty vanilla with everything else present besides RTG.
I'm not sure how I feel about changing things that will lead to terrain generation changes. Usually that's a no-no for me, but since this is more of a "for the experience" world, I may be less opposed to that. I'm undecided for now. I definitely don't want to restart it after making a thread for it though.
I probably would have changed the configuration to get larger climate zones had I known about it, but again, for an "experience" world, I'll leave it be. If anything I think I'd rather try it close to default. Maybe I'll retire this world after experiencing it enough, and then doing more of a committed world with some changes after it (either in a new thread or simply following here, either way). I'm happy to find out such a change is already possible and easy though. I think you know that even if I find 1.7 and 1.18's climate zones too big for most, I also find 1.6s too small for myself, and this feels similar. But it makes for a good way to get accustomed with what's going on. I wouldn't want to explore the amounts I have in my hardcore world to see everything here, for example.
If the thin forest strips aren't common, that's great news. For reference, I love that it's a thing. It creates wonderful environments that I've never seen vanilla do. I was just worried they might be super common.
There might be "only" a few of each tree type, but it's still more quantity and quality than what vanilla has going on. I'm not going to stop being excited about them any time soon.
The single flowers, thus far anyway, do seem pretty common and you can see a number of spots in some of my pictures showing this (but yes I'm currently only working with a sample size of one in worlds count). Something else I've noticed is tall grass seems... almost nonexistent? Or it's limited to certain biomes/locales that I have yet to find.
"Should have". Oh, yes, a botched markup should only affect that one image. Or, at least, not the ones before it. But, that's not how it works. Miss one tag, and the whole post is plaintext, and you have to go through carefully looking for that one markup missing a slash or typed "ing" instead of "img".
I can't believe you've *never* botched a markup, thus learning what goes wrong. I used to botch a markup on every third post or so, to the point that I now have a "format" document with lots of markup tags that I paste and write into.
You aren't "mixing anything up". You didn't write these mods; I don't expect you to have read the documentation in detail. I just wanted to explain exactly how the things you're commenting on are happening - especially since some of them can be changed. Well, that and get a bit of education in the cybersphere. It's a very common expectation that RTG is placing/choosing biomes. Just today, I fielded a comment on a Discord board where somebody was wondering why he didn't see any BoP biomes in his RTG world (answer: BoP doesn't place it's biomes in anything but it's custom world, and he hadn't installed anything that could.)
You find these climate zones similar to 1.6 because - they are. Roughly, they are the same size as the 1.6-era Ice Plains. 1.7 zones are actually not *that* much bigger - twice the length and 4 times the area. A lot of the problem with them was that Hot and Cold were quite rare inland, and there's a lot of "inland" with 1.7 generation. Geo places them more often, partly because it has a smarter climate smoothing algorithm, and partly because it has more ocean with default settings.
Incidentally, Geographicraft can make most changes to biome placement without any chunk-wall-ish effects, smoothly inserting them into the world, starting generally about 1000 blocks beyond any yet explored terrain. (I was SO proud when I finally pulled that off!) This includes pulling Plains out of hot zones. There are a few config changes it *can't* do that for, so check with me before actually doing changes.
To be precise: in Plains areas (where the "real" biome is plains) thin forests are common (sub-biome forests that get stretched around, or a complicated boundary with a Forest). In Forest areas, they are basically the same as vanilla forests in extent, except that they do have clearings and rocky hills scattered about. Personally I love the thin and stretched forests; I love open woodland, and the shape of the trees is more visible.
I'll have to look at tall grass. Another thing I just haven't thought about. I think it's common in Savanna.
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.
That's just the thing; I absolutely have messed up tags before. A lot! But I don't recall all images failing to work. I think I've seen a missed URL tag result in it being automatically placed at the end of the post so the rest of the post's text becomes a link, but other than that, I've not run into such issues.
I also know Photobucket does some of its own things and i am hosting this world's images there, so I was thinking maybe there was something between it and the forums here that weren't playing together well. As mentioned, I remember when the forum software here changed, and the rich editor in particular became near impossible to use for me in some scenarios (such as posts or pages with a lot of pictures). So I typically switch to the raw text editor all the time (I wish I could have it default to that...). So when I saw the freezing and memory leak, I thought maybe the forums were why.
If you want a clue as to how often I mess up, look at my posts for entries to my worlds. I usually end up editing all of them because believe me, I mistype words or phrase things awkwardly a lot and then I go back and correct it. It bothers me (and sometimes makes what i typed not convey what i wanted too well). Somehow, in all this time, I've never seen this much of a mess result from it before.
