Per Fabrica Ad Astra aims to enhance the technical complexity and realism of Minecraft to enable more sophisticated modeling of the modern industrial economy, including mineral extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. Eventually, gameplay will extend to worlds beyond Earth. Its broader aim is to help realize the potential of Minecraft in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education. Since reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction, many of the ideas are directly inspired by nature and actual science. Of course, gameplay takes precedence over realism, because if no one plays, no one learns. Community involvement is a prerequisite of this becoming a reality: contributions are welcome to this wiki, as well as to the development of the mod itself.
Geologica adds realistic and interesting geology to Minecraft, with the goal of enhancing the mining experience. It defines new types of rocks and minerals and relies on the Custom Ore Generator mod to place them in the world in a way that is totally configurable. Vanilla stone is completely replaced by the new types of rocks. Mineral deposits, including metal ores and industrial minerals, spawn in psuedo-realistic veins and clouds, accoding to the type of rock and, often, the biome. Since Geologica is implemented on top of CustomOreGen, it is possible to override every aspect of its generation using the standard COG mechanisms (see its documentation).
Features
Geologica adds:
24 types of rock, each with corresponding stone, cobble, brick, stone/cobble/brick slab and cobble/brick wall blocks. Limestone, granite and marble also have cobble/brick stair blocks. Cobble blocks may be smelted to stone. Existing stone/cobble/brick recipes are automatically ore-dictified to support the new rock types.
35 types of metal ore, found in various types of deposits, in stone, sand or clay form.
Fix torch placement and monster spawning on stone.
Fix crash when rendering slabs.
0.2.19
Fix the massive chunk generation lag.
Fix alpha blending of cobble, bricks and rubble overlays. This change will confuse Carpenter's Blocks again; however, I have a patch for CB that should be in its next release.
Tweak some overlays to blend in better.
Fix glauconite sand ore name and processing.
0.2.18
Fix rendering issue with leaves.
0.2.17
Rewrite rendering. Overlays should no longer overlap e.g. potion effects, except for wall blocks (would disturb mob pathfinding -- that's Minecraft for you). Should play a bit nicer with carpenter's blocks.
Redo overlays. Old textures are back but as overlays, many of which have been modified heavily but hopefully for the better. Every ore has a distinct overlay now. Vanilla ores use vanilla-style overlay.
Generate our own version of sandstone, which is has behavior consistent to that of the other rocks and is intentionally distinct from vanilla sandstone (potentially for balance, and because vanilla is more of a decorative block).
Add pyrite ore, which is a minor component of various sulfide ore deposits.
Add realgar, an ore of arsenic found in granite veins and new volcanic fumaroles, which are found in the Extreme Hills and BoP Hot Springs and also consist of gypsum and rock salt.
Give polluted soil hardness and step sound
Fix the incompatibility with recent Buildcraft.
0.2.16
Improve? the appearance the medium ore overlay -- contributions are welcome here.
Fix rendering of falling blocks
Fix flicker of block items in world
0.2.15
Use a custom item renderer instead of block renderer to avoid breaking path finding around wall blocks (and probably other things).
0.2.13
Fix ore/rock block dropping
0.2.13
Fixed accidental usage of scale Arrays class
0.2.12
Overhaul rendering. Ores are rendered as overlays, where the overlay pattern depends on the strength and material type. Colors distinguish ore types. Cobble, brick and rubble are also rendered as overlays. The base stone texture is fixed for some ores, for others it is selected based on nearby stone.
Many textures have been reworked to "blend in" more.
Add vanilla ore equivalents that use the overlay system and blend into the surroundings. By default, they drop items as in vanilla, but this can be disabled.
Conglomerate can drop copper nuggets, garnet sand can drop gold, silver and electrum nuggets (requires a mod to be installed that adds these, except for gold of course).
Glauconite is now a sand instead of a rock.
Use "stoneBricks" instead of "stoneBrick" as ore dictionary term for stone bricks.
