This list is a long time in the making. While I'm ecstatic that Mojang is finally improving the terrain generation of Minecraft, over the last 10 years of exploring Minecraft worlds, I've developed a sense of what I believe are its most overdue shortcomings in terrain generation. In this thread, instead of focusing on a variety of cool new features I'd like to see, which would be a list which would never end, I am going to focus mainly on fixing what I perceive to be largely aesthetic problems in the current Overworld terrain generation, that have lingered for the last ten years. Feel free to add your thoughts or any big issues I might have missed. (I am omitting the re-hauling of the Swamp and Birch Forest biomes, due to Mojang finally getting around to improving them for the Wild Update.) Beginning with the broadest scale problems I see in Overworld terrain generation, my Top 12 Most Needed Overworld Terrain Changes are:
1. Fully formed Continents, instead of the Endless Sponge pattern of Land and Ocean generation.
2. A larger volume of Islands and Archipelagos to populate the dull monotony of ocean.
3. A larger and more interesting variety of tree shapes, with much taller and looming forests.
4. Full Grass Blocks or connected texture Grass, to prevent hills from looking like dirt mounds from side angles.
5. Color variation in the cool Ocean biomes, like that of Warm Oceans, instead of the bland, featureless monotony of blue.
6. Integration of Red and Orange Terracotta into Savannah biome, to add a pop of color contrast and look less bland.
7. Thinner stone-wall-size Birch Tree trunk block, to make birch trees look stylistically closer to true birch trees.
8. Smoothing out of ugly erratic desert terrain, and possibly integration of wavy Sahara Desert style terrain patterns.
9. Re-haul of the Stone Shore biome, with boulders made of Tuff and Smooth Basalt, to make it less dull and ugly.
10. At least 2 more unique cave biomes in addition to the Lush Caves, to give the underground more life.
11. Improvement of the ugly Flat Wall cliffside terrain generation against ocean shores, which look unnatural.
12. Cleaning up of Aquifers' ridiculous scattered mess style terrain generation, which look unnatural.
4. Full Grass Blocks or connected texture Grass, to prevent hills from looking like dirt mounds from side angles. You need colour variety or it gets hard to look at
I disagree; while I only started using "better grass" after I added it to my own modded versions I now think that the game looks ugly without it, along with "better snow", which renders grass as snowy below partial blocks adjacent to snow (my implementation actually replaces the top grass texture with snow, rather than rendering an actual snow layer "block", with the shading on the sides of adjacent snow layers changed so they blend in):
Also, a feature of TMCW is that snow generates under trees during world generation, which along with the above greatly improves the appearance of snowy biomes (this is a much older addition, added over 6 years ago in TMCWv3; "better grass/snow" was added last year in TMCWv4.5):
There's a lot of good ideas here- and, luckily, I think a lot of these will eventually be covered in 1.18 or 19.
1.Not sure about continents; I think it's possible, (I'm not sure how 1.18 changes generation on a larger scale, though I seem to recall something about more mountainous terrain generation further inland. Two is sort of similar- I guess some smaller islands could be interesting, but not to the extent that they entirely replace the ocean.
3.Definitely! Regular forests are quite boring compared to various updated biomes... and just other existing biomes. I'm hoping the Wild Update adds more interesting generation to existing forests, even if it's as simple as podzol/coarse dirt in forest floors, and more unique tree shapes for different forests.
4. ...Neutral? This is really up to personal preference, and it's already an Optifine Feature.
5. Pretty sure cool oceans already have darker blue water.
6. Yes please! It would be such a small tweak, but would give savannahs something interesting other than Acacia Wood and Coarse dirt.
7.Too big of a change to work properly; especially if it alters existing birch wood. Birch trees themselves could generate more slender, (as in, 1*1 block), compared to other trees.
8. Deserts could use some work...
9.Could be interesting, and it would be neat to have another way of finding tuff.
10.Deep Dark? Dripstone Caves?
11/12.I kind of like cliff faces and aquifers, but again, I haven't really noticed much to have a preference.
4. ...Neutral? This is really up to personal preference, and it's already an Optifine Feature.