And yes, by all means, explain things. I just wanted to clarify that if I ever phrase something as "RTG's doing", I'm probably improperly labeling it that way and instead referring "the doing of any of the mods I'm using" because I'm going straight from vanilla to a (small) collective of mods, and RTG is the prime reason I'm doing it so my mind probably mentally jumps to "this is all RTG", but I'll try and be better about consciously putting it that way.
The tall grass was readily noticeable as not showing up... well, anywhere. I'm not saying it should be like vanilla here, mind you. I just wanted to mention it as a pretty obvious change I noticed. Vanilla mixes it everywhere (perhaps too much) and I'm not seeing it anywhere here yet.
Tall grass is indeed absent from all RTG decoration apart from Savanna and its variants. I thought the vanilla decorators ran and put it in; but I guess that's been turned off (probably by me in the process of blocking vanilla trees). Likely something similar happened with flowers. These are fixable problems; but I'm planning to put out a release this weekend (which will probably be approved sometime next week; the initial release took 3 days for CurseForge to approve it), and I'm not going to delay this release for it.
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.
By all means, as I mentioned before, don't interrupt your usual doings to make sudden last minute changes based on things I say or think. I neither expect that nor want you to push your schedule to fit it in.
I think the grass is sort of fine anyway. Sure, there are some awkward spots with almost none at all, and this is what made me think villages were failing to spawn in these spots, but it's not like it's so bad it needs attention
The flowers though, by contrast, I'd love to see something happen there eventfully. I think they'd be better off with a new approach to how they are done as opposed to merely making more spawn in some spots anyway, but that's just an opinion of mine and maybe you don't want to go that far with it. That's fine. If you want to leave them as-is and just "fix" the flowers, that would still be an improvement. If you want examples of how common these single flower happenings are for me, I'm obviously still early in my world and I already have multiple pictures above that just show a single flower in many places.
I swear I don't have a problem with making new worlds! Which is funny because I used to have the opposite problem. But I'm okay with this. It seems like a common cause for starting new worlds all the time is because one loses drive in a given world, and starts a new world in response to that to try and force meaning into playing. That's not a problem for me at all. I haven't lost any motivation in any of my worlds. Instead, my new worlds are often created for unique purposes (and then as I only have finite time, I can't play them all). And that's what is happening here. I plan to continue my current active hardcore world, but I'm starting a new one, and this one is for trying RTG.
I've never dove into content modded Minecraft much, so this will be somewhat of a first for me. I've done some client side visual mods and shaders, but never anything with major content changes. My currently active world started as a "hardcore, but harder" compliment to my first hardcore world that ended up being too easy, but the restrictions on it made me abandon that direction and it became about exploring the 1.18+ era terrain generation. This world will likely serve a similar purpose, but it will be about RTG. I do intend to build and play a bit more as opposed to solely exploring (but that will of course be the purpose), because this will not be a hardcore world.
I'm not playing with any of my typical restrictions either, so this is largely just a survival world.
Here's the configuration of exact mods and versions. The short versions is that I'm playing 1.12.2 for RTG and the others are complimentary to that. I'm back to using the BSL shaders (my overall preference) as opposed to the Complimentary shaders I've used in my last few worlds. I figured I'd change it back for the variety, and because my mind is telling me the lighting of BSL will look a lot better with the trees and forests of RTG.
Minecraft 1.12.2
Forge 14.23.5.2859
OptiFine 1.12.2 HD U G5
Geographicraft 0.9.3.1
Realistic Terrain Generation Plus 7.0
Underground Biome Constructs 1.3.14
BSL 8.2 Shaders (they are configured quite a bit from default)
I change some configuration options for RTG, but it's not much? Or maybe some of the changes have farther reaching impacts than I think. What I change is shown in the video below. If I could redo it, I might disable villages, but I won't restart the world now to do that. Older (pre-1.14) villagers/villages feel less useful, but also because Underground Biome Constructs seems to be having an adverse impact on them. I can live with it though.
With the details out of the way, it's time to start the update proper!
Yes, I decided to go with the name Gaia again (or "RTG Gaia"). I felt like I could get away with reusing the name since it's for a different world type, so it's a Gaia in another universe of sorts.
I did "reroll" my seed once, since the first result had me start in a snowy biome and I didn't want that. While RTG has far, far smaller climate regions than modern vanilla versions, I still wanted a temperate start. The second random seed gave me that.
