"Doing a Garnet" is straight lines through *difficult* terrain for mapping purposes. Nothing's difficult from an airship, so it doesn't count. But there may be "doing a Garnet" in the future, based on something that comes up in a forthcoming episode.
I'm not so much talking about modern vanilla in general as modern vanilla *villages*, which are a mess in difficult terrain, with doors far in the air over 15 blocks of pillar, like this one:
Even in ordinary terrain it can be a mess; I saw one village with doors in the air just next to an RTG river. You have to be *bad* to botch building placement in flattish RTG terrain.
Millenaire villages come out much better because a) they consider terrain when placing building (they won't place if it's not reachable or on an excessive slope, and b ) they impose a flat area right around the building. Occasionally you get this kind of chunk wall effect but it's a much rarer problem than with vanilla.
Nothing really *wrong* with Ice Spikes on hills, it's just that I programmed the terrain and didn't remember making it hilly.
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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.
A large part of the issue with vanilla villages is a change made in 1.10 which allows them to spread into any biome, previously they could only generate within their valid spawn biomes, which were generally flat, and which I made even flatter, adding hillier variants and increasing the underlying frequency of village spawn attempts to compensate.
Although you can still find elevation differences of 5-10 blocks across the biomes and even a few blocks can cause doors to be too high or low, which I did attempt to reduce by allowing village placement to measure the average ground level within the entire 32x32 block area that can be accessed during chunk population (vanilla restricts them to the central 16x16 blocks; worst-case a single block will be used to determine the ground level for an entire building if that is all that intersects it, with that altitude used for all subsequent pieces*), there is still the issue that buildings may be placed in separate pieces and the part with the door may be placed second, and/or be in unloaded chunks when the first part is placed, thus it isn't possible to use the altitude to make sure it is at ground level (well it is, if you don't care about recursive chunk loading).
*The consequences of not doing this can be seen in modern (post-1.12.2) versions due to multithreaded chunk generation (I suppose they could fix this by sharing the structure data via volatile/synchronized methods. Or, just optimize the game so you don't need like 20 threads to generate a world within a few seconds, or use a single thread for structure placement). Also, prior to 1.6.4 structure data didn't persist between sessions and this could possibly cause them to generate at different heights when fully generated across sessions (this is why I only removed structure saving for mineshafts, which generate at a predetermined, fixed altitude independent of terrain. There is one quirk that results from this, and post-1.12.2, the possibility of finding double cave spider spawners, even two right next to each other, I fixed this in TMCW by making their placement tied to the structure itself, not the RNG that places features).
My own structures are much better about this since they are placed all at once, with the limitation that they can't be more than 32x32 blocks, some also include some terraforming, but not just by chopping out a block of land, but sloping it up over a few blocks (so only the ground next to the structure is level, then it is 1 block up, 3 blocks, etc; or only 1-3 blocks are removed from the former surface, again more next to the structure). I also disable or modify the generation of trees in chunks with certain structures so they don't end up getting overwritten by them (igloos disable trees in their chunk; mansions disable trees in their chunk as well as parts of the surrounding 3x3 chunks; otherwise, you'd find trees merged with the structure. The code I use to measure ground level also ignores logs, whereas vanilla includes any solid block (vanilla can also generate village paths in trees that overhang them since they simply generate on the highest solid surface).
Also, Mojang did change villages in 1.14 so they no longer generate on pillars but actually place blobs of land below them, or are supposed to, although there is still a lot of awkward generation as seen from the following issues (and you cant even fix it by adding flatter biome variants like I did because biomes and terrain are now separate, or mostly, since I assume there are still special biome variations like "Mesa Bryce" (the spikes of land could be seen as more of a feature than terrain though, I do generate them during terrain generation but as separate entities from the overall height map):
(some of the examples do show water lakes, which were likely removed in 1.18 due to the issues they caused and can still happen with lava lakes, which is again an issue specific to post-1.12.2. Maybe it can occur at the very edge of a village in earlier versions but I've never seen it)
Also, Mojang did change villages in 1.14 so they no longer generate on pillars but actually place blobs of land below them, or are supposed to, although there is still a lot of awkward generation as seen from the following issues (and you cant even fix it by adding flatter biome variants like I did because biomes and terrain are now separate, or mostly, since I assume there are still special biome variations like "Mesa Bryce" (the spikes of land could be seen as more of a feature than terrain though, I do generate them during terrain generation but as separate entities from the overall height map):
It seems as though villages often generate near or on top of ravines or gaping holes in the ground. I have a case where one village generated on top of such a cavern opening, the pillar being more than twenty blocks high (this was generated in 1.7):
I haven't seen similar generation beyond 1.14, which would make sense given the changes you noted. But this particular village seems unusual, as though it shouldn't have been allowed to generate like this.