The fact that a feature exists in a mod, which can only be used by Java Edition players, which are a minority of the player base, should never be a reason to not add a suggestion. Did you know that a lot of graphical settings once required Optifine (it is often claimed that Mojang can't add them because they can't use Optifine's code, which is true but they can write their own code to do so since the concept themselves aren't copyrighted)?
Remember before 1.7, when there was no mipmapping (hence the description here of "You would also see that blocks would have this sort of pixelation effect after they got further and further away from you. This was especially noticeable on leaf blocks (with Fancy graphics)."), fog was much denser and started much closer to the player (compare vanilla 1.6.4 to Optifine - the latter looks much better at the same render distance; even though vanilla is now similar to Optifine's default setting they could still have a slider to adjust fog distance, even turn it off), crude render distance control ("Tiny", "Short", "Normal", "Far", each of which was double the previous, or 4x the rendered area, so there was a big leap between each one, while now if Far (16 chunks) is too much but Normal (8 chunks) is good enough you could go for 9-15 chunks), a brightness setting and vsync (vanilla did not have these until Beta 1.8 and Release 1.4.2 respectively), and individual control of some settings, such as clouds (previously there was only a single global Fast/Fancy setting; IMO vanilla should include more settings like this, for example, leaves are primarily responsible for the performance difference between Fast and Fancy so having a separate toggle for them would be good; of course, any "better grass/snow" settings would also be toggleable).
Vanilla has even incorporated some of Optifine's gameplay-altering features, such as "clear water", which lowered the light opacity from 3 to 1 so light can penetrate much further underwater, as was done in 1.13 ("clear water" also greatly reduced underwater fog, which I believe was not changed, or at least not as much, I know that some people have complained about the lack of the setting in Optifine since 1.13 because of this). Spyglasses can be seen as an implementation of Optifine's "zoom" feature in a more gameplay-balanced manner as they require the player to craft and use an item instead of simply pressing a button (likewise, shulker boxes are similar to backpacks but are much harder to obtain and harder to use than how mods often implement them, same for elytra and mods that allow the player to fly in Survival mode; all in all, if there is a feature in vanilla there is probably a mod that implemented it before; bigger caves? I've been modding them into the game for the past 8 years and experimented for a while with making the ground 2-3x deeper and there are even older mods that did these, like this one from 2012).
Conversely, Optifine let you disable some vanilla features, such as void fog, before it was officially removed, and good riddance (it was removed due to "performance issues" but they only had to remove/reduce the particle effect, not the fog itself, which was simply render distance fog modified to be closer and darker as you went deeper without skylight; of course, it also made it difficult to see far in deeper caves, especially the sort I've modded in, hence my own mods disabled it without the need for Optifine).
3. A larger and more interesting variety of tree shapes, with much taller and looming forests.
Sure I guess[/b]
As it stands I think the current default Minecraft oak tree is way too basic, outdated, and tiny. Instead of being these impressive, looming halls of lumber and branches, current Minecraft forests tend to be this annoying scattering of tiny bush-sized trees, which don't really feel like a real forest, and are annoying to try to ride a horse through.
4. Full Grass Blocks or connected texture Grass, to prevent hills from looking like dirt mounds from side angles.
You need colour variety or it gets hard to look at[/b]
Yes, but leaving the side of a green grass block all brown dirt texture is poor and unnatural way to incorporate color variety to a grassy landscape. It means there are no full grassy hills, no slopes, without being cut through with a line of dirt texture. It's simply bad aesthetic design. It's also superfluous since, even with connected texture or full grass blocks, we would still get visual patches of dirt when any slope or hill is more than 1 block steep. If color variety is our concern here, then that should be incorporated in a more coherent way, with new landscape features to contrast against the green grass slopes.
5. Color variation in the cool Ocean biomes, like that of Warm Oceans, instead of the bland, featureless monotony of blue.