I did what I did with my last "pure hardcore" world (which has been shelved due to lack of time for now) and simply recorded the first full day, and I'll let that be my establishing entry. There's not much to say since it's a rather typical first day for Minecraft. The only noteworthy thing to add is that I try and make a bed with different wool colors and that doesn't work in 1.12 (when current versions get quality of like changes, going back to older versions that lack them can trip you up). Other than that, the main purpose is to establish the start of the world and show off a bit of RTG itself.
Further updates will be more in picture and text form so don't worry, I'm going to have a lot to say soon. Just not yet. For now I just want to establish the world, and a video felt better here.
Oh, and I'll be sort of trying to concurrently (meaning going back a forth) update this and my hardcore vanilla 1.20 Gaia world for a while. I still want to finish the Southern region in the other world before resting on it for a bit, and I'm almost at that point, but it's still quite a ways off, and that's before counting the stuff I need to do before resuming the mapping bits (I'm considering skipping that and just risking the adventure parts though...). But I don't intend to drop this first update and then shelve the world either. So this will go somewhere because I'm instantly in love with this, but updates just won't be very frequent out the gate until I finish the Southern region in my other world.
You very much know what you're doing! LOL
If you don't like the harlequin effect, there might be an option in the UBC config to turn it off. Set B:UBifyVillages=false . I haven't tested it with the 1.12 version, though, which isn't mine. Cobblestone might still change, and you don't want to turn that off because it will disrupt the looks of RTG hills and mountains.
My that shader makes RTG look extra nice. I'll have to try it and see if my system can handle it. What configs changes did you make?
I was wondering why you trundled all the way over to the the rocky hill as opposed to digging a few blocks down. For the exposed ores?
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.
I'd say I don't want to change anything unless I know what other impacts it could have, but I'd be completely contradicting the fact that I changed some settings to begin with! I'll try turning it off for villages and see if causes any issues. I didn't see any other villages on the map I looked at earlier so I shouldn't have any partial villages generated near the edge of the explored areas yet.
I went for that hill for a number of reasons. First was because I wanted to check it out because it was new to me. I saw a new stone color/type. I didn't even know if whatever it was would work in place of regular stone but I thought there was a chance it would. The thought of possible surface resources was another reason, yes, but not the primary one. The final reason was because I ultimately felt wanted to explore that way anyway since I figured open fields were a safer bet to find sheep, and that was my big priority next. Forest or ocean was surrounding me in most other directions, but the field went North and East. I figured I'd just gather my stone there and then continue right by it either way looking for sheep.
The shader changes are numerous. BSL is a great shader when it comes to lighting and shadows (but I feel like it's outdone by other shaders in other areas), but it has a "hazy Blue" lean by default. Most shaders do have that hazy look by default because most of them lean heavily into exaggerating the effects because that's part of their appeal. Similar to how TVs are set with bright and vivid settings on the display floor or out of the box. It makes things "pop" and catches your eye, but to some people it looks overdone (and awful at times). I'm one of those people who finds it overdone and desires to set it back down. I mostly want shaders for the improved lighting and the shadows as it radically changes the look and feel of the atmosphere of the game, but I want all of that stuff with some of the clarity and sharpness back.
If you're interested in my exact full set of changes, they are here.