0.2.11
Fluid source blocks are now flammable, so infinite fires should no longer consume CPU
Kyanite now generates in quartzite and quartz veins, not so much in pegmatites
Many ore distributions now replace vanilla stone, so that they generate even when Geologica rocks are disabled
Config cleanup
0.2.10
General nerf (1/2) of ore densities in clouds
Balance/compatibility with COG Gregtech config
Graphite clouds are more common and can contain diamonds
Add hint veins for apatite and gypsum
Drop magnesite, beryl, and scheelite from pegmatite veins (too crowded)
Add quartz (aplite) veins to granite
Add scheelite veins to skarn deposits
Cassiterite veins now contain some gold and scheelite
Small chance of lapis in skarn deposits
Sedimentary generation disabled in deep oceans (not enough space)
Add config options for disabling manganese, chromium and titanium ore generation
Carbonatites are now localized to mesas and shield volcanos; the composition of carbonatite veins has changed
Add specific rock strata to mesa biomes
Squid (water mobs) should now longer spawn in industrial fluids (like oil)
Flammable liquids can be ignited by nearby lava
Farmland near industrial liquid will convert to "polluted soil"
0.2.9: Fix respiration in water, other liquids
0.2.8: Biome dictionary fixes (laterite in jungles, basalt in oceans, etc)
0.2.7: Fix client-side crash related to flammability.
0.2.6: Fix for dedicated server crash.
0.2.4:
Fix dedicated server support
Model respiration in fluids: it is now possible to drown in liquids, and asphyxiate or suffer other ill effects in gases
Burning entities can ignite flammable fluids
0.2.2:
Fix crasher bug related to setting private fields by name, which breaks after obfuscation.
Override fog rendering so that the fog assumes the color of a custom fluid when the player is submerged in it.
Chemica is actually a mod now (in same jar as Geologica)
0.2.0:
Add petroleum resources: crude oil (light, medium, heavy, extra-heavy), natural gas and oil shale. As usual, other mods are expected to add uses, but the fluids will burn if near fire, lava or if they pass into a torch or fire block. Natural gas required a new gaseous fluid behavior that I think is consistent with Minecraft; feedback welcome.
0.1.8:
Fix compatibility with (and require) CustomOreGen 1.1.7
Add configurable hardness and resistance multipliers
0.1.6:
Fix block resistance (now set to 5 * hardness, except rubble/sand is zero)
Hardness is now configurable
0.1.5:
Ores should be compatible with Gregtech (fixed its mod ID)
When a new config is generated and Gregtech is installed, more appropriate defaults for the initial tool damages are selected, as recommended by the Gregtech community.
0.1.3: Disabled dependency checking, because it causes a crash in certain situations. Forge bug?
0.1.1: Fixed ore dictionary, ore drops and an annoying NEI issue.
0.1.0: Ported to 1.7.2. Many changes behind the scenes to chemica.
0.0.12:
Add the requested Geologica (cobble)stone => vanilla (cobble)stone recipes.
Add config options for strength-specific harvest levels and stone pickaxe damage.
Minor changes to world generation
0.0.11: Fix stone slab crash (and lighting).
0.0.10: When Gregtech is installed, register all minerals and ores under their proper names, rather than their simple names; i.e., cassiterite is oreCassiterite, instead of oreTin.
0.0.9: Initial wide release
Screenshots:
(OUT OF DATE, textures are much improved now, or not)
The Biomes O Plenty alps, showing the transition from limestone, to sandstone, to gneiss peaks.
Agreed that the textures could use some work. First, they could be drawn better. Second, the ore could be rendered on top of the stone texture. Iguanaman might implement the rendering as part of a more general solution, but I'm going to need some help in the art department.
Awesome! Been looking forward to an official release. Will test it out now.
May I recommend http://www.minecraft...land-generator/ with this mod? Geologica along with CustomOreGen can be a real resource drain when combined with lots of ore-adding and generation mods. Let your new worlds generate overnight so you can explore them a little easier.
EDIT: It would be cool if you could actually 'blend' two subterranean 'biomes' in the same sort of way grass color blends on above ground biomes. Even if you don't actually layer the two textures and blend them, but instead just tried to match the colors along the edges, that'd help a lot.
Nice. I'm looking forward to seeing how processing some of these more realistic material types goes.
Are you going to be adding multiple kinds of deposits of the same metal in their different forms?
I'd imagine that if you're only running Geologica + vanilla, it'd be simple, but what about the specific processing options that tech mods like Rotarycraft, Gregtech, and Thermal Expansion offer?
Nice. I'm looking forward to seeing how processing some of these more realistic material types goes.
Are you going to be adding multiple kinds of deposits of the same metal in their different forms?
That already exists for many metals, e.g., iron has a bunch of different deposits (banded iron formations, iron sands, iron-rich laterite clays, magnetite veins, ...). I consider the world generation to be more or less complete at this point, but I'm definitely open to specific suggestions. Main concerns are twofold: balance and performance.
I'd imagine that if you're only running Geologica + vanilla, it'd be simple, but what about the specific processing options that tech mods like Rotarycraft, Gregtech, and Thermal Expansion offer?