Isn't that blandness intentional? To show it's cold and not diverse or energetic.[/b]
It's not really a matter of intentional design. Cold ocean remains flat textureless blue not out of any thoughtful design choice, but because that was the first default rendering of ocean that Minecraft had, and nobody bothered to make it more interesting and give it a facelift as the game began to incorporate deeper aesthetic features. It's just outdated game design. Also, "intentional blandness" is an idea which sounds nice on paper to many Minecraft players but ultimately just amounts to an excuse to make the game dull, letting miles of terrain generation be wasted on poor design.
6. Integration of Red and Orange Terracotta into Savannah biome, to add a pop of color contrast and look less bland.
Why not[/b]
Imagine that fried yellowish savannah grass accented with a pop of red and orange terracotta. I'd add some red sand, too. Would look much more like a real life African savannah, which tend to have a lot of warm reddish tones with red clay and dirt.
7. Thinner stone-wall-size Birch Tree trunk block, to make birch trees look stylistically closer to true birch trees.
I doubt this will happen but would be interesting[/b]
Wood be.
9. Re-haul of the Stone Shore biome, with boulders made of Tuff and Smooth Basalt, to make it less dull and ugly.
Yes[/b]
This one drives me nuts. So much potentially wonderful oceanfront shore ruined by featureless blobs of stone, which don't look like any real life terrain, they just look like blobs of Minecraft stone. If Mojang wants to incorporate a stone shore, they should actually design a stone shore biome with features like boulders and other stuff, but if they're just going to make it a blob of stone blocks, then they should have just made it a sandy beach instead.
1. Fully formed Continents, instead of the Endless Sponge pattern of Land and Ocean generation.
2. A larger volume of Islands and Archipelagos to populate the dull monotony of ocean.
I really miss this part of 1.6.4's generation and prior versions, and unfortunately the only way to replicate some feeling of it today is to use Large Biomes (which I understand does not replicate the generation at all, but the increased size of the "oceans" can at least make it feel a little more spread out, since that's exactly what it is). Thankfully in my main world I still have some 1.5 chunks - but, this is such a small portion of the world (only about a square mile estimated) that it makes no big difference except for the caving.
Additionally it would be ideal to have such continents maintain some consistency in temperature/biomes - this would make other continents worth exploring, in the event that your main continent is home to temperate/colder biomes (as opposed to deserts and jungles).
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LP series? Not my style! Video series? Closer, but not quite. Survival journal, maybe? That's better. Now in Season 4 of the Legends of Quintropolis Journal (<< click to view)!! World download and more can be found there.
Additionally it would be ideal to have such continents maintain some consistency in temperature/biomes - this would make other continents worth exploring, in the event that your main continent is home to temperate/colder biomes (as opposed to deserts and jungles).
This would be even worse than the 1.7+ biome generation; I've literally spent almost half a year of my life playing on my first world (probably way more than most people have spent in total playing Minecraft), yet still have to fully explore the spawn continent - so I'm not supposed to be able to find a single biome of a different temperature for at least that long (and no, I don't want to have to explore out of my way, i.e. anything aside from caving, just to find one). This is why TMCW does not disallow snowy biomes from generating next to hot biomes, just like in vanilla 1.6.4, where the variety in biome generation within a small area is one of its main features for me (aside from the underground), and only has very loosely defined "climate zones"; even vanilla 1.6.4 has "snowy" regions composed of Ice Plains and Taiga (in fact, 1.7+ uses the same basic code to add climate zones, just with more types); in TMCW these regions are partially non-snowy biomes; likewise, I added "hot" regions but they aren't entirely hot biomes, and both are smaller than in vanilla:
In particular, note how small "TripleHeightTerrain" was, even though it wasn't my least-played world, due to having about 3.5 times the volume between sea level (increased to y=191, hence "triple height", though "triple depth" would be more accurate) and lava level (lowered to y=6) and about 3.7 times the overall underground volume of vanilla 1.6.4, thus it took around that much longer to explore a given area, and even then I found every type of biome, save for Mushroom Island (I've only ever found one in my first world, largely since I stay under or near land):