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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.
Episode 94: Something Old, Something New, Something Blue - but not really anything borrowed, sorry.
I'm exploring, but I'll still pick up a little sugarcane when I can! Even an oddly placed one like this.
I contemplate going in to the wendy bayous to maximize my mapping, but decide to stay in relatively open water instead.
The acacia-looking tree is actually an acacia - sort of. RTG puts acacias made of dark oak material into its Roofed Forest. Pink thought they looked good. The flat tops do work out.
Soon I find a river running into the swamp from the south, so I end up spending a lot less time in the swamp than I expected - for now, anyway.
The river forks. I run over to grab the cane on the left and then take the right fork, which is heading south. I'm curious whether this connects to the southern oceans.
And the answer, evidently, is no. There's a cold zone, meaning a frozen river, and what looks like a mountain further on, which will stop even the frozen river.
I chop and re-place the boat, to try ice boating, but I hear zombie noises. Something must have spawned in the dark forest you could see in the last pic. I pull out my sword, but then fatfinger the E key and get stuck in my inventory. While I'm bailing myself out of the modular inventory screen.
It lights me.
I run a bit to get some distance, and then turn around -
To find the zombie has gotten stuck in my boat. It burns to a crisp before I can take a shot, so all you see is the rotten meat floating next to it. Sorry, my keyboarding skills are really off today.
I get in the boat and start iceboating. I'm getting better at it - one trick I've learned is that you don't want to go full speed - that's just too fast with the directional control issues. Overall, I'm definitely faster than on water.
As expected, though, the mountain is the source of the river. I get out and cross the mountain. On the other side I find another river, continuing south.
This returns to temperate climate soon enough - unfortunately Dark Forest.
It's a nice wide river though, so I feel pretty safe apart from one portage. Unfortunately, as you can see, I must have put down my map for a bit while I was iceboating and so I missed some mapping. Grrr.
And the river does indeed reach the sea, still in Dark Forest.
There's a Millenaire sheepherder, on a little clearing between the sea and some kind of back bay. I don't say hi, although I do map round the edge of the bay.
The bay has another river coming out of it, to the east, though the Dark Forest. I take it, hoping to get the forest mapped without having to brave it or fetch my airship.
This river also goes to the sea. And I do get the area below me mapped - except for ONE DOT. After some thought, I decide to just live with it.
Across the bay is a Byzantine village, on another river. I head over to check in, but they don't have anything I want to trade. Actually, they don't have ANYTHING to trade, which surprises me. I guess I went by on the coast too quickly for them to do anything.
It's sunset, and a hospitable town worker lets me crash in his house.
The village is built over a cave system and there are a number of openings. The town planning commission needs to up their game.
The river runs east for a little while and then turns north, which would be perfect for mapping.
If north weren't into a mountain range. I learned my lesson over the past few episodes and I'll leave this for a future airship operation.
Now it's time to tackle a different problem.
The massive Dark Forest I've been dealing with all along the coast. Pretty much all of the green between me and the snowy zone is Dark Forest, plus all the way to the coast, plus who knows how much inland. This might cause mapping problems. I adopt my usual first line tactic, walking the edge and hoping I get it all, even though that's unlikely. I only got the part near the coast because of a fortuitous river.
First I hit a lake, which I boat map, and then I spot this clearing inside the forest, with only a negligible screen of trees separating it from the outside. Per procedure, I go in and start walking the perimeter of the clearing.
The clearing is long, thin and wendy, so I walk it with my sword out. At the tip is a river, but this one is too narrow to boat safely. So I work my way back outside and keep walking the outside of the forest.