The plan is to integrate with the various tech mods. Gregtech is the first target, and I'm already working with Greg on it. TE should be more straight-forward. Still need to get familiar with Rotarycraft.
I love it, but I like Terrain Control too... Compatibility would be nice.
Great goal and idea though. Looking forward to seeing how this progresses.
It should work (i.e., generate) with Terrain Control, but you won't be able to customize anything. However, since Geologica is implemented on top of CustomOreGen, you can override its configuration using the standard COG mechanisms. That allows total customization. Note that a lot of customization is possible from the CustomOreGen GUI during world creation.
Suggestion would be to code the ores to be just the metal overlay, and what ever type of stone they touch becomes the background colour.
IMO, the stone types could use some smoothing (perhaps several ore textures, and a randomiser so they don't all look the same?), and the ores look a bit meh. If you want, I will happily do them because the mod itself looks pretty cool.
Better textures would be awesome. And yes, the overlay idea is a good one and it's what Iguanaman was developing at one point. Please come up with the overlays and new base textures and I'll implement the rendering. It'll be a little tricky, because ideally it will choose a base texture corresponding to a rock that hosts the ore, rather than one that just happens to be next to it. A simple randomization scheme might just be to rotate the overlay by a random amount. Better ideas?
Running this mod, should one disable all other oregen?
This would be optimal in terms of performance. It will remove existing ores via the ore dictionary, but that's CPU intensive and I'm going to add options to disable that. It also won't catch them all.
It'll be a little tricky, because ideally it will choose a base texture corresponding to a rock that hosts the ore, rather than one that just happens to be next to it.
Perhaps maintain a list of possible host rocks for each ore, and check for one of those to be adjacent/nearby. If none is found, select one randomly or select one that could reasonably occur where the ore is located. Clusters should presumably share a host.
I'd imagine you'd want to do this when the ore block is placed by worldgen, so you don't have to constantly calculate updates. Not sure what to do about a player picking up the ore and placing it elsewhere, though; maybe just revert to a default so they stack nicely and call it good enough.
Perhaps maintain a list of possible host rocks for each ore, and check for one of those to be adjacent/nearby. If none is found, select one randomly or select one that could reasonably occur where the ore is located. Clusters should presumably share a host.
I'd imagine you'd want to do this when the ore block is placed by worldgen, so you don't have to constantly calculate updates. Not sure what to do about a player picking up the ore and placing it elsewhere, though; maybe just revert to a default so they stack nicely and call it good enough.
This is pretty much exactly what I had in mind. A list of possible hosts, with one default (for drawing the item and when arbitrarily placing it in the world). For further rendering discussions, please turn to this github issue.
Btw, SirusKing, I'm going to come up with a list of colors for every ore/mineral at Greg's request. I'll send them to you, so that we can keep things visually consistent.
I've figured out how to make the multi-pass rendering work, so as soon as you can get me new textures, things will look a lot prettier I really appreciate this. Thanks!
I like the concept, but it would be great if you could make the textures blend together when their together, they don't seem to mix very well at the moment.
I've been looking for a long time for a mod like this. Terra Firma had lovely geology, but did not play nice with anything else. There's another mod, but it generated different rock types per chunk, which ended up looking not so good. This one is beautifully layered, I love how it plays nice with gregtech.
Suggestions: I'd like to see the natural block have a more rough look, like you'd see in nature, and have a polished block look cleaner and more colorful.
I'd also like to see silver/gold/platinum/diamond/ruby/emerald/saphire in the same kind of textures as the other ores, maybe sands containing gem nuggets in river sand.
Suggestions: I'd like to see the natural block have a more rough look, like you'd see in nature, and have a polished block look cleaner and more colorful.
I'd also like to see silver/gold/platinum/diamond/ruby/emerald/saphire in the same kind of textures as the other ores, maybe sands containing gem nuggets in river sand.
We're currently working on rendering an ore overlay on top of the texture of nearby stone. This brings up the need to do the same at least for vanilla ores like redstone, coal, diamonds, etc. There is a plan to have some sands yield nuggets.
Hey is there anyway you could push a quick update/ patch for me? I'm using a custom modpack and TE copper and Tin are mine-able with stone picks, do you think you could change cassetirite and chalcopyrite to those levels too? Thank You
EDIT: If this isn't what you want to do is there anyway you could make me a config that re-enables TE tin and copper because I don't know how to do that.