AMBIENT_DB=192
AMBIENT_NB=192
AMBIENT_NI=0.25
AO_STRENGTH=2.00
AURORA=true
BLOOM=false
BLOOM_STRENGTH=0.25
CLOUD_AMOUNT=12.0
CLOUD_BRIGHTNESS=2.50
CLOUD_HEIGHT=7.5
CLOUD_OPACITY=0.1
CLOUD_SPEED=0.50
CLOUD_THICKNESS=16
COLOR_GRADING=true
DESATURATION_FACTOR=2.0
DISTANT_FADE=3
DISTANT_FADE_STYLE=1
DOF_STRENGTH=2.0
EMISSIVE=0
EMISSIVE_RECOLOR=true
ENTITY_FLASH=false
FOG_DENSITY=0.25
FXAA=false
LENS_FLARE=false
LIGHT_DB=208
LIGHT_NB=192
LIGHT_NI=0.25
LIGHT_SHAFT_STRENGTH=0.25
MINLIGHT_B=48
MINLIGHT_G=48
MINLIGHT_I=0.00
MINLIGHT_R=48
NETHER_BB=204
NETHER_BG=192
NETHER_BI=0.40
NETHER_BR=255
NETHER_CB=48
NETHER_CG=64
NETHER_CI=0.40
NETHER_CR=208
NETHER_NB=128
NETHER_NG=128
NETHER_NI=0.25
NETHER_VI=0.25
NETHER_WB=204
NETHER_WI=0.25
PARALLAX=false
ROUND_SUN_MOON=true
SHADOW_ENTITY=false
SHADOW_PIXEL=64
shadowDistance=1024.0
shadowMapResolution=3072
SKY_DENSITY_D=0.50
SKY_GROUND=0
SKY_I=0.85
SKYBOX_BRIGHTNESS=1.00
sunPathRotation=-30.0
TAA=true
VIBRANCE=1.20
VIGNETTE=false
WATER_A=0.95
WATER_BUMP=0.50
WATER_DETAIL=0.10
WATER_FOG_DENSITY=1.50
WATER_I=0.20
WATER_SHARPNESS=0.8
WATER_SPEED=0.50
WEATHER_BI=1.00
WEATHER_CI=1.00
WEATHER_DI=1.00
WEATHER_MI=0.90
WEATHER_OPACITY=4.00
WEATHER_RI=0.55
WEATHER_SI=0.60
WEATHER_VI=1.00
That needs be saved as a text file with the same exact name as the compressed shader file. For example, My shaders are named "BSL_v8.2.zip" and the text file is named "BSL_v8.2.zip.txt" (the bold is the actual name and the rest is the file extension that are hidden by default). BSL seems to be up to version 8.2.08 whereas I'm still using 8.2, so if you download the latest version, I'm not sure how much of my settings for 8.2 will carry over.
If you've never tried shaders, I'd recommend experimenting because what I like might not be what you like. For example, my underwater settings my be too restrictive in vision brightness or distance for some people.
Shaders need a lot of graphics hardware. By default Minecraft mostly wants a good CPU and not so much on graphics. So if it performs poorly, it's likely because the video chip might not be too performant (or my settings might also be too high, so you can try the lower presets and see if they help).
Be aware that if you play with v-sync and use shaders, you'll possibly run into an issue where if you can't maintain enough frames to match your refresh rate, you'll get frame rate drops to a fraction (often a third, half, or two thirds) of your refresh rate. You can enable triple buffering for OpenGL applications to work around this (this will increase VRAM use and slightly increase input delay). This would be done in the driver settings of whatever your video hardware is. I know both nVidia and AMD allow this because I've done it on both, but I'm not sure about Intel.
One clarification on "showing off RTG": some of the desirable features are from RTG, Geographicraft, and Underground Biomes working together. #1 example is the hill Princess Garnet mined. That there was a hill in a plains biome at all is Geo. The hill's shape and surface variability are RTG. The non-vanilla stone is UB.
Likewise some open woodland areas that show up in this modset result from Geo's subbiomes and increased biome border complexity, again mixed with RTG's trees.
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.
Mhm, and that's why I asked about what you felt were good complimentary mods before setting it up (as well as listing it in the first post). It seems a few of these were made in mind with one another, even if they can work alone. RTG certainly isn't the only thing at play here, but it's definitely the main one I'm interested in.
I tried the other two on their own before I had the current version of RTG playing well, and they didn't seem to do much on their own (but something I'm wondering is if either needs configured as I saw not in-game options to do so, but you make it sound like they are in effect here so it sounds like all is well with them). It seems like RTG is doing the majority of the terrain generation and decorator layer overhaul, which is where my real interest is, especially the latter. Those trees...
This first update will be mostly about exploring RTG's terrain and generation, and sharing some thoughts about it. I don't attempt to "progress" yet.
Picking up where the video ended is the start of the second day.
It's no secret that I love what Minecraft does since 1.18 as far as terrain generation goes, so this is comparatively smooth and flat. But it measures up to its namesake of being more realistic, and it's probably more fair to keep in mind this comes from the era of 1.7 to 1.17 terrain generation, which was... rough, so this was an improvement on what the norm of the time.
What I like least about vanilla Minecraft is its decorator layer, especially the trees. That's the big reason I'm interested in trying this to begin with. And I'm fawning over all of this. It might have been noticeable in the video but I stopped a few times to simply look at the trees.
I head back towards my formal spawn spot and get a picture looking just North of the hill, back towards the area I was when I passed my first night.