The mountains wrap around a bit to the north, and then as I turn west along the top the edge is swamp.
Then some regular forest, with a Tinker's floating island far above. I kind of wanted to go over and see if it was a purple slime island, but I forgot to do it.
I come across a lake and boat it out. This gives an opportunity to show how enormous this Dark Forest is. Almost all the dark green from where I am all the way to the ocean is Dark Forest (there is a bit of oak forest just below me and some birch to the east, but otherwise...)
Heading south into the aforementioned Oak Forest, I encounter a dayspawn brigade. For some reason there are several vanilla lighting bugs all clustered together (you can see one to the right of the Zombie). I off the dayspawners and place temporary torches to dispatch the lighting bugs.
Staying out of the forest eventually forces me all the way back to the river I took south to get here, near the spot where I first reached the snowy area. Now I head south along the border between the snowy zone and the roofed forest. But it's looking grim to finish the mapping from the outside.
A screen refresh and a color change inform me that it's now mid-autumn. But what's this? A clearing! Maybe I've got a chance to finish the mapping after all.
The clearing gets most of the area above me, but not quite all. There's still a few dots. I think about the hassle of hauling the airship down here and decide to
Risk it all treetopping the autumn colored Dark Forest. It actually turns out to be - not too bad. There's a little more up and down than in a vanilla Dark Forest because most of the trees aren't flat on top, but with a little care to avoid the holes I get around OK, if a bit slowly.
In the middle of the little spot I'm trying to map lies a small clearing, not easily accessible from the outside. It would be a little bit of hassle to get down, so I walk around the edge. And soon:
I'm done! Well, with this area. Treetop Zeno has arrived! I'd do a little dance - but I don't want to fall through a hole.
So I turn south to the rest of the Dark Forest.
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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've gone into the Dark Forest on the treetops. Now I need to get out.
It's fairly routine, but there *are* boobytraps.
I get back to the clearing I came from. I'd certainly survive a jump down, but it seems - tacky.
So I clamber over to the pillar I used to get up and dig down on it.
I map out the rest of this clearing (it's big)
Struggle along the border of the Dark Forest and Ice Mountains
And head to the sea along the boundary of the Dark Forest and some thankfully ordinary Taiga.
And I'm done! I got this whole enormous Dark Forest mapped from the ground and the water (and the treetops).
Now I map that little bulge to the left, through Taiga and regular Forest. I'm enjoying the fall colors.
Then the edge of the snowy zone.
Soon I've filled in that spot along the Frozen River that I missed because I put down my map for a bit. Then I continue on, wrapping around the area to my left.
There's mountains ahead of me, and Extreme Hills on the coast (judging by map colors) so I probably won't be able to map it all, but let's see what I can do.
When I reach the mountains I turn south. This will probably leave me "trapped" by this mountain range, with most of the terrain on this side of the range mapped. I figure, though, I'll be able to weasel my way to the coast and then boat west to the other side of the range and map there.
I have to squeeze by yet more Dark Forest, but when I get to the coastal Extreme Hills
It's not that rugged on the east side, and I map all the way to the coast. I climb up this hill for the view, and it is nice!
Then west along the coast. I figure I'll be driven into the ocean, but I manage to walk along the edge of that big mountain ahead, helped by a little patch of swamp along the cost which makes the slope a little less problematic.
On the other side of the mountain I find a large mountain valley. This I can map.
This is going to wait, though.
There's a pass leading west past that mountain.
I'm finding the mountains much less of a hassle this time. Part of this may be that RTG has noise based variation in Extreme Hills - so the surface roughness and hill sizes vary from place to place. Part is that I'm sort of getting the hang of dealing with the structure of RTG Extreme Hills - large valleys separated by sharp ridges. And part is that being next to the water gives me "escape routes" where the ridges run into the ocean.
There are some caves in the pass, but I don't care to investigate.
Beyond the pass is the other side of the range, and a large swamp. It looks like there's a lot of water from the map and I try boating; but it doesn't work very well. I'm still in the usual situation boat a bit, get out, walk a bit, etc.
