One of the most common reasons people cited for Minecraft beta terrain being more 'interesting' than the release version was that the release version had "removed floating islands and overhangs." However these features have never been 'removed', they still generate perfectly well and commonly in Savannah M biomes. The problem is just that this biome is as rare as hen's teeth, giving the impression that these landmarks have been 'removed'. I think there's a few things Mojang could do to make the terrain way more interesting without totally overhauling the generator -
-make Savannah M biomes more common
-add Savanna M-like biomes to all other biomes (except plains of course)
-make beaches wider and flatter (so that they actually look like beaches)
-make plains look more like plains (remove all those ugly little ponds all over the place and flatten them somewhat)
And before people cry out "but lagggg!"...is there any Mojang policy in place that Minecraft must be able to run on a toaster? If there is, they haven't been doing a very good job at it so far.
One thing I found that really helped with variety was simply turning large biomes on. I know it's just a scaled up version, but all the terrain feels more alive and organic.
Personal favorite is finding a forest biome, no bigger than 70ish blocks across in the middle of a massive plains biome.
However, I do agree. More "noise" in the vanilla generator would be appreciated.
Rather than making savannah m more common, could we just reinstate the ability to generate floating islands and overhangs? I LOVE those features, and I believe every biome deserves a chance at having them. And if it becomes some sort of problem (idk how it would, but still) they should just be made more rare, not completely removed from the game.
A better solution would be to increase terrain variability in general; I'm not sure of the exact setting but it seems like Beta did not rescale the generator output at all, while since then each biome applies a multiplier and an offset to the noise field, with the multiplier generally being relatively low, e.g. 0.3 for most biomes where 1.0 would be unaltered (presumably Beta); in my own mod I increased it to 0.7 for most non-flat biomes, with some biomes having a "hilly/mountainous" variant added (e.g. desert, so desert villages aren't so messed-up; 1.10 aggravated this by letting villages generate into any adjacent biome. I offset the reduction in village spawn biomes by making villages more common).
Also, I consider the biome placement changes in 1.7 to be a more serious issue; for example, imagine if worlds were as varied as this; I found 31 unique biomes, not including duplicates, hills, rivers, or edge biomes, within an area of about one level 4 map (2048x2048 blocks):
Sure, some would object to having snowy biomes next to deserts but I prefer variety over realism (in a game that is far from realistic), and with even more biomes than vanilla I've never found every biome across every world that I've made using my mod, even a couple that were added in the first version (another objection is that it would be too easy to find every biome; if anything, the climate zones in 1.7+ make it easier to find hot and snowy biomes since you know that they will not be next to each other and they generate in large areas, easily a thousand blocks across even on default; to me even one level 4 map is vast since I exclusively explore by caving, with 5-6 months required to explore a single level 4 map).
Of course, they also need to fix the underground; I have no idea what they were thinking in 1.7, which was never mentioned in any changelogs or explained by any of the developers (as far as I know).
One of the most common reasons people cited for Minecraft beta terrain being more 'interesting' than the release version was that the release version had "removed floating islands and overhangs." However these features have never been 'removed', they still generate perfectly well and commonly in Savannah M biomes. The problem is just that this biome is as rare as hen's teeth, giving the impression that these landmarks have been 'removed'. I think there's a few things Mojang could do to make the terrain way more interesting without totally overhauling the generator -
-make Savannah M biomes more common
-add Savanna M-like biomes to all other biomes (except plains of course)
-make beaches wider and flatter (so that they actually look like beaches)
-make plains look more like plains (remove all those ugly little ponds all over the place and flatten them somewhat)
And before people cry out "but lagggg!"...is there any Mojang policy in place that Minecraft must be able to run on a toaster? If there is, they haven't been doing a very good job at it so far.
One thing I found that really helped with variety was simply turning large biomes on. I know it's just a scaled up version, but all the terrain feels more alive and organic.
Personal favorite is finding a forest biome, no bigger than 70ish blocks across in the middle of a massive plains biome.
However, I do agree. More "noise" in the vanilla generator would be appreciated.
Rather than making savannah m more common, could we just reinstate the ability to generate floating islands and overhangs? I LOVE those features, and I believe every biome deserves a chance at having them. And if it becomes some sort of problem (idk how it would, but still) they should just be made more rare, not completely removed from the game.
A better solution would be to increase terrain variability in general; I'm not sure of the exact setting but it seems like Beta did not rescale the generator output at all, while since then each biome applies a multiplier and an offset to the noise field, with the multiplier generally being relatively low, e.g. 0.3 for most biomes where 1.0 would be unaltered (presumably Beta); in my own mod I increased it to 0.7 for most non-flat biomes, with some biomes having a "hilly/mountainous" variant added (e.g. desert, so desert villages aren't so messed-up; 1.10 aggravated this by letting villages generate into any adjacent biome. I offset the reduction in village spawn biomes by making villages more common).
Also, I consider the biome placement changes in 1.7 to be a more serious issue; for example, imagine if worlds were as varied as this; I found 31 unique biomes, not including duplicates, hills, rivers, or edge biomes, within an area of about one level 4 map (2048x2048 blocks):
Sure, some would object to having snowy biomes next to deserts but I prefer variety over realism (in a game that is far from realistic), and with even more biomes than vanilla I've never found every biome across every world that I've made using my mod, even a couple that were added in the first version (another objection is that it would be too easy to find every biome; if anything, the climate zones in 1.7+ make it easier to find hot and snowy biomes since you know that they will not be next to each other and they generate in large areas, easily a thousand blocks across even on default; to me even one level 4 map is vast since I exclusively explore by caving, with 5-6 months required to explore a single level 4 map).
Of course, they also need to fix the underground; I have no idea what they were thinking in 1.7, which was never mentioned in any changelogs or explained by any of the developers (as far as I know).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?