These are close-ups of the edges of the world, followed by x-ray views of areas I explored; the size of the jungle trees at the top-left and to-center gives you an idea of how deep the ground is (measured at 201 blocks deep at the right):
This is the tunnel I dug down to my branch-mine (the increased depth had little impact on mining; ore distribution was simply scaled from vanilla so they all had wider ranges relative to what vanilla has above cave lava level; 0-255 for coal, 0-191 for iron, 0-68 for gold, etc with vein counts increased to maintain the same density):
This is a ravine in an area I didn't explore, 191 blocks deep with the top at y=217; on the left side of the cave rendering above is a ravine I explored that is nearly as deep (the average size of ravines was increased a lot more than individual caves in these mods, with most of the increase in the size of cave systems due to many more and longer tunnels, though quite large chambers could generate on occasion):
This list is a long time in the making. While I'm ecstatic that Mojang is finally improving the terrain generation of Minecraft, over the last 10 years of exploring Minecraft worlds, I've developed a sense of what I believe are its most overdue shortcomings in terrain generation. In this thread, instead of focusing on a variety of cool new features I'd like to see, which would be a list which would never end, I am going to focus mainly on fixing what I perceive to be largely aesthetic problems in the current Overworld terrain generation, that have lingered for the last ten years. Feel free to add your thoughts or any big issues I might have missed. (I am omitting the re-hauling of the Swamp and Birch Forest biomes, due to Mojang finally getting around to improving them for the Wild Update.) Beginning with the broadest scale problems I see in Overworld terrain generation, my Top 12 Most Needed Overworld Terrain Changes are:
1. Fully formed Continents, instead of the Endless Sponge pattern of Land and Ocean generation.
2. A larger volume of Islands and Archipelagos to populate the dull monotony of ocean.
3. A larger and more interesting variety of tree shapes, with much taller and looming forests.
4. Full Grass Blocks or connected texture Grass, to prevent hills from looking like dirt mounds from side angles.
5. Color variation in the cool Ocean biomes, like that of Warm Oceans, instead of the bland, featureless monotony of blue.
6. Integration of Red and Orange Terracotta into Savannah biome, to add a pop of color contrast and look less bland.
7. Thinner stone-wall-size Birch Tree trunk block, to make birch trees look stylistically closer to true birch trees.
8. Smoothing out of ugly erratic desert terrain, and possibly integration of wavy Sahara Desert style terrain patterns.
9. Re-haul of the Stone Shore biome, with boulders made of Tuff and Smooth Basalt, to make it less dull and ugly.
10. At least 2 more unique cave biomes in addition to the Lush Caves, to give the underground more life.
11. Improvement of the ugly Flat Wall cliffside terrain generation against ocean shores, which look unnatural.
12. Cleaning up of Aquifers' ridiculous scattered mess style terrain generation, which look unnatural.
I disagree; while I only started using "better grass" after I added it to my own modded versions I now think that the game looks ugly without it, along with "better snow", which renders grass as snowy below partial blocks adjacent to snow (my implementation actually replaces the top grass texture with snow, rather than rendering an actual snow layer "block", with the shading on the sides of adjacent snow layers changed so they blend in):
Also, a feature of TMCW is that snow generates under trees during world generation, which along with the above greatly improves the appearance of snowy biomes (this is a much older addition, added over 6 years ago in TMCWv3; "better grass/snow" was added last year in TMCWv4.5):
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?
I agree with all of those points. Support. Though, I'm 50/50 on the full grass blocks thing.
There's a lot of good ideas here- and, luckily, I think a lot of these will eventually be covered in 1.18 or 19.
1.Not sure about continents; I think it's possible, (I'm not sure how 1.18 changes generation on a larger scale, though I seem to recall something about more mountainous terrain generation further inland. Two is sort of similar- I guess some smaller islands could be interesting, but not to the extent that they entirely replace the ocean.
3.Definitely! Regular forests are quite boring compared to various updated biomes... and just other existing biomes. I'm hoping the Wild Update adds more interesting generation to existing forests, even if it's as simple as podzol/coarse dirt in forest floors, and more unique tree shapes for different forests.
4. ...Neutral? This is really up to personal preference, and it's already an Optifine Feature.