On the other side of the swamp proper is a very complicated mix of multiple forest types, swamp, and Extreme Hills. I've said it before, but I like this kind of thing and I think it makes terrain more interesting. Even in all the massive explorations I've done in this journal, I've never seen anything quite like this.
Then a wide friendly pass between the Extreme Hills range to my left and this one outcrop to my right. I'm trying to stick to the left/south side.
I do encounter a ridgeline, and following my new Wu Wei policy, I walk alongside it, sticking to lower and less rugged parts of the Extreme Hills.
The ridgeline gradually curves around, with excellent views of that plain ahead and to my right, and that outcrop mountain on the right, plus what looks like a large, inviting lake.
Of course I accept the invitation! You know how I am.
After I've circled the lake, since there are mountains blocking me from going further west, I figue it's a good time to head back east. I land and prepare to head off.
Ooh, but what's this? Exposed iron at the lakeshore? I'm pretty short of iron right now, so I pull out my pickaxe and mine it up.
And now that I think about it, I should have been looking for iron in all the mountain climbing. Something to remember in the future.
On the north side of the outcrop mountain is this broad sweeping valley with views of forest and swamp in the distance.
I gotta say, not only are the red leaves too bright for swamp, they go on too long. Seems I've been looking at red swamp leaves for quite a while.
Still collecting sugarcane.
Night falls and I climb up on to a swamp tree to catch the sunset.
Next episode: Rather more excitement than I like.
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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 fourth image in your latest update shows a good example of why I said I like RTG shore generation. It's rare that you get such a thing in vanilla. The shores are usually far steeper.
If that had a large beach there, that cove would be begging for a beach house.
"Doing a Garnet" is straight lines through *difficult* terrain for mapping purposes. Nothing's difficult from an airship, so it doesn't count. But there may be "doing a Garnet" in the future, based on something that comes up in a forthcoming episode.
I'm looking forward to it!
I once used a cargo ship, haha, so nothing about an airship prevents it from counting.
I'm not so much talking about modern vanilla in general as modern vanilla *villages*, which are a mess in difficult terrain, with doors far in the air over 15 blocks of pillar, like this one:
Even in ordinary terrain it can be a mess; I saw one village with doors in the air just next to an RTG river. You have to be *bad* to botch building placement in flattish RTG terrain.
That's 1.12 though, which isn't equivalent to how modern versions do it. Villages back then were pretty bad about some of that stuff. Of course, they have their own oddities now too, but I was referring to that completely straight cut into the corner you showed. I don't see such things in modern Minecraft, even though the structures often generate, as you said, in more extreme and non-flat conditions. But that's also a modded, and very large, structure so it's hard to saw how much of it is from that.
I must have misread your earlier comment about RTG beaches, because I thought you said you *didn't* like the way they slope off slowly. I would like a little more variety, TBH; I like the gradual slope but it would be better if sometimes it had drop-offs (beside mountain sides, which do sometimes drop off).
Yes, I know vanilla villages have been improved somewhat. I played a little in modern minecraft a few months ago, and journaled it, as usual, although I doubt I'll ever publish. I thought the villages were much improved in their architecture, and somewhat improved in their placement. The somewhat flatter new terrain helps some, of course.
Large structures in procedural terrain are a problem. That's just how it is. But I think this is the first time I've seen something that bad in this huge continent, so I can live with it.
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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 only thing I can think of that I would say I don't "like" about RTG beaches might be that they aren't all too existent to begin with (at least in the sizes I'd prefer to see them at), but that's not something exclusive to RTG anyway. Vanilla doesn't, and never has, do/done beaches like I'd want either. I've only ever seen large beaches done well in custom maps.
But anyway, yeah, when I was talking about RTG shores, I was saying I liked how it does them. It definitely has the same behavior vanilla does in that it tends to do them all a similar way (with the differences being how each of them do it), so I presume making a terrain generator that's both high in variety and doing it "right" isn't easy to do.
You're also probably the only person I saw refer to new (presuming this was 1.18 or newer anyway?) terrain as flatter at all. Old terrain (pre-1.18) was far too flat almost all of the time, and new terrain is far more mixed.
