From Beta 1.8 to 1.17, biomes were the keystone of Minecraft generation. The biome determined the terrain, the decorations (mostly plants), and the coloration. In 1.18, Mojang drastically overhauled Minecraft generation and terrain is no longer set by the biome; rather, the terrain noise parameters are used to determine the biome for an area, which is then used to generate the decorations and the coloration. I think this is a mistake; with the noise parameters there's no need for biomes to determine decorations or coloration and I think Minecraft world would be far more interesting and varied if the decorations and coloration were generated straight from the terrain noise parameters, with no need to define biomes.
I've recently been working on a long-considered project to increase variability of pre-1.17 biomes. A very common complaint at the time was that a given biome was always the same, and once you've seen one forest, you've seen them all. This is pretty much true; apart from a few biomes with wild terrain like Extreme Hills, it was really hard to tell one Forest from another; with the only distinction being what biomes it was next to.
As a big explorer, this always bugged me, and a lot of other players too. You get to "another forest", "another desert", and "another plains" in a big hurry playing Minecraft. People explored looking for rare biomes and sub-biomes like Flower Forest and Sunflower Plains, with the generic biomes just the chaff you had to sift through to find something interesting. Over time, Mojang has tried to improve on this by adding more biomes like Birch Forest (basically Forest with a different tree) and that has helped some, but then you get to "another Birch Forest" too.
But, I've always thought, it doesn't *have* to be that way! You can use Perlin-style noises to generate parameters like temperature, humidity, and soil richness; and use *those* to influence the decorations in a biome. So generate more spruce when it's cold, sparser trees when it's dry, and taller trees when the soil is rich.
So after dreaming about this for years, I finally did it in the RTG mod, where I'm currently the active designer. And it works! I can get small trees (well, by RTG standards):
Big trees:
And giant trees:
All from only one biome! Plus the tree mix changes too: sometimes all Oak like in the small trees; sometimes lots of Spruce like in the giant trees, and sometimes lots of Birch:
The density changes too; it doesn't show up well in screenshots, but you feel it on the ground.
I made the parameters change slowly with distance, so a typical "biome area" will be fairly consistent. And: that does it! Now every Forest *isn't* the same; sometimes it's small dense stands with just Oak; sometimes larger trees mixing in Birch; and sometimes scattered mixed giants of Oak and Spruce. All from just some cleverness in the decoration code.
Theoretically, I could go farther; make the Forest range from all-Birch to all-Oak to all-Spruce, and now I can do Birch Woods, Forest, *and* Taiga, all with just *one* biome. Plus, lots, lots, lots more variations of sizes and mixtures and densities you'd never see with the Minecraft biome system. But in the pre-1.18 system, it's not so practical; biomes are already labeled "Birch Forest" or whatever by the biome system, and there's no noise available to duplicate that. If I generate my own noises, they won't generally put Birches into what the biome system independently labeled "Birch".
But - post 1.18, Minecraft *does* have underlying noises. And *those* could tell the game where to put Birches or Oaks or Spruces, and how densely, and how big, without any need for biomes. And then Minecraft could have much more varied flora, with hundreds of different combinations not possible in the current biome shoehorn. Plus variation could be much more natural - with oak forest gradating to birch, or forests petering out into plains.
Likewise, coloration could be based on the temperature/humidity values directly, smoothly and naturally varying from place to place, with no need for biomes (and I wouldn't miss those abrupt transitions, at all).
Mojang made a bold move taking terrain out of the control of biomes, and it's generally been a big boost to the naturalism, interest, and variability of Minecraft terrain. They need to finish the job and take decorations and colors out of the control of biomes too. I'd be thrilled to see the result.
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Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
The issue is that Minecraft has this weird idea about forcing the player to explore different biomes and making some items biome exclusive - not only is this not fun, but it's fake difficulty. Minecraft would substantially improve from needing minimal travel to do anything. It should be about planning, not walking aimlessly.
What implications would this have on the game? So many things seem tied to biomes.