I now decide to explore the other direction the plains/clearing leads. I notice the forest here is thin (and the trees are tall enough to see through!). There's more plains beyond it, but I'm hit my first realization of a much smaller climate zone. I can observe a desert temple beyond this, which means there's desert to the North.
Just past the clearing is this exposed circular cave room (?) and a single exposed iron, my first. This appears to be a slightly lighter stone type.
Another first... well, sort of, is this zombie that emerges from the attached cave. I decide to let the sun do its thing here. My first spotted mob was actually a witch in the ravine at the very start of the world, which I found coincidental since I made that post right after Zeno had an encounter with one. My first sort-of encounter was with this zombie, but my first combat encounter will wait for another day.
I'm not sure what implications my changes to the cave settings made. I raised cave chance from 10 to 30, which was still on the lower end of the slider, and cave density from 7 to 10, putting it near the middle. I'm not sure if that made them vastly more common and larger, or if RTG defaults to very few caves and it only mildly increased them? Any input here? Surface openings seem rare so far, but... I'm comparing to what I'm used to with modern vanilla, where they are everywhere, and I've only been playing this world for a single day, so perhaps it's early to judge.
I gather the iron and it's unfortunately just one piece, but there's coal beneath it, which I do gather. I'm constantly checking the same cave for other mobs. I just jumped in without an immediate exit path, which I'd not have done if this was hardcore. I can afford to be a bit more careless, especially so early, I figure?
Further North is an adorably small forest.
It's here that I discovered these random farm and wheat spots aren't from the zero size villages, since I have village size at 2 and clearly villages spawn, yet these remain.
I notice a "large birch" tree nearby. I like this. I wouldn't have imagined this was necessary or would turn out good, because I like the unique ones better. But I like it.
From here I head back towards the village to get some more pictures.
First and foremost... flowers! There's a lot to say here.
There was an opportunity to say this earlier, but I waited until now to talk about the flowers all at once.
How I feel about the flower placement in general is complicated, but I need to explain how I already feel about it with vanilla for this to have context.
With RTG, it seems like very often, only a single flower is placed. I think numerous flowers would make more sense.
However, I'm not thrilled with vanilla's general flower placement either. I sort of like single types over multiple when it comes to small batches.
The above seem to be RTG's take on flower forests. I do like this better than the vanilla flower forests, but the big reason isn't because of the flowers themselves, but rather the forests. Something that always sat confusingly with me was why they are in forests. I never understood why Mojang went that route with them. Why are they not in fields instead? Fields could have used additional variety more than forests (especially when 1.7 released as the overworld was comprised so much of forest so forests needed reduced in amount), and especially in vanilla where forest canopies are so low to the ground, it doesn't work well. It works far better here as a result of the better trees and forests.
But I think having vast fields of singular flower types and grass would work, perhaps especially for RTG which leans into smaller biomes sizes (and the inclusion of sub biomes) in general. Go to about the 17 minute mark in the following video for an example of how a single flower field biome might work.
Again, with RTG doing smaller biomes, I imagine there's lots of room to do this without them overwhelming the world too much. Not all flowers would need this dedicated field. The dandelion and poppy (rose?) might not need it. Double tall flowers might be excessive. Tulips and some others, though, yes please.
The flower forests could (and should), of course, remain as-is too.
But in general, there's so much potential for flowers otherwise. The single flowers are too disappointing, and merely following Mojang's poor solution of spamming all types in a forest, even if it works ten times better due to RTG's forests, seems like a minimal solution.
It's less that there's anything wrong with things though, and more that I see so much more potential for how flowers could be done.
Moving on from flowers...
Here's the village. I touched upon this already but the mismatched stone just seems odd. I did disable it, but this village will remain as an original.
Here's more flowers after saying I was moving on from them, yes, but the overall thing I'm showing here was just the mix of various things going on, from the numerous forest types, the tall canopies, the flowers, and the forest not being as dense or deep in some spots (such as where I am). It being a "strip" and seeing through it is nice... but I wonder if RTG does this a bit too much due to the biome sizes being so tiny. But that might be a me thing, as my preference leans more towards larger in general.
There's a sand dune visible beyond in the direction of the desert too.
The novelty factor is doing some work on me, but I do find it a bit too smooth. But again, that's a bit of me thing. I like the general ruggedness and altitude variation modern vanilla does. I think comparing it to that all the time is unfair. The namesake is "realistic" and it nails that.
The plus side is even though I might prefer one thing over another, that doesn't mean I dislike the other one. There is ample flat space for building, for example.