Per Fabrica Ad Astra aims to enhance the technical complexity and realism of Minecraft to enable more sophisticated modeling of the modern industrial economy, including mineral extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. Eventually, gameplay will extend to worlds beyond Earth. Its broader aim is to help realize the potential of Minecraft in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education. Since reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction, many of the ideas are directly inspired by nature and actual science. Of course, gameplay takes precedence over realism, because if no one plays, no one learns. Community involvement is a prerequisite of this becoming a reality: contributions are welcome to this wiki, as well as to the development of the mod itself.
For more details: wiki
Geologica adds realistic and interesting geology to Minecraft, with the goal of enhancing the mining experience. It defines new types of rocks and minerals and relies on the Custom Ore Generator mod to place them in the world in a way that is totally configurable. Vanilla stone is completely replaced by the new types of rocks. Mineral deposits, including metal ores and industrial minerals, spawn in psuedo-realistic veins and clouds, accoding to the type of rock and, often, the biome. Since Geologica is implemented on top of CustomOreGen, it is possible to override every aspect of its generation using the standard COG mechanisms (see its documentation).
Features
Downloads
Dependency: CustomOreGen
1.7.10: PFAA-0.2.29 (Requires CustomOreGen 1.2.13)
Changelog
0.2.9: Fix respiration in water, other liquids
0.2.8: Biome dictionary fixes (laterite in jungles, basalt in oceans, etc)
0.2.7: Fix client-side crash related to flammability.
0.2.6: Fix for dedicated server crash.
0.2.4:
0.1.8:
0.1.1: Fixed ore dictionary, ore drops and an annoying NEI issue.
0.1.0: Ported to 1.7.2. Many changes behind the scenes to chemica.
0.0.12:
0.0.10: When Gregtech is installed, register all minerals and ores under their proper names, rather than their simple names; i.e., cassiterite is oreCassiterite, instead of oreTin.
0.0.9: Initial wide release
Screenshots:
(OUT OF DATE, textures are much improved now, or not)
The Biomes O Plenty alps, showing the transition from limestone, to sandstone, to gneiss peaks.
Typical continental sedimentary strata: limestone, claystone, mudstone, conglomerate.
Large beds of coal, suitable for pit mining.
Chalcopyrite (and gold) veins, one of the types of vein deposits.
Layered evaporite deposits, consisting of salt ores like rock salt and gypsum.
Clay limonite (iron ore) deposits in tropical biomes and swamps.
Placer deposits of mineral-rich sands on river banks and beaches.
Banded iron ore being extracted from a hillside.
A layered igneous intrusion, diorite into gabbro, with molybdenite veins.
An ore-rich pegmatite vein intersecting a mineshaft.
Development
Community participation strongly encouraged. Suggestions always welcome. For code access and contributions, see the github repository.
License
Released under the Artistic 2.0 license. In a nutshell, do what you want, as long as you give credit where credit is due.
EDIT: Try to make the textures blend in more.
Agreed that the textures could use some work. First, they could be drawn better. Second, the ore could be rendered on top of the stone texture. Iguanaman might implement the rendering as part of a more general solution, but I'm going to need some help in the art department.
May I recommend http://www.minecraft...land-generator/ with this mod? Geologica along with CustomOreGen can be a real resource drain when combined with lots of ore-adding and generation mods. Let your new worlds generate overnight so you can explore them a little easier.
EDIT: It would be cool if you could actually 'blend' two subterranean 'biomes' in the same sort of way grass color blends on above ground biomes. Even if you don't actually layer the two textures and blend them, but instead just tried to match the colors along the edges, that'd help a lot.
Are you going to be adding multiple kinds of deposits of the same metal in their different forms?
I'd imagine that if you're only running Geologica + vanilla, it'd be simple, but what about the specific processing options that tech mods like Rotarycraft, Gregtech, and Thermal Expansion offer?
That already exists for many metals, e.g., iron has a bunch of different deposits (banded iron formations, iron sands, iron-rich laterite clays, magnetite veins, ...). I consider the world generation to be more or less complete at this point, but I'm definitely open to specific suggestions. Main concerns are twofold: balance and performance.
The plan is to integrate with the various tech mods. Gregtech is the first target, and I'm already working with Greg on it. TE should be more straight-forward. Still need to get familiar with Rotarycraft.
Great goal and idea though. Looking forward to seeing how this progresses.
It should work (i.e., generate) with Terrain Control, but you won't be able to customize anything. However, since Geologica is implemented on top of CustomOreGen, you can override its configuration using the standard COG mechanisms. That allows total customization. Note that a lot of customization is possible from the CustomOreGen GUI during world creation.