It sounds less like you think 1.18+ made a mistake here, and more that you think it took half a step in the right direction, but didn't take the whole step. After all, it stepped away from the problems with terrain being tied to biome that the generation from beta 1.8 to release 1.16 (and 1.17) had, so while it's not perfect, it's an improvement (albeit it with its own other flaws).
Regardless of which way it goes, I'd sort of like to see the forests become larger in scale. Those little, regular oak (and birch) trees? They have to go! I know, I know, they're iconic and it would feel like taking something away which feels bad, but really it's changing something that increasingly feels like a poor fit in modern Minecraft. Forests shouldn't be tree canopies starting at human reach and total height being about twice as tall as a human.
Likewise, the spruce tress feel like double size Christmas trees as best.
Not all forests need to be as massive as Mega Taiga (or old growth Taiga, as they are now known), but the "regular" forests (oak, birch, and spruce) really feel like they need to be 2 to 4 times larger in height and tree scale.
And the pictures of your trees there are actually about well in line for what I feel the normal forests should be like. It's one of my lasting and largest qualms with modern Minecraft. The forests, and really the trees that make them up, need redone and to be larger. No more ground level bushes!
I'd also like to see flat and very "deep" beaches, and palm trees. You do sometimes get deeper beaches since 1.18 but they seem a bit small still and awkward and not really long (along the shore), flat, and deep. We're missing that beach-like location and unless you go with a custom map that has them, we have no chances to make large beachside buildings/villages.
I've long said 1.18 feels a bit like an unofficial "the update that changed the world II" or at least half of such a thing. Such an update as the one you're suggesting could therefore be called "caves and cliffs part IV", and I mean that in a good way, and not to insinuate the recent updates are lacking and are only giving us what 1.18 should have already had. It feels like 1.18 laid a lot of groundwork and there's now a lot of potential to build upon that.
With 1.18 introducing the terrain blending, I'm hoping they'll take opportunities to change stuff like this more often than once in a Blue moon, because now changes can seamlessly blend in with existing worlds more.
As I said, the implication is a lot more variety in areas classed as a "biome" in current Minecraft. Right now, for example, all Plains have the same decoration - same flower frequency, same tree frequency, same coloration. Everywhere. With a noise-based system different areas would have different characters. Areas near woodlands would have more trees and shrubs, perhaps grading into open woodland. In areas near Savanna, the scattered Oaks would get replaced by Savanna. Some hillsides would have more flowers going up as it approached Meadow conditions, while others might have spruce shrubs as they approached Windswept conditions. Special decoration areas like Sunflower Plains would no longer be necessarily restricted to their host biomes - for example, you could easily have a "Flower Plains" akin to "Flower Forest". And the color would change from area to area, reflecting the climate conditions.
Transitions would be a lot more naturalist and extended. Most Minecraft players don't realize how awesome a good transition can look. I remember when I got the interbiome terrain transition working in RTG how transition areas immediate became some of my favorites - it's just so cool to see one thing shifting into another.
I do think they made a mistake, by not continuing on with the "same system everywhere" approach. One thing I find a little amusing is I *know* they spent a lot of time and tears trying to figure out how to shoehorn the 5-dimensional noise system into biome boxes (it is a *hard* problem), and it was all totally unnecessary.
Changing *decorations* to noise basis would not cause any big problems with existing worlds. It's not like terrain shifts. Minecraft players are *totally* used to seeing drastic decoration changes from chunk to chunk. If you saw a Plains area shift from current stark savanna to open woodland, you wouldn't go "eww" like you do with chunk walls, you'd think "neat". Likewise if you were walking through a Birch Forest and suddenly started to see Oaks mixed in.
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!
Most Minecraft players don't realize how awesome a good transition can look.
Bingo. New players simply don't know how the game would be without bubble biomes because that's all they have experienced, but having started in beta 1.12 I know how biomes gradually shifting into each other made world so much more natural and interesting, no matter how that version had such a limited palette of natural blocks.
Not every player is into building, engineering, caving or fighting. There's people like me who like to explore, be amazed, or just enjoy a nice view.
