So my Realm is expiring...I talked it over with the boyfriend last night and we decided to just download the world and play on a LAN since we now live together and his kids seem to have abandoned Minecraft. So then we toyed with the idea of starting a new world for just us and I discovered the customized options button! Apparently this has been around a while and I totally missed it, but I haven't been able to find a lot of info on what the different tweeks do. The Minecraft Wiki page was somewhat helpful, but does anyone have an explanation or link to some such that describes the possible results of certain combinations? We aren't planning on changing anything with the ores, mostly we are interested in tweeking the terrain that generates.
I thought it might be nice to have larger biomes, although it is kind of nice to be able to find a bunch of them close by for wood types and such for building.
If the biomes were larger, would it limit the generation of things like Woodland Mansions and Water Temples, or would we have a higher chance of finding such structures closer together in one large biome?
I was also thinking of limiting the river and lake generation somewhat to make horse travel more convenient and finding a suitable squid-farm spot a little easier.
The biome size setting scales the size of biomes by doubling (halving) their size with each step up (down) while keeping everything in the same relative locations; a plains biome at 100, 200 on Default (size 4) will be at 400, 800 on Large Biomes (size 6). Also, the default size of 4 gives an average biome size of 256x256 blocks (1024x1024 for 6, and so on).
River size works similarly, although it is a bit misleading since it doesn't actually change the size (width and depth) of rivers themselves but the "borders" along which they generate (similar to biome borders).
The chance of lakes is another counter-intuitive setting; increasing the chance makes them rarer with the frequency scaling inversely; the default for water lakes is 4 while 8 (2) would give half (double) the frequency (this also means that you can only make them up to 4 times more common but much, much rarer). Note that this also only affects the approximately chunk-sized pools that generate at any elevation, not land that is below sea level. Lava lakes follow the same pattern but are much rarer; similar to water lakes this does not affect lava in caves below y=11.
Also, these settings can be manipulated to be outside of the bounds imposed by the sliders by directly editing the preset code given on the presets page, as can many others (note that some may crash the game if set too far out of bounds).
As for structures, most can only generate within particular biomes and only a few can be found together in the same biome, so you'll likely spread them further apart from structures of another type, but with more per biome (even in default worlds villages can be quite common in "hot" areas, which are largely Plains, Savanna, and Desert). Woodland mansions and ocean monuments require that the biome around their location is all the biome they spawn in (Deep Ocean or Roofed Forest) so they will be more common (after accounting for the increase in biome size). Note that the predetermined locations of structures are not affected by biome size (in other words, if you had a Plains-only world the locations of villages would remain constant as biome size changes, otherwise whether they exist depends on the biome at each location), and aside from dungeons (which are not really the same thing as structures) there is no way to change how common they are.
So my Realm is expiring...I talked it over with the boyfriend last night and we decided to just download the world and play on a LAN since we now live together and his kids seem to have abandoned Minecraft. So then we toyed with the idea of starting a new world for just us and I discovered the customized options button! Apparently this has been around a while and I totally missed it, but I haven't been able to find a lot of info on what the different tweeks do. The Minecraft Wiki page was somewhat helpful, but does anyone have an explanation or link to some such that describes the possible results of certain combinations? We aren't planning on changing anything with the ores, mostly we are interested in tweeking the terrain that generates.
I thought it might be nice to have larger biomes, although it is kind of nice to be able to find a bunch of them close by for wood types and such for building.
If the biomes were larger, would it limit the generation of things like Woodland Mansions and Water Temples, or would we have a higher chance of finding such structures closer together in one large biome?
I was also thinking of limiting the river and lake generation somewhat to make horse travel more convenient and finding a suitable squid-farm spot a little easier.
Anyone have any sage advice?
The biome size setting scales the size of biomes by doubling (halving) their size with each step up (down) while keeping everything in the same relative locations; a plains biome at 100, 200 on Default (size 4) will be at 400, 800 on Large Biomes (size 6). Also, the default size of 4 gives an average biome size of 256x256 blocks (1024x1024 for 6, and so on).
River size works similarly, although it is a bit misleading since it doesn't actually change the size (width and depth) of rivers themselves but the "borders" along which they generate (similar to biome borders).
The chance of lakes is another counter-intuitive setting; increasing the chance makes them rarer with the frequency scaling inversely; the default for water lakes is 4 while 8 (2) would give half (double) the frequency (this also means that you can only make them up to 4 times more common but much, much rarer). Note that this also only affects the approximately chunk-sized pools that generate at any elevation, not land that is below sea level. Lava lakes follow the same pattern but are much rarer; similar to water lakes this does not affect lava in caves below y=11.
Also, these settings can be manipulated to be outside of the bounds imposed by the sliders by directly editing the preset code given on the presets page, as can many others (note that some may crash the game if set too far out of bounds).
As for structures, most can only generate within particular biomes and only a few can be found together in the same biome, so you'll likely spread them further apart from structures of another type, but with more per biome (even in default worlds villages can be quite common in "hot" areas, which are largely Plains, Savanna, and Desert). Woodland mansions and ocean monuments require that the biome around their location is all the biome they spawn in (Deep Ocean or Roofed Forest) so they will be more common (after accounting for the increase in biome size). Note that the predetermined locations of structures are not affected by biome size (in other words, if you had a Plains-only world the locations of villages would remain constant as biome size changes, otherwise whether they exist depends on the biome at each location), and aside from dungeons (which are not really the same thing as structures) there is no way to change how common they are.
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?