Perhaps rougher is a better word than less flat - irregular over fairly small areas. And 1.7. era generation is only flat in Plains and Swamp; anything that could have Hills in it could and fairly frequently did have abrupt spikes of 3D noise. And Extreme Hills, of course, was frequently nuts, although it was supposed to be, so that would be pretty OK - except that villages could not infrequently spill over to gruesome results.
RTG + Geo beaches could be wider everywhere with the "wider beaches" Geo setting, but I haven't used it. The plunge rate is mostly set by the depth of Ocean biome (the usually coastal Ocean per se, not Deep Ocean). I have it set to fairly shallow, to make land easier to spot on long ocean voyages. It could potentially vary more, and perhaps that would be a good tradeoff; not many players essay long sea voyages where they need to spot land but a lot look at different beaches. That would be part of a broad overhaul of RTG terrain though; I don't like changing one or two biomes because of incompatibility with existing worlds.
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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 1.7. era generation is only flat in Plains and Swamp; anything that could have Hills in it could and fairly frequently did have abrupt spikes of 3D noise.
Oh, perhaps I should explain that I made that statement more in regards to 1.6 and earlier terrain, so if 1.7 to 1.16/1.17 were different here, then perhaps my statement would apply a bit less. I guess I commonly see all pre-1.18 terrain as similar enough in many regards, especially compared to the much larger differences 1.18 brings.
But anyway, your remark surprised me since I think most people seem to find that current generation is less flat than before, not more flat.
RTG + Geo beaches could be wider everywhere with the "wider beaches" Geo setting, but I haven't used it.
I didn't know there was a simple setting for that or else I probably would have tried it when I was playing this. This sounds like it might overdo it, though?
The wider beaches in Geo are double-width. RTG would alter that with the beach post-processing; less than double next to mountains; not sure about elsewhere.
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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.
By "double wide", I take it you are referring to depth instead? As in, the distance between the shore and where it transitions from sand away from beach?
In any case, I'm not sure how large RTG beaches tend to be, but using vanilla beaches an example, those being twice as deep wouldn't be enough. I wish they were more of a miro-biome rather than a small but semi-frequent shore feature, which is more what they feel like.
Width means the horizontal distance assigned "beach" biome. But, that will also affect the terrain heights. In vanilla, most of the time, the added width will be slightly-above-water sandy beach, while the rise on the land side and the drop on on the ocean side will be about the same width as before. RTG blends terrain at a greater distance, so you might see more of a gentler slope in the beach region. Next to flattish biomes like Plains and non-hill Forest, you'd probably get a beach "shelf" kind of like you would in vanilla.
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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.
Yes, that's definitely another problem with vanilla beaches. Along with not being large/deep enough, they're usually not very flat. These two things make them poor "beaches" and more of just "periodic sand shores".
Episode 96: Expending Energy on Excessive Excitement
Continuing east, the swamp ends against the foothills of the mountain range I was dealing with, fairly successfully, last episode. Now, though, I wouldn't have the option of escaping to the sea if I hit some serious obstables, so I'll leave it for the airship and I turn left, toward the northeast.
Turns out, though, that this is the end of this mountain range. So I've successfully mapped an admittedly quite small mountain area, from the ground without serious complications. A good day.
I continue north through Birch Forest draped in fall color.
Then a plains area with a copse of large oak trees.
Past that I'm getting back to the snowy area, although it looks like I'm almost done with it. The Cold Taiga Hills sub-biome to my left adds some interest to what in vanilla can be a boring climate.
Then a big tree Oak forest, with some nice variety from the Spruce trees mixed in.
The big trees are a bit hard on the Minecraft decoration system, which doesn't like such big things that not infrequently spread into adjacent chunks. But views like this are just so rewarding. Makes all the work I put into the tree system worth it.
Continuing north, a Dark Forest blocks my way. But it's not very thick, and I can see through in spots to the plains on the other sice. VERY uncharacteristically, I decide to charge through, feeling a bit more confident in my combat abilities. It almost goes wrong, though, as a creeper spawns ahead and to the side of me. No pic, because I was dashing to avoid it.
I get through to the other side without setting off the creeper
And almost fall into the ravine. Phew, that was close!
And then:
WHOOMP!
I take damage? Did something follow me out of the Dark Forest?