Also, they handled bubble biomes in a way that I don't understand from a gameplay standpoint. If you check biome definitions you'll notice how aside from the shape of the landscape and decorations, pretty much nothing changes from a biome to the next one: almost always the same hostiles spawn (animals don't change that much even when they look different, anyway), ore drop is almost the same, structures are almost the same aside from how they look, the weather is almost the same, the way you're supposed to play is almost always the same everywhere. What's the point of having biomes if it makes not much difference playing in one or the other?
One could say that the possibility of spawning everywhere makes it necessary. If that's the case all they had to do was to make a handful of biome designed specifically for starting players and only make them spawn there. Plenty of games can do that.
Finally, a technical problem with using bubble biomes. Assume you want more variety and better transitions. With the current system you have to add literally dozens of "new" biomes to accomplish what RTG does so much more organically. I did it with a datapack and it was a friggin' nightmare for so many months. And yet I still don't understand why Mojang wouldn't do it.
As I said, the implication is a lot more variety in areas classed as a "biome" in current Minecraft. Right now, for example, all Plains have the same decoration - same flower frequency, same tree frequency, same coloration. Everywhere. With a noise-based system different areas would have different characters.
Transitions would be a lot more naturalist and extended.
Oh, sorry. I understood that part. And it's why I think this suggestion (?) is good. Untying stuff from biomes (perhaps even to the point of them formally going away) could be an improvement, and looking at the terrain generation over time is an example of why.
The terrain generation from beta 1.8 to release 1.6 actually had mediocre variety, but it masked its repetitiveness and seemed like it had good verity simply because it had random biome placement and small biomes. The result of many harsh biomes transitions happening frequently gives the impression variety is there... but people were quick to notice it wasn't, which is why terrain generation was being called bad even before 1.7 was even a thing. As you said, you've seen one biome, you've seen them all (to a point, repetitiveness will probably always be there on a large enough scale with anything, though).
I guess the problem with 1.7 was that it merely implemented a climate system that wasn't variable enough (or "too strict"), and in a game that perhaps didn't yet have enough (sub)biomes for it. And it didn't yet uncouple terrain generation (or elevation) from biomes. It's like there was no true underlying terrain generation, but instead just a biome placement system where the terrain depended on the biome. Same as before, only the placement was no longer random.
By time the game got to 1.18 and untied elevation from biome (and instead just used them as paint atop that) and added more biomes, things have improved markedly, but I think your suggestion of formally removing biomes would be the next step towards truly achieving the goal of better variety.
So I was just sort of wondering out loud what other considerations there might be if such a change were to occur and biomes were to formally go away, since it seems Minecraft currently still does things where a lot of stuff is tied to biome. I was sort of asking "what challenges might be faced if something like this were considered and attempted". I'm not too knowledgeable about terrain generation so that's why I was asking.
For just one example, fossils are apparently found under desert or swamp only. If biomes formally went away, would mimicking the current behavior be an easy thing to do? Could you also have fossils as a decoration to the same "noise-based system" and have it come out the same, or would there be challenges in some of the details like this?
For just one example, fossils are apparently found under desert or swamp only. If biomes formally went away, would mimicking the current behavior be an easy thing to do?
Kind of. Just as an example, currently a desert biome is just the worldgen picking a specific assortments of noise values that Mojang called "desert" and no other biome uses. They would just have to tell fossils to generate only in chunks which get those same values. Or, more interestingly, instead of just resorting on temperature, humidity etc. structure could use more noise values specifically designed to handle structures, which would be maybe even more flexible than the current system, and for sure it wouldn't be worse.
I guess the problem with 1.7 was that it merely implemented a climate system that wasn't variable enough (or "too strict"), and in a game that perhaps didn't yet have enough (sub)biomes for it. And it didn't yet uncouple terrain generation (or elevation) from biomes. It's like there was no true underlying terrain generation, but instead just a biome placement system where the terrain depended on the biome. Same as before, only the placement was no longer random.
The problem with 1.7 era climate was, and was pretty much only, that the "pitch" - the size of and distance between climates - was too large. There were plenty of biomes for warm and hot; cool was a little bit low and icy was limited, although that might well have been artistic intent (that icy zones were pretty much Antarctica.) In Geographicraft, just halving the zone sizes and improving the smoothing algorithm IMO fixed all the problems with climate.