5. Pretty sure cool oceans already have darker blue water.
6. Yes please! It would be such a small tweak, but would give savannahs something interesting other than Acacia Wood and Coarse dirt.
7.Too big of a change to work properly; especially if it alters existing birch wood. Birch trees themselves could generate more slender, (as in, 1*1 block), compared to other trees.
8. Deserts could use some work...
9.Could be interesting, and it would be neat to have another way of finding tuff.
10.Deep Dark? Dripstone Caves?
11/12.I kind of like cliff faces and aquifers, but again, I haven't really noticed much to have a preference.
Cooking with Mindthemoods ~ Biomes ~ Archeology
---
~ My Portfolio ~ Skindex ~ Test ~ Discs ~
The fact that a feature exists in a mod, which can only be used by Java Edition players, which are a minority of the player base, should never be a reason to not add a suggestion. Did you know that a lot of graphical settings once required Optifine (it is often claimed that Mojang can't add them because they can't use Optifine's code, which is true but they can write their own code to do so since the concept themselves aren't copyrighted)?
Remember before 1.7, when there was no mipmapping (hence the description here of "You would also see that blocks would have this sort of pixelation effect after they got further and further away from you. This was especially noticeable on leaf blocks (with Fancy graphics)."), fog was much denser and started much closer to the player (compare vanilla 1.6.4 to Optifine - the latter looks much better at the same render distance; even though vanilla is now similar to Optifine's default setting they could still have a slider to adjust fog distance, even turn it off), crude render distance control ("Tiny", "Short", "Normal", "Far", each of which was double the previous, or 4x the rendered area, so there was a big leap between each one, while now if Far (16 chunks) is too much but Normal (8 chunks) is good enough you could go for 9-15 chunks), a brightness setting and vsync (vanilla did not have these until Beta 1.8 and Release 1.4.2 respectively), and individual control of some settings, such as clouds (previously there was only a single global Fast/Fancy setting; IMO vanilla should include more settings like this, for example, leaves are primarily responsible for the performance difference between Fast and Fancy so having a separate toggle for them would be good; of course, any "better grass/snow" settings would also be toggleable).
Vanilla has even incorporated some of Optifine's gameplay-altering features, such as "clear water", which lowered the light opacity from 3 to 1 so light can penetrate much further underwater, as was done in 1.13 ("clear water" also greatly reduced underwater fog, which I believe was not changed, or at least not as much, I know that some people have complained about the lack of the setting in Optifine since 1.13 because of this). Spyglasses can be seen as an implementation of Optifine's "zoom" feature in a more gameplay-balanced manner as they require the player to craft and use an item instead of simply pressing a button (likewise, shulker boxes are similar to backpacks but are much harder to obtain and harder to use than how mods often implement them, same for elytra and mods that allow the player to fly in Survival mode; all in all, if there is a feature in vanilla there is probably a mod that implemented it before; bigger caves? I've been modding them into the game for the past 8 years and experimented for a while with making the ground 2-3x deeper and there are even older mods that did these, like this one from 2012).
Conversely, Optifine let you disable some vanilla features, such as void fog, before it was officially removed, and good riddance (it was removed due to "performance issues" but they only had to remove/reduce the particle effect, not the fog itself, which was simply render distance fog modified to be closer and darker as you went deeper without skylight; of course, it also made it difficult to see far in deeper caves, especially the sort I've modded in, hence my own mods disabled it without the need for Optifine).
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?
As it stands I think the current default Minecraft oak tree is way too basic, outdated, and tiny. Instead of being these impressive, looming halls of lumber and branches, current Minecraft forests tend to be this annoying scattering of tiny bush-sized trees, which don't really feel like a real forest, and are annoying to try to ride a horse through.
Yes, but leaving the side of a green grass block all brown dirt texture is poor and unnatural way to incorporate color variety to a grassy landscape. It means there are no full grassy hills, no slopes, without being cut through with a line of dirt texture. It's simply bad aesthetic design. It's also superfluous since, even with connected texture or full grass blocks, we would still get visual patches of dirt when any slope or hill is more than 1 block steep. If color variety is our concern here, then that should be incorporated in a more coherent way, with new landscape features to contrast against the green grass slopes.