No! It's bandits! I'm nervous because there's no water to escape to.
But, fortunately, they don't have anybody firing poison arrows, only melee fighters. And my sword is already in hand so none of my frequent fumblefingering. It turns out, between high power armor and a seriously sharp sword, I'm able to handle three melee bandits pretty easily.
I spot their nearby base and loot it, but they don't have much (unlike the bandits I fought in Episode 59) - just some copper coins, arrows, and a few raw chickens. I still take it.
The bandit camp is actually in the Dark Forest, a bit, so I leave immediately once I've checked the chests. Don't want to get creepered, especially in these one-door buildings, and I assume the one I saw is still around.
When I reach my previous explorations to the north I consider just going home but decide I'm good for a little more exploration, so I turn west (left), through *this* unusual mix of Taiga, Swamp, and Extreme Hills. Go mixed biomes!
Soon I hit a mix of Dark Forest and Dark Forest M (which has vanilla Dark Oak). It doesn't look that far to the other side, so I try charging through again. But I spot what looks like a spawning nest - a Zombie and probably something else too - so I back out and go around to the north.
Then I head back down on the other side (it's a small Dark Forest, probably a sub-biome of the swamp). I still end up going through small bits of Dark Forest, but I don't get hassled.
Night is falling, and for variety I pillar up into the canopy of some tall birches to sleep. In the morning:
Aaah! I'm suffocating! And where's my interface?
The suffocation smacks are coming thick and fast, and I can't figure out why I can't do ANYTHING. Eventually I realize I F1'd off my interface for an evening shot. Then I fumble around for a bit to get my axe in hand. I'm having bad memories of suffocating in my tree farm (even after waving around my axe) in my Return to Minecraft journal - but THIS journal is hardcore and I won't be coming back.
FINALLY I chop my way out, with a physical gasp of relief. Down 6 hearts (remember my armor gives me a bonus 4). This hurt me more than the bandits did this time, and almost as much as they did last time.
This is WAY too much adventure for me. Two relatively close calls, within minutes.
But, oddly, I choose to continue. Going through Dark Forest, continuing after a near-death experience, what's happening to me? Maybe there's something in my coffee?
Continuing west I soon come across this pleasant lake, which I eagerly boat.
From the lake I find a river going south. But soon it turns southwest, and I have to decide how I want to plan the rest of the expedition. So far I really haven't been following a plan other than to avoid leaving any unexplored bits, which have given me trouble on so many past episodes. I figure my choices are to take the river SW into this mostly unexplored map, or to go back east and finish the western part of the map I'be been on most of this episode.
I decide that finishing that area on the previous map is ambitious enough, and get out of my boat.
I cross back to the previous map (to the east) and am rewarded with this interesting mixed biome view as I prepare to explore out this area.
Next episode: Getting it done.
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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 start mapping this section of my main target map (1 south of the lower Pantheon map) with a spin on this small lake bridging the boundaring between this map and the one immediately west.
Then I head east along the top of the unmapped region.
When I reach the corner I turn south-southwest, passing through the cathedral forest I complemented in the previous episode, although this region has more spruce trees.
There's still a bit of the snowy area to the east to map, but I don't pass through it. I can see the Ice Spikes in the distance.
On my right is a mix of Taiga, Mega Taiga, and their hill variants. Then a plains area.
Near the junction of Taiga and Plains is an open woodland area where they mix. In that area lies a Byzantine village (suddenly seeing a lot of them recently). I head in hoping to sell the arrows I got from the bandits. But while some Millenaire villages buy arrows, this isn't one of them. I lug my unintended trade goods onwards.
I reach the edge of the map and peek over to the next map. This leaves a tiny strip unmapped, so I go a bit firther to finish it.
Even though this requires stepping into some Dark Forest. Yes, it appears you have a new Zeno.
Night is falling, and per my usual dislike of bed plopping, I retreat to the Byzantine village to sleep.
This guy is crafting an icon so maybe they'll have something to sell soon. I think the Byzantine icons would make good decor for the chateau.
Then off to tackle the Taiga/Mega Taiga region. This turns out to have quite a hill in it. I don't have to climb to the top, but I do anyway because I'm expecting some nice views.