So I was just sort of wondering out loud what other considerations there might be if such a change were to occur and biomes were to formally go away, since it seems Minecraft currently still does things where a lot of stuff is tied to biome. I was sort of asking "what challenges might be faced if something like this were considered and attempted". I'm not too knowledgeable about terrain generation so that's why I was asking.
For just one example, fossils are apparently found under desert or swamp only. If biomes formally went away, would mimicking the current behavior be an easy thing to do? Could you also have fossils as a decoration to the same "noise-based system" and have it come out the same, or would there be challenges in some of the details like this?
There really isn't any problem; anything they wanted to restrict to current desert or swamp areas could just be restricted to only appear when the noise values would currently indicate desert or swamp. But it could be changed easily to something that's different but similar, and which would encourage exploring and understanding the system. For example, fossils could be placed in high erosion zones that are either very wet or very dry; which would be similar to the current system; (those are often desert or swamp) but it wouldn't be any desert or swamp; players would need to look for areas with the right characteristics - which you could F3, but which also could be inferred by terrain, which would make for interesting exploration. And, depending on how the parameters are tuned, fossils might show up on other areas which would actually be pretty logical, such as shattered biomes (generally in areas with high peakiness but slightly lower erosion than swamps and high-erosion deserts.) So, again, more variety - fossil placement is related to sand placement, but no longer exactly the same.
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!
I disagree. I love this idea that Mojang is doing because I like exploring. It does make it a bit more difficult to obtain some items, but it isn't too bad.
The suggestion wouldn't remove the benefits to exploring. If anything it'd (try to) make them better by adding variety.
Maybe the original post should clarify this to people who take it at face value, but the reasoning to drop biomes isn't to drop what the biomes themselves offer. That stuff would still be there. It'd just be formally removing the biomes themselves so that there's less strict rules that world generation has to abide by.
In other words, it's a technical only change. On the surface, you'd still have everything, and then some. At least, that's the idea I think.
As of at least 1.18, biomes are already a "layer of paint" over terrain generation, as opposed to a strict criteria world generation itself has to follow. This suggestion is to take that further and untie the "decorations" from that too, or at least it moves the criteria they follow to something else so that there can be "in-between" decorations and even more variety.
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The giant trees look awesome! I think too that minecraft might change something concerning their forests. Tree sizes yes, but also the ability to chop down trees faster like in the timber mod. There is a lot minecraft could do. However I'd prefer if minecraft would finally add useful stuff for minecarts, rails and redstone as this is long overdue.
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Curse PremiumFrom Beta 1.8 to 1.17, biomes were the keystone of Minecraft generation. The biome determined the terrain, the decorations (mostly plants), and the coloration. In 1.18, Mojang drastically overhauled Minecraft generation and terrain is no longer set by the biome; rather, the terrain noise parameters are used to determine the biome for an area, which is then used to generate the decorations and the coloration. I think this is a mistake; with the noise parameters there's no need for biomes to determine decorations or coloration and I think Minecraft world would be far more interesting and varied if the decorations and coloration were generated straight from the terrain noise parameters, with no need to define biomes.
I've recently been working on a long-considered project to increase variability of pre-1.17 biomes. A very common complaint at the time was that a given biome was always the same, and once you've seen one forest, you've seen them all. This is pretty much true; apart from a few biomes with wild terrain like Extreme Hills, it was really hard to tell one Forest from another; with the only distinction being what biomes it was next to.
As a big explorer, this always bugged me, and a lot of other players too. You get to "another forest", "another desert", and "another plains" in a big hurry playing Minecraft. People explored looking for rare biomes and sub-biomes like Flower Forest and Sunflower Plains, with the generic biomes just the chaff you had to sift through to find something interesting. Over time, Mojang has tried to improve on this by adding more biomes like Birch Forest (basically Forest with a different tree) and that has helped some, but then you get to "another Birch Forest" too.