Not much to say here; it's a sideways log! But it's new to me.
I can't remember why, but I headed back towards the hill near spawn, which explains these backtrack pictures. I then merely headed back through the plains North of spawn towards the same desert.
I don't mean to repeat this so often as though I'm criticizing it, so I apologize for mentioning it so much, but I'm surprised to see the desert end so soon in spots. There's a swamp to the West, more forest beyond the desert (the big thing attracting me is those trees!), and a river. The latter interrupts my attention. I love the idea of the foliage along the river banks, even if it doesn't happen everywhere. In the desert, this gives it an oasis feel.
Moving on to those trees that captivated me originally...
Oh my goodness! This is quickly becoming "it's going to be hard to go back to vanilla trees" and this is already giving me ideas. I won't share them yet though, as I have some ideas I may utilize them for later.
The unique trees to the left beyond the swamp catch my attention too. I'm not sure if they are the same as these or something different. I'm thinking the latter, but as they are along the fog edge I'm unsure. I haven't drawn closer to them as of yet to investigate them. Instead I head along the desert edge to the East (right).
This matches exactly what I said birch forests should be in vanilla. Well, I also think they should be nearly flooded with grass, but that aside, the trees almost match exactly what I want from a birch forest.
I shift East over the dune and find my first palm tree!
I think a dedicated beach biome (much deeper than normal beaches) with a chance of more of these would be lovely.
To the East is a plains which feels out of place to me, but again... I'm used to modern vanilla here. Beyond that is another... mountain (hill?) with a medium (?) forest to its South (right).
I head back towards the dune and the river runs through here. They feel a little bit too straight for my liking. I also definitely think wider on average is a plus. This is quite a bit smaller than most of what modern vanilla has going on (even if modern vanilla overdoes placement and has its own huge flaws).
But that hole in the sane dune catches my eye. That's a deep and wide dune at that point. Why can I see daylight through it? Soon it becomes apparent...
It's the "1.8+ era" occlusion culling at work. I'm not sure when this happening was improved upon, but I almost never see it anymore. When I started in 1.16, I want to say it was already reduced, so I'd want to guess 1.13 or 1.15 reduced this.
I look South back towards the village because the treeline attracts my eyes. I also head back there.
I'm thinking of possibly building here. The flat Green area, the tree line, the flowers, spots of forest being thin, canopies being high, and even a desert nearby. I'm in love! But it's merely one spot of a few that have already come to mind, so it's in competition with a few others.
I plan to explore more, and maybe start progressing (gathering early supplies, materials, upgrading gear, and building) in the next few sessions, but I might not get too heavily into that until finishing the Southern region in my other world. Which I'm drawing close to doing. So I'll be able to progress more here in the not too distant future. For now, I wanted to catch up on my initial exploring and share my initial impressions.
There's a slash in one the image markups that shouldn't be there, which turns the whole thing into plaintext.
So, a bunch of comments:
First, I have already put in the configs to widen and deepen the rivers. I plan to release them once I am done debugging to very strange bugs in mesa generation.
If the configs get changed in an existing world, it will create discontinuities across the exploration boundary when it's changed (the terrain will just jump or drop across that chunk boundary.) I don't know if you want to endure the changes, or start a new world with what you want, since you haven't really started yet.
You talk about biome changes, but there is a division of labor where. RTG doesn't place biomes anywhere except some minor adjustments to beach and river biomes to make them fit. RTG just puts biomes where the layout system tells it to. That can be vanilla, or Geographicraft, or BiomeTweaker scripts, or anything else that will place biomes in a RTG worldtype. (BoP, for example, only places its biomes in the BoP worldtype, but with a one-line change, it could place into RTG, and RTG would happily plop down biomes wherever BoP wanted it too.) I actually think some of the biome mods like Biomes You Go actually do that.
Since you're running Geo, Geo is doing the biome placement. Some of the things you talk about can be changed. Plains showing up in hot regions (as vanilla did at the time) can be stopped by changing
S:"Plains climate"=PLAINS
in the Geographicraft.cfg file
to:
S:"Plains climate"=MEDIUM
(medium is COOL and WARM)
Note: Geo keeps a separate config for each world (because otherwise my dozens of test worlds turned into disasters). The config in the general config is for new worlds. Once created, a world's config is in the worldspecificconfig folder in the worlds' save folder.
Geo can also make bigger climate zones (by setting B:"Half Zone Size"=false), roughly as large as 1.7 era vanilla, although Geo is smarter and manages to place more of them so they are not quite as hard to find.