Which I find. The hill combines an Extreme Hills sub-biome with a Taiga Hills sub-biome, in the spirit of the biome mixes I've been seeing on this trip, and they managed to combine into an unusually large forested hill. There's also some nice view of the plains and Ice Spikes on the other side.
A little more roaming though flatland Taiga, and I'm done with this section of the map. I decide to head for home. I probably should have done the other side up to the mountain range on that side, because now that area is "leftover", a bit awkward to fit into an expedition. Mistakes were made.
Instead, I make for the swampy area I started, planning to pick up the river and head home.
Soon enough I'm doing just that. I head back up the river to the one break near the hill, cross it, and continue north. But after some more travel, it doesn't look familiar. There should be a break for some Plains and the Ice Spikes in the distance, and I'm just seeing forests.
Because I took the wrong fork in the river just past the portage. The fork I took went northwest on to the next map west. I turn around and boat back to the Pantheon map.
The fork is south, in the wrong direction, so I get out and bushwhack NE through this small tree Birch Forest toward the river I should have taken in the first place.
I reach it, but the delay has put me behind schedule. You can see by my clock it's late afternoon. I can't make the Pantheon by nightfall and have to sleep on the riverside.
Next morning, I finish the rest of the trip to the Pantheon, to worship at the altar of
My map. This expedition has filled in that middle section on the south. I'm now halfway through fall, and it looks like there's about 3 expeditions worth of exploration - one for the area on the west, and two for the east. Having done two so far in the fall, I probably will have one left by the time winter arrives and I need to do my overwintering mining and decoration work.
Next episode: back to the air
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There's a lot of variety to see in those last couple. It's nice to be able to see this since I'm not playing it. I think the current season is helping push that variety further though. There's Browns of oak trees mixed with retained Greens of spruce, and the deep Reds of swamp trees. While I love spring and summer more for the lush Greens, the color variety is going to be better during autumn.
I think I realized why the rivers in RTG feel even smaller too. It's the more gradual slopes it does dropping off between land and water. The last river you showed is a good example. It looks like it's somewhere between just below average and average for an "old" river? By 1.18+ standards, it's tiny, but it's somewhere small and normal for the 1.12 it's based off I'd guess? Anyway, despite that, it seems even smaller, and I'm convinced it's the gradual slope. While it might already be less wide on the surface, those gradual slopes result in less water volume too.
On other words, the gradual slopes (which I approve of, mind you) RTG does really beg for wider rivers to accommodate them in my opinion, and I think that is precisely why I've always thought they felt "too small". Not only are they too small on the surface, but so are they below the surface.
I too adore Autumn. Serene Seasons Spring has a nice feel with all the saturated greens and blueish tinges, especially after going through Winter (you have to do it to understand; there is a feel that's just not in the pics). But Autumn is absolutely the best for pretty pics. My only gripe is the 6 months of red swamps; it just doesn't look right. Sadly, and surprisingly, Serene Seasons has fairly minimal configuation options (there's temperate seasons, tropical seasons, and no season; I would really expect some by-biome-by-month temperature adjustments.) I'm seriously considering altering the vegetation for swamps to use other leaves like Birch and Jungle in hopes they'll look better with swamp seasonal changes (probably as a config option). That creates a problem in that the resulting trees might not be growable, and I'm musing on the tradeoff.
Interestingly a lot of the prettiness you get from mixed colors doesn't happen in vanilla - you need mixed trees, and vanilla doesn't mix much. There's a real synergism there between Serene Seasons and RTG plus's *variably* mixed trees.
I'm also stewing on a minimod that would erase snow on loading if it's out of season. Then if you go back in summer to a region that you left with snow in the winter it'll be gone when you get there (much like in real life). It doesn't last *that* long when I come back, but it's still weird and offputting.
RTG rivers on average are wider than vanilla rivers from that era, at least in terms of minimum width. They are the way they are primarily because I like boating (as you see) and I just couldn't consistently boat on vanilla rivers. RTG rivers I can boat almost all the time.
It is possible to make RTG rivers wider now due to changes I've put in to the configs. Defaults need to be the (unconfigurable) setting from before because otherwise a world being updated could get damaged from the change in parameters.
