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!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
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.
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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!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
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.
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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!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I 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.
I recognise that this is an older thread, but I want to say that it really does feel like they were developing a good concept with the worldgen overhaul and then stopped halfway. The game's selection of biomes and the hard biome borders worked way better with the old world generation, where biomes were selected mostly at random with only loosely-defined temperature regions. Probably my favourite places in pre-1.18 worldgen were the plains, since you could get nice open areas that were surrounded by a whole bunch of different biomes like forests, birch forests, dark forests, taigas, mountains etc. The fact that biomes had different terrain height offsets with sharp jumps between them was fine, since the biome borders had enough organic "roughness" to make it look nice.
The current system of biomes being selected based on temperature, humidity, and terrain noises is at odds with the identities of the biomes themselves, where a lot of them are defined by "biological" or aesthetic qualities like the types of trees and plants that grow there, instead of a particular type of climate. It makes sense to some extent to separate different trees based on temperature and humidity but there are a lot of distinctions that feel shoehorned in - like oak and birch forests, how do you separate those? Shouldn't they have some overlap in temperature and humidity regions? The way they ended up doing it is that birch forests occupy the "medium" temperature range at a higher humidity than normal forests, which I guess makes sense but means that a birch forest can never generate next to a plains (since plains generate at lower humidity than normal forests). And then dark forests generate at a higher humidity than birch forests - so dark forests can't generate next to plains OR generate next to normal forests (even though dark oak trees are presumably "mature" versions of normal oaks), and it creates a fairly obvious pattern of forests and dark forests always having a band of birch forest in between them. There are a bunch of other questionable choices like taigas only generating at higher humidity than forests so that they're also "forest-locked" and can't generate next to plains, no jungles next to savannas (but you can have jungles next to birch forests for some reason?), or the fact that they use the "weirdness" (i.e. peaks and valleys) parameter to separate biomes so that certain biomes can only generate on one side of a river.
The new terrain generation is great and has a lot of potential with data pack customisation, but it feels like they made the biome placement too formulaic and failed to look at biomes holistically and think about how interesting landscapes can be formed from biome pairings rather than just individual biomes. The game is also lacking some pretty basic biome types for "climate-based" biome generation like cold deserts, dry grasslands, and dry forests or woodlands, and the new Cherry Grove and Mangrove Swamp biomes especially feel like they would've fit better in the old system. I think it would've been better if they expanded the multi-noise system with one or two more parameters for "biome randomness" so that more biomes could have overlapping temperature and humidity ranges, or a more radical idea would be to replace the existing biomes with more generalised ones and make things like tree variety controlled by biome-independent noise (e.g. instead of forest, birch forest, dark forest etc, you could just have a "Temperate Forest" biome that can contain regions of oak, dark oak, birch, and spruce trees). I am actually (slowly) working on a data pack that does the latter, as well as redoing the terrain gen to hopefully add more variety on that front too.
I have put these idea in practice in the Better Forest mod, and I can now absolutely say it would be better with a "Temperate Forest" biome covering all the assorted temperate biomes. I made Forest generally mixed composition, varying from majority-spruce to all oak to majority birch back to mostly oak, based on temperature. The only reason I didn't make all spruce areas is that there's still Taiga and Birch Forest biomes. It's much nicer feel than the abrupt shifts.
And working on it made me see your point about limited adjacencies. The way they did it, a lot of forests can never occur next to plains, and that's really a pity because they would make great views, besides the other things you mention. And agreed on weirdness separating some biomes.
Another oddity is putting some of the unusual biomes in the super-dry category, including Flower Forest - which can never be next to forest anymore. Really? And Ice Spikes is odd for super-dry if you think about it - it would make sense more as very wet. These would have been better as very high weirdness areas, or using a system more like structures where they get scattered about in appropriate biomes.
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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!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
And Ice Spikes is odd for super-dry if you think about it - it would make sense more as very wet. These would have been better as very high weirdness areas, or using a system more like structures where they get scattered about in appropriate biomes.
Not really. There are plenty of real world locations where ice is super prevalent but also has super dry air. Just because ice comes from, and is made from water, does not mean the air around it is going to be moist. Humidity is a factor that doesn't care much about physical permanence. Just like there's a Dry heat, there's also a dry cold. As well as a wet heat, and wet cold.
Besides the fact that Minecraft exists in it's own world, with it's own laws and rules, not everything should make sense like it does in real life. The universe of Minecraft has it's own sets of irrefutable laws and rules that only make sense in Minecraft You're talking about a game where a portal to hell and some other void dimension exist with their own ecosystems and weather patterns, either existing or not..
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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!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
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.
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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.
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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?