The thin forest strips is another Geo doing; but it's not as common as you seem to experience. That shows up mostly with forest sub-biomes within plains (unique to Geo). Geo also places full-biome forests, and they can be quite large, although with default settings they'll have some clearings in them.
RTG generation is smoother than I'd like, too. You'll probably notice Extreme Hills is much more rumpled than the various XXX Hills. I was kind of thinking about moving over some of the techniques I developed for Extreme Hills, but I didn't do it before I started posting, and I don't want to change it now because changing that would also create terrain discontinuities. One of the headaches of terrain mods is that generally any change creates problems in ongoing world, so if you improve things and then somebody uses it on an existing world, it will damage the world.
There are not *that* many new tree types. There are 3 types each for Taiga, Birch, and Oak, plus two for Acacia. Basically "small, medium, and large". The three Taiga trees are not all that different. Birch and Oak smalls are the same structure (the Cypress-y trees). So that leaves the four; large and small, Birch and Oak, which are pretty different. So, really, 6 types. That said, they can vary a lot in size and that affects their overall shapes, plus most are fractal, so there are differences in detail.
In terms of flowers: I haven't been paying attention to the flower code. Back in the day RTG just used vanilla placement. I'm not sure how it's working now. Offhand, generally single flowers doesn't seem right; but maybe they're placed late and get crowded out by other things. I've thought about applying forest-style noise techniques to flowers (so abundance and type would vary from place to place). But, I haven't done anything about it.
Caves are another thing where I haven't looked at the relevant code for ages. I have no idea how they compare to vanilla. I do remember some discussions about caves messing up the terrain, so maybe it is low?
Villages are a headache with UB (this is not an RTG issue, other than UB is really good for mountains) because cobble gets converted, I think even with that setting off. I've thought about hacking into the code and changing the stones used, and I did that long ago in 1.7, but villages are much more complex code-wise in 1.12 even and I'm reluctant to shoulder that.
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.
Oh my goodness, I love you! It works! Sorry if that's inappropriate but I'm so happy now.
I'm still confused why it happened to begin with. Shouldn't the one tag have merely stopped just that one image from showing, not the whole post worth? Oh well, some things are best not questioned I guess? That soothes a lot of future concern at least.
Anyway, moving on...
My apologies if I get things mixed up a lot. I'll have to try and remember that there's a lot more at work here than just RTG. I guess I have it in my mind that its doing most of what I see, since things seemed pretty vanilla with everything else present besides RTG.
I'm not sure how I feel about changing things that will lead to terrain generation changes. Usually that's a no-no for me, but since this is more of a "for the experience" world, I may be less opposed to that. I'm undecided for now. I definitely don't want to restart it after making a thread for it though.
I probably would have changed the configuration to get larger climate zones had I known about it, but again, for an "experience" world, I'll leave it be. If anything I think I'd rather try it close to default. Maybe I'll retire this world after experiencing it enough, and then doing more of a committed world with some changes after it (either in a new thread or simply following here, either way). I'm happy to find out such a change is already possible and easy though. I think you know that even if I find 1.7 and 1.18's climate zones too big for most, I also find 1.6s too small for myself, and this feels similar. But it makes for a good way to get accustomed with what's going on. I wouldn't want to explore the amounts I have in my hardcore world to see everything here, for example.
If the thin forest strips aren't common, that's great news. For reference, I love that it's a thing. It creates wonderful environments that I've never seen vanilla do. I was just worried they might be super common.
There might be "only" a few of each tree type, but it's still more quantity and quality than what vanilla has going on. I'm not going to stop being excited about them any time soon.
The single flowers, thus far anyway, do seem pretty common and you can see a number of spots in some of my pictures showing this (but yes I'm currently only working with a sample size of one in worlds count). Something else I've noticed is tall grass seems... almost nonexistent? Or it's limited to certain biomes/locales that I have yet to find.
"Should have". Oh, yes, a botched markup should only affect that one image. Or, at least, not the ones before it. But, that's not how it works. Miss one tag, and the whole post is plaintext, and you have to go through carefully looking for that one markup missing a slash or typed "ing" instead of "img".
I can't believe you've *never* botched a markup, thus learning what goes wrong. I used to botch a markup on every third post or so, to the point that I now have a "format" document with lots of markup tags that I paste and write into.