But, I've always thought, it doesn't *have* to be that way! You can use Perlin-style noises to generate parameters like temperature, humidity, and soil richness; and use *those* to influence the decorations in a biome. So generate more spruce when it's cold, sparser trees when it's dry, and taller trees when the soil is rich.
So after dreaming about this for years, I finally did it in the RTG mod, where I'm currently the active designer. And it works! I can get small trees (well, by RTG standards):
Big trees:
And giant trees:
All from only one biome! Plus the tree mix changes too: sometimes all Oak like in the small trees; sometimes lots of Spruce like in the giant trees, and sometimes lots of Birch:
The density changes too; it doesn't show up well in screenshots, but you feel it on the ground.
I made the parameters change slowly with distance, so a typical "biome area" will be fairly consistent. And: that does it! Now every Forest *isn't* the same; sometimes it's small dense stands with just Oak; sometimes larger trees mixing in Birch; and sometimes scattered mixed giants of Oak and Spruce. All from just some cleverness in the decoration code.
Theoretically, I could go farther; make the Forest range from all-Birch to all-Oak to all-Spruce, and now I can do Birch Woods, Forest, *and* Taiga, all with just *one* biome. Plus, lots, lots, lots more variations of sizes and mixtures and densities you'd never see with the Minecraft biome system. But in the pre-1.18 system, it's not so practical; biomes are already labeled "Birch Forest" or whatever by the biome system, and there's no noise available to duplicate that. If I generate my own noises, they won't generally put Birches into what the biome system independently labeled "Birch".
But - post 1.18, Minecraft *does* have underlying noises. And *those* could tell the game where to put Birches or Oaks or Spruces, and how densely, and how big, without any need for biomes. And then Minecraft could have much more varied flora, with hundreds of different combinations not possible in the current biome shoehorn. Plus variation could be much more natural - with oak forest gradating to birch, or forests petering out into plains.
Likewise, coloration could be based on the temperature/humidity values directly, smoothly and naturally varying from place to place, with no need for biomes (and I wouldn't miss those abrupt transitions, at all).
Mojang made a bold move taking terrain out of the control of biomes, and it's generally been a big boost to the naturalism, interest, and variability of Minecraft terrain. They need to finish the job and take decorations and colors out of the control of biomes too. I'd be thrilled to see the result.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
The issue is that Minecraft has this weird idea about forcing the player to explore different biomes and making some items biome exclusive - not only is this not fun, but it's fake difficulty. Minecraft would substantially improve from needing minimal travel to do anything. It should be about planning, not walking aimlessly.
What implications would this have on the game? So many things seem tied to biomes.
It sounds less like you think 1.18+ made a mistake here, and more that you think it took half a step in the right direction, but didn't take the whole step. After all, it stepped away from the problems with terrain being tied to biome that the generation from beta 1.8 to release 1.16 (and 1.17) had, so while it's not perfect, it's an improvement (albeit it with its own other flaws).
Regardless of which way it goes, I'd sort of like to see the forests become larger in scale. Those little, regular oak (and birch) trees? They have to go! I know, I know, they're iconic and it would feel like taking something away which feels bad, but really it's changing something that increasingly feels like a poor fit in modern Minecraft. Forests shouldn't be tree canopies starting at human reach and total height being about twice as tall as a human.
Likewise, the spruce tress feel like double size Christmas trees as best.
Not all forests need to be as massive as Mega Taiga (or old growth Taiga, as they are now known), but the "regular" forests (oak, birch, and spruce) really feel like they need to be 2 to 4 times larger in height and tree scale.
And the pictures of your trees there are actually about well in line for what I feel the normal forests should be like. It's one of my lasting and largest qualms with modern Minecraft. The forests, and really the trees that make them up, need redone and to be larger. No more ground level bushes!
I'd also like to see flat and very "deep" beaches, and palm trees. You do sometimes get deeper beaches since 1.18 but they seem a bit small still and awkward and not really long (along the shore), flat, and deep. We're missing that beach-like location and unless you go with a custom map that has them, we have no chances to make large beachside buildings/villages.