It's not really a matter of intentional design. Cold ocean remains flat textureless blue not out of any thoughtful design choice, but because that was the first default rendering of ocean that Minecraft had, and nobody bothered to make it more interesting and give it a facelift as the game began to incorporate deeper aesthetic features. It's just outdated game design. Also, "intentional blandness" is an idea which sounds nice on paper to many Minecraft players but ultimately just amounts to an excuse to make the game dull, letting miles of terrain generation be wasted on poor design.
Imagine that fried yellowish savannah grass accented with a pop of red and orange terracotta. I'd add some red sand, too. Would look much more like a real life African savannah, which tend to have a lot of warm reddish tones with red clay and dirt.
Wood be.
This one drives me nuts. So much potentially wonderful oceanfront shore ruined by featureless blobs of stone, which don't look like any real life terrain, they just look like blobs of Minecraft stone. If Mojang wants to incorporate a stone shore, they should actually design a stone shore biome with features like boulders and other stuff, but if they're just going to make it a blob of stone blocks, then they should have just made it a sandy beach instead.
I really miss this part of 1.6.4's generation and prior versions, and unfortunately the only way to replicate some feeling of it today is to use Large Biomes (which I understand does not replicate the generation at all, but the increased size of the "oceans" can at least make it feel a little more spread out, since that's exactly what it is). Thankfully in my main world I still have some 1.5 chunks - but, this is such a small portion of the world (only about a square mile estimated) that it makes no big difference except for the caving.
Additionally it would be ideal to have such continents maintain some consistency in temperature/biomes - this would make other continents worth exploring, in the event that your main continent is home to temperate/colder biomes (as opposed to deserts and jungles).
LP series? Not my style! Video series? Closer, but not quite. Survival journal, maybe? That's better. Now in Season 4 of the Legends of Quintropolis Journal (<< click to view)!! World download and more can be found there.
This would be even worse than the 1.7+ biome generation; I've literally spent almost half a year of my life playing on my first world (probably way more than most people have spent in total playing Minecraft), yet still have to fully explore the spawn continent - so I'm not supposed to be able to find a single biome of a different temperature for at least that long (and no, I don't want to have to explore out of my way, i.e. anything aside from caving, just to find one). This is why TMCW does not disallow snowy biomes from generating next to hot biomes, just like in vanilla 1.6.4, where the variety in biome generation within a small area is one of its main features for me (aside from the underground), and only has very loosely defined "climate zones"; even vanilla 1.6.4 has "snowy" regions composed of Ice Plains and Taiga (in fact, 1.7+ uses the same basic code to add climate zones, just with more types); in TMCW these regions are partially non-snowy biomes; likewise, I added "hot" regions but they aren't entirely hot biomes, and both are smaller than in vanilla:
In particular, note how small "TripleHeightTerrain" was, even though it wasn't my least-played world, due to having about 3.5 times the volume between sea level (increased to y=191, hence "triple height", though "triple depth" would be more accurate) and lava level (lowered to y=6) and about 3.7 times the overall underground volume of vanilla 1.6.4, thus it took around that much longer to explore a given area, and even then I found every type of biome, save for Mushroom Island (I've only ever found one in my first world, largely since I stay under or near land):
These are close-ups of the edges of the world, followed by x-ray views of areas I explored; the size of the jungle trees at the top-left and to-center gives you an idea of how deep the ground is (measured at 201 blocks deep at the right):
This is the tunnel I dug down to my branch-mine (the increased depth had little impact on mining; ore distribution was simply scaled from vanilla so they all had wider ranges relative to what vanilla has above cave lava level; 0-255 for coal, 0-191 for iron, 0-68 for gold, etc with vein counts increased to maintain the same density):
This is a ravine in an area I didn't explore, 191 blocks deep with the top at y=217; on the left side of the cave rendering above is a ravine I explored that is nearly as deep (the average size of ravines was increased a lot more than individual caves in these mods, with most of the increase in the size of cave systems due to many more and longer tunnels, though quite large chambers could generate on occasion):
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?