You aren't "mixing anything up". You didn't write these mods; I don't expect you to have read the documentation in detail. I just wanted to explain exactly how the things you're commenting on are happening - especially since some of them can be changed. Well, that and get a bit of education in the cybersphere. It's a very common expectation that RTG is placing/choosing biomes. Just today, I fielded a comment on a Discord board where somebody was wondering why he didn't see any BoP biomes in his RTG world (answer: BoP doesn't place it's biomes in anything but it's custom world, and he hadn't installed anything that could.)
You find these climate zones similar to 1.6 because - they are. Roughly, they are the same size as the 1.6-era Ice Plains. 1.7 zones are actually not *that* much bigger - twice the length and 4 times the area. A lot of the problem with them was that Hot and Cold were quite rare inland, and there's a lot of "inland" with 1.7 generation. Geo places them more often, partly because it has a smarter climate smoothing algorithm, and partly because it has more ocean with default settings.
Incidentally, Geographicraft can make most changes to biome placement without any chunk-wall-ish effects, smoothly inserting them into the world, starting generally about 1000 blocks beyond any yet explored terrain. (I was SO proud when I finally pulled that off!) This includes pulling Plains out of hot zones. There are a few config changes it *can't* do that for, so check with me before actually doing changes.
To be precise: in Plains areas (where the "real" biome is plains) thin forests are common (sub-biome forests that get stretched around, or a complicated boundary with a Forest). In Forest areas, they are basically the same as vanilla forests in extent, except that they do have clearings and rocky hills scattered about. Personally I love the thin and stretched forests; I love open woodland, and the shape of the trees is more visible.
I'll have to look at tall grass. Another thing I just haven't thought about. I think it's common in Savanna.
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.
That's just the thing; I absolutely have messed up tags before. A lot! But I don't recall all images failing to work. I think I've seen a missed URL tag result in it being automatically placed at the end of the post so the rest of the post's text becomes a link, but other than that, I've not run into such issues.
I also know Photobucket does some of its own things and i am hosting this world's images there, so I was thinking maybe there was something between it and the forums here that weren't playing together well. As mentioned, I remember when the forum software here changed, and the rich editor in particular became near impossible to use for me in some scenarios (such as posts or pages with a lot of pictures). So I typically switch to the raw text editor all the time (I wish I could have it default to that...). So when I saw the freezing and memory leak, I thought maybe the forums were why.
If you want a clue as to how often I mess up, look at my posts for entries to my worlds. I usually end up editing all of them because believe me, I mistype words or phrase things awkwardly a lot and then I go back and correct it. It bothers me (and sometimes makes what i typed not convey what i wanted too well). Somehow, in all this time, I've never seen this much of a mess result from it before.
And yes, by all means, explain things. I just wanted to clarify that if I ever phrase something as "RTG's doing", I'm probably improperly labeling it that way and instead referring "the doing of any of the mods I'm using" because I'm going straight from vanilla to a (small) collective of mods, and RTG is the prime reason I'm doing it so my mind probably mentally jumps to "this is all RTG", but I'll try and be better about consciously putting it that way.
The tall grass was readily noticeable as not showing up... well, anywhere. I'm not saying it should be like vanilla here, mind you. I just wanted to mention it as a pretty obvious change I noticed. Vanilla mixes it everywhere (perhaps too much) and I'm not seeing it anywhere here yet.
Tall grass is indeed absent from all RTG decoration apart from Savanna and its variants. I thought the vanilla decorators ran and put it in; but I guess that's been turned off (probably by me in the process of blocking vanilla trees). Likely something similar happened with flowers. These are fixable problems; but I'm planning to put out a release this weekend (which will probably be approved sometime next week; the initial release took 3 days for CurseForge to approve it), and I'm not going to delay this release for it.
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.
By all means, as I mentioned before, don't interrupt your usual doings to make sudden last minute changes based on things I say or think. I neither expect that nor want you to push your schedule to fit it in.
I think the grass is sort of fine anyway. Sure, there are some awkward spots with almost none at all, and this is what made me think villages were failing to spawn in these spots, but it's not like it's so bad it needs attention
The flowers though, by contrast, I'd love to see something happen there eventfully. I think they'd be better off with a new approach to how they are done as opposed to merely making more spawn in some spots anyway, but that's just an opinion of mine and maybe you don't want to go that far with it. That's fine. If you want to leave them as-is and just "fix" the flowers, that would still be an improvement. If you want examples of how common these single flower happenings are for me, I'm obviously still early in my world and I already have multiple pictures above that just show a single flower in many places.