I've long said 1.18 feels a bit like an unofficial "the update that changed the world II" or at least half of such a thing. Such an update as the one you're suggesting could therefore be called "caves and cliffs part IV", and I mean that in a good way, and not to insinuate the recent updates are lacking and are only giving us what 1.18 should have already had. It feels like 1.18 laid a lot of groundwork and there's now a lot of potential to build upon that.
With 1.18 introducing the terrain blending, I'm hoping they'll take opportunities to change stuff like this more often than once in a Blue moon, because now changes can seamlessly blend in with existing worlds more.
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Curse PremiumAs I said, the implication is a lot more variety in areas classed as a "biome" in current Minecraft. Right now, for example, all Plains have the same decoration - same flower frequency, same tree frequency, same coloration. Everywhere. With a noise-based system different areas would have different characters. Areas near woodlands would have more trees and shrubs, perhaps grading into open woodland. In areas near Savanna, the scattered Oaks would get replaced by Savanna. Some hillsides would have more flowers going up as it approached Meadow conditions, while others might have spruce shrubs as they approached Windswept conditions. Special decoration areas like Sunflower Plains would no longer be necessarily restricted to their host biomes - for example, you could easily have a "Flower Plains" akin to "Flower Forest". And the color would change from area to area, reflecting the climate conditions.
Transitions would be a lot more naturalist and extended. Most Minecraft players don't realize how awesome a good transition can look. I remember when I got the interbiome terrain transition working in RTG how transition areas immediate became some of my favorites - it's just so cool to see one thing shifting into another.
I do think they made a mistake, by not continuing on with the "same system everywhere" approach. One thing I find a little amusing is I *know* they spent a lot of time and tears trying to figure out how to shoehorn the 5-dimensional noise system into biome boxes (it is a *hard* problem), and it was all totally unnecessary.
Changing *decorations* to noise basis would not cause any big problems with existing worlds. It's not like terrain shifts. Minecraft players are *totally* used to seeing drastic decoration changes from chunk to chunk. If you saw a Plains area shift from current stark savanna to open woodland, you wouldn't go "eww" like you do with chunk walls, you'd think "neat". Likewise if you were walking through a Birch Forest and suddenly started to see Oaks mixed in.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
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Curse PremiumBingo. New players simply don't know how the game would be without bubble biomes because that's all they have experienced, but having started in beta 1.12 I know how biomes gradually shifting into each other made world so much more natural and interesting, no matter how that version had such a limited palette of natural blocks.
Not every player is into building, engineering, caving or fighting. There's people like me who like to explore, be amazed, or just enjoy a nice view.
Also, they handled bubble biomes in a way that I don't understand from a gameplay standpoint. If you check biome definitions you'll notice how aside from the shape of the landscape and decorations, pretty much nothing changes from a biome to the next one: almost always the same hostiles spawn (animals don't change that much even when they look different, anyway), ore drop is almost the same, structures are almost the same aside from how they look, the weather is almost the same, the way you're supposed to play is almost always the same everywhere. What's the point of having biomes if it makes not much difference playing in one or the other?
One could say that the possibility of spawning everywhere makes it necessary. If that's the case all they had to do was to make a handful of biome designed specifically for starting players and only make them spawn there. Plenty of games can do that.
Finally, a technical problem with using bubble biomes. Assume you want more variety and better transitions. With the current system you have to add literally dozens of "new" biomes to accomplish what RTG does so much more organically. I did it with a datapack and it was a friggin' nightmare for so many months. And yet I still don't understand why Mojang wouldn't do it.
Oh, sorry. I understood that part. And it's why I think this suggestion (?) is good. Untying stuff from biomes (perhaps even to the point of them formally going away) could be an improvement, and looking at the terrain generation over time is an example of why.
The terrain generation from beta 1.8 to release 1.6 actually had mediocre variety, but it masked its repetitiveness and seemed like it had good verity simply because it had random biome placement and small biomes. The result of many harsh biomes transitions happening frequently gives the impression variety is there... but people were quick to notice it wasn't, which is why terrain generation was being called bad even before 1.7 was even a thing. As you said, you've seen one biome, you've seen them all (to a point, repetitiveness will probably always be there on a large enough scale with anything, though).