Better textures would be awesome. And yes, the overlay idea is a good one and it's what Iguanaman was developing at one point. Please come up with the overlays and new base textures and I'll implement the rendering. It'll be a little tricky, because ideally it will choose a base texture corresponding to a rock that hosts the ore, rather than one that just happens to be next to it. A simple randomization scheme might just be to rotate the overlay by a random amount. Better ideas?
This would be optimal in terms of performance. It will remove existing ores via the ore dictionary, but that's CPU intensive and I'm going to add options to disable that. It also won't catch them all.
Perhaps maintain a list of possible host rocks for each ore, and check for one of those to be adjacent/nearby. If none is found, select one randomly or select one that could reasonably occur where the ore is located. Clusters should presumably share a host.
I'd imagine you'd want to do this when the ore block is placed by worldgen, so you don't have to constantly calculate updates. Not sure what to do about a player picking up the ore and placing it elsewhere, though; maybe just revert to a default so they stack nicely and call it good enough.
IF you'd like help with specific information on rocks and such, don't hesitate to shoot me a PM either here or over on the IC2 forums.
This is pretty much exactly what I had in mind. A list of possible hosts, with one default (for drawing the item and when arbitrarily placing it in the world). For further rendering discussions, please turn to this github issue.
Btw, SirusKing, I'm going to come up with a list of colors for every ore/mineral at Greg's request. I'll send them to you, so that we can keep things visually consistent.
EDIT: removed chisel and got this: http://pastebin.com/L8FXrBkk
Greg added the colors, so they should be visible in the game; and I'll stick them here in RGB:
| Ore | color |
|--------------------+-------------|
| BORAX | 255,255,255 |
| MOLYBDENITE | 25,25,25 |
| PYROLUSITE | 150,150,170 |
| ROCK_SALT | 240,200,200 |
| STIBNITE | 70,70,70 |
| BARITE | 230,235,255 |
| BASTNASITE | 200,110,45 |
| GARNIERITE | 50,200,70 |
| LEPIDOLITE | 240,50,140 |
| MAGNESITE | 250,250,180 |
| PENTLANDITE | 165,150,5 |
| SCHEELITE | 200,140,20 |
| WOLFRAMITE | 55,50,35 |
| BANDED_IRON | 145,90,90 |
| BERYL | 30,200,200 |
| CHROMITE | 35,20,15 |
| ILMENITE | 70,55,50 |
| MAGNETITE | 30,30,30 |
| POLLUCITE | 240,210,210 |
| SPODUMENE | 190,170,170 |
| TANTALITE | 145,80,40 |
| URANINITE | 35,35,35 |
| VANADIUM_MAGNETITE | 35,35,60 |
| CHRYSOTILE | 110,140,110 |
| DIATOMITE | 225,225,225 |
| GLAUCONITE | 130,180,60 |
| GRAPHITE | 45,45,45 |
| GYPSUM | 230,230,250 |
| MIRABILITE | 240,250,210 |
| MICA | 195,195,205 |
| SOAPSTONE | 95,145,95 |
| TRONA | 135,135,95 |
| ALUNITE | 225,180,65 |
| CELESTINE | 200,205,240 |
| DOLOMITE | 225,205,205 |
| MALACHITE | 5,95,5 |
| WOLLASTONITE | 240,240,240 |
| ZEOLITE | 240,230,230 |
| KYANITE | 110,110,250 |
| PERLITE | 30,20,30 |
| PUMICE | 230,185,185 |
| Vermiculite | 200,180,15 |
| Bentonite | 245,215,210 |
| Fuller's Earth | 160,160,120 |
| Kaolinite | 245,235,235 |
| Talc | 90,180,90 |
I've figured out how to make the multi-pass rendering work, so as soon as you can get me new textures, things will look a lot prettier I really appreciate this. Thanks!
Suggestions: I'd like to see the natural block have a more rough look, like you'd see in nature, and have a polished block look cleaner and more colorful.
I'd also like to see silver/gold/platinum/diamond/ruby/emerald/saphire in the same kind of textures as the other ores, maybe sands containing gem nuggets in river sand.
We're currently working on rendering an ore overlay on top of the texture of nearby stone. This brings up the need to do the same at least for vanilla ores like redstone, coal, diamonds, etc. There is a plan to have some sands yield nuggets.
EDIT: If this isn't what you want to do is there anyway you could make me a config that re-enables TE tin and copper because I don't know how to do that.