I recognise that this is an older thread, but I want to say that it really does feel like they were developing a good concept with the worldgen overhaul and then stopped halfway. The game's selection of biomes and the hard biome borders worked way better with the old world generation, where biomes were selected mostly at random with only loosely-defined temperature regions. Probably my favourite places in pre-1.18 worldgen were the plains, since you could get nice open areas that were surrounded by a whole bunch of different biomes like forests, birch forests, dark forests, taigas, mountains etc. The fact that biomes had different terrain height offsets with sharp jumps between them was fine, since the biome borders had enough organic "roughness" to make it look nice.
The current system of biomes being selected based on temperature, humidity, and terrain noises is at odds with the identities of the biomes themselves, where a lot of them are defined by "biological" or aesthetic qualities like the types of trees and plants that grow there, instead of a particular type of climate. It makes sense to some extent to separate different trees based on temperature and humidity but there are a lot of distinctions that feel shoehorned in - like oak and birch forests, how do you separate those? Shouldn't they have some overlap in temperature and humidity regions? The way they ended up doing it is that birch forests occupy the "medium" temperature range at a higher humidity than normal forests, which I guess makes sense but means that a birch forest can never generate next to a plains (since plains generate at lower humidity than normal forests). And then dark forests generate at a higher humidity than birch forests - so dark forests can't generate next to plains OR generate next to normal forests (even though dark oak trees are presumably "mature" versions of normal oaks), and it creates a fairly obvious pattern of forests and dark forests always having a band of birch forest in between them. There are a bunch of other questionable choices like taigas only generating at higher humidity than forests so that they're also "forest-locked" and can't generate next to plains, no jungles next to savannas (but you can have jungles next to birch forests for some reason?), or the fact that they use the "weirdness" (i.e. peaks and valleys) parameter to separate biomes so that certain biomes can only generate on one side of a river.
The new terrain generation is great and has a lot of potential with data pack customisation, but it feels like they made the biome placement too formulaic and failed to look at biomes holistically and think about how interesting landscapes can be formed from biome pairings rather than just individual biomes. The game is also lacking some pretty basic biome types for "climate-based" biome generation like cold deserts, dry grasslands, and dry forests or woodlands, and the new Cherry Grove and Mangrove Swamp biomes especially feel like they would've fit better in the old system. I think it would've been better if they expanded the multi-noise system with one or two more parameters for "biome randomness" so that more biomes could have overlapping temperature and humidity ranges, or a more radical idea would be to replace the existing biomes with more generalised ones and make things like tree variety controlled by biome-independent noise (e.g. instead of forest, birch forest, dark forest etc, you could just have a "Temperate Forest" biome that can contain regions of oak, dark oak, birch, and spruce trees). I am actually (slowly) working on a data pack that does the latter, as well as redoing the terrain gen to hopefully add more variety on that front too.
Looks pretty awesome so far, looking forward to this!
EDIT: i just saw the date...
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Curse PremiumThese trees are available in 1.12 in RTG plus (not the original RTG mod; the project head disappeared and nobody can edit the pages).
They are available in 1.20.1 through 1.20.4 in Better Forests.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
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Curse PremiumI have put these idea in practice in the Better Forest mod, and I can now absolutely say it would be better with a "Temperate Forest" biome covering all the assorted temperate biomes. I made Forest generally mixed composition, varying from majority-spruce to all oak to majority birch back to mostly oak, based on temperature. The only reason I didn't make all spruce areas is that there's still Taiga and Birch Forest biomes. It's much nicer feel than the abrupt shifts.
And working on it made me see your point about limited adjacencies. The way they did it, a lot of forests can never occur next to plains, and that's really a pity because they would make great views, besides the other things you mention. And agreed on weirdness separating some biomes.
Another oddity is putting some of the unusual biomes in the super-dry category, including Flower Forest - which can never be next to forest anymore. Really? And Ice Spikes is odd for super-dry if you think about it - it would make sense more as very wet. These would have been better as very high weirdness areas, or using a system more like structures where they get scattered about in appropriate biomes.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Not really. There are plenty of real world locations where ice is super prevalent but also has super dry air. Just because ice comes from, and is made from water, does not mean the air around it is going to be moist. Humidity is a factor that doesn't care much about physical permanence. Just like there's a Dry heat, there's also a dry cold. As well as a wet heat, and wet cold.
Besides the fact that Minecraft exists in it's own world, with it's own laws and rules, not everything should make sense like it does in real life. The universe of Minecraft has it's own sets of irrefutable laws and rules that only make sense in Minecraft You're talking about a game where a portal to hell and some other void dimension exist with their own ecosystems and weather patterns, either existing or not..
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me three times, hold up, rewind, That's not even possible.
Using the ignore feature here is kinda weird.
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