I guess the problem with 1.7 was that it merely implemented a climate system that wasn't variable enough (or "too strict"), and in a game that perhaps didn't yet have enough (sub)biomes for it. And it didn't yet uncouple terrain generation (or elevation) from biomes. It's like there was no true underlying terrain generation, but instead just a biome placement system where the terrain depended on the biome. Same as before, only the placement was no longer random.
By time the game got to 1.18 and untied elevation from biome (and instead just used them as paint atop that) and added more biomes, things have improved markedly, but I think your suggestion of formally removing biomes would be the next step towards truly achieving the goal of better variety.
So I was just sort of wondering out loud what other considerations there might be if such a change were to occur and biomes were to formally go away, since it seems Minecraft currently still does things where a lot of stuff is tied to biome. I was sort of asking "what challenges might be faced if something like this were considered and attempted". I'm not too knowledgeable about terrain generation so that's why I was asking.
For just one example, fossils are apparently found under desert or swamp only. If biomes formally went away, would mimicking the current behavior be an easy thing to do? Could you also have fossils as a decoration to the same "noise-based system" and have it come out the same, or would there be challenges in some of the details like this?
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Curse PremiumKind of. Just as an example, currently a desert biome is just the worldgen picking a specific assortments of noise values that Mojang called "desert" and no other biome uses. They would just have to tell fossils to generate only in chunks which get those same values. Or, more interestingly, instead of just resorting on temperature, humidity etc. structure could use more noise values specifically designed to handle structures, which would be maybe even more flexible than the current system, and for sure it wouldn't be worse.
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Curse PremiumThe problem with 1.7 era climate was, and was pretty much only, that the "pitch" - the size of and distance between climates - was too large. There were plenty of biomes for warm and hot; cool was a little bit low and icy was limited, although that might well have been artistic intent (that icy zones were pretty much Antarctica.) In Geographicraft, just halving the zone sizes and improving the smoothing algorithm IMO fixed all the problems with climate.
There really isn't any problem; anything they wanted to restrict to current desert or swamp areas could just be restricted to only appear when the noise values would currently indicate desert or swamp. But it could be changed easily to something that's different but similar, and which would encourage exploring and understanding the system. For example, fossils could be placed in high erosion zones that are either very wet or very dry; which would be similar to the current system; (those are often desert or swamp) but it wouldn't be any desert or swamp; players would need to look for areas with the right characteristics - which you could F3, but which also could be inferred by terrain, which would make for interesting exploration. And, depending on how the parameters are tuned, fossils might show up on other areas which would actually be pretty logical, such as shattered biomes (generally in areas with high peakiness but slightly lower erosion than swamps and high-erosion deserts.) So, again, more variety - fossil placement is related to sand placement, but no longer exactly the same.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
I disagree. I love this idea that Mojang is doing because I like exploring. It does make it a bit more difficult to obtain some items, but it isn't too bad.
The suggestion wouldn't remove the benefits to exploring. If anything it'd (try to) make them better by adding variety.
Maybe the original post should clarify this to people who take it at face value, but the reasoning to drop biomes isn't to drop what the biomes themselves offer. That stuff would still be there. It'd just be formally removing the biomes themselves so that there's less strict rules that world generation has to abide by.
In other words, it's a technical only change. On the surface, you'd still have everything, and then some. At least, that's the idea I think.
As of at least 1.18, biomes are already a "layer of paint" over terrain generation, as opposed to a strict criteria world generation itself has to follow. This suggestion is to take that further and untie the "decorations" from that too, or at least it moves the criteria they follow to something else so that there can be "in-between" decorations and even more variety.
The giant trees look awesome! I think too that minecraft might change something concerning their forests. Tree sizes yes, but also the ability to chop down trees faster like in the timber mod. There is a lot minecraft could do. However I'd prefer if minecraft would finally add useful stuff for minecarts, rails and redstone as this is long overdue.
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"Why Minecraft should drop biomes". To see if they break?