Deeper slopes do create a visual problem with RTG rivers. I made them shallower because I was getting complaints from users.
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The Red in the swamps doesn't bother me much, but I'm saying that as an observer and not as someone playing it. I do think it's a bit too saturated though.
Couldn't you change the raw color data directly somehow? What about Purple instead of Red? That would match a swamp, and it would lean partially into Red without being Red itself. Back in the times of 1.6, I used the "Better Grass and Leaves" mod, and it turned the grass and leaves in swamps Purple (it wasn't bright), and I loved it. When I updated to 1.7, the mod never updated (it did have a spiritual successor called "Better Foliage" eventually, but this didn't retain the Purple color in swamps) and I never had those Purple swamps again. I miss them.
What issues do deeper slopes create with rivers? Vanilla always had deeper slopes, and I'm unable to think of what could be an issue with that? I'm not saying the shallow slopes are not preferable. I'm just saying that it reduces the volume of water and I feel like it's why the rivers come across as smaller to me. The shallower slope seems to need wider rivers to truly shine, but that's merely my opinion.
The red is too RED for swamps, but the bigger problem (for me) staying that way for six months of the year is way too much. I assume there's probably a way to hack into Serene Seasons and change its color adjustments, but that's not something I know anything about and I have too much other stuff on my plate at the moment.
Steeper slopes create a kind of "knife edge" effect on the bottom.
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Curse Premium"Doing a Garnet" is straight lines through *difficult* terrain for mapping purposes. Nothing's difficult from an airship, so it doesn't count. But there may be "doing a Garnet" in the future, based on something that comes up in a forthcoming episode.
I'm not so much talking about modern vanilla in general as modern vanilla *villages*, which are a mess in difficult terrain, with doors far in the air over 15 blocks of pillar, like this one:
Even in ordinary terrain it can be a mess; I saw one village with doors in the air just next to an RTG river. You have to be *bad* to botch building placement in flattish RTG terrain.
Millenaire villages come out much better because a) they consider terrain when placing building (they won't place if it's not reachable or on an excessive slope, and b ) they impose a flat area right around the building. Occasionally you get this kind of chunk wall effect but it's a much rarer problem than with vanilla.
Nothing really *wrong* with Ice Spikes on hills, it's just that I programmed the terrain and didn't remember making it hilly.
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A large part of the issue with vanilla villages is a change made in 1.10 which allows them to spread into any biome, previously they could only generate within their valid spawn biomes, which were generally flat, and which I made even flatter, adding hillier variants and increasing the underlying frequency of village spawn attempts to compensate.
Although you can still find elevation differences of 5-10 blocks across the biomes and even a few blocks can cause doors to be too high or low, which I did attempt to reduce by allowing village placement to measure the average ground level within the entire 32x32 block area that can be accessed during chunk population (vanilla restricts them to the central 16x16 blocks; worst-case a single block will be used to determine the ground level for an entire building if that is all that intersects it, with that altitude used for all subsequent pieces*), there is still the issue that buildings may be placed in separate pieces and the part with the door may be placed second, and/or be in unloaded chunks when the first part is placed, thus it isn't possible to use the altitude to make sure it is at ground level (well it is, if you don't care about recursive chunk loading).
*The consequences of not doing this can be seen in modern (post-1.12.2) versions due to multithreaded chunk generation (I suppose they could fix this by sharing the structure data via volatile/synchronized methods. Or, just optimize the game so you don't need like 20 threads to generate a world within a few seconds, or use a single thread for structure placement). Also, prior to 1.6.4 structure data didn't persist between sessions and this could possibly cause them to generate at different heights when fully generated across sessions (this is why I only removed structure saving for mineshafts, which generate at a predetermined, fixed altitude independent of terrain. There is one quirk that results from this, and post-1.12.2, the possibility of finding double cave spider spawners, even two right next to each other, I fixed this in TMCW by making their placement tied to the structure itself, not the RNG that places features).
My own structures are much better about this since they are placed all at once, with the limitation that they can't be more than 32x32 blocks, some also include some terraforming, but not just by chopping out a block of land, but sloping it up over a few blocks (so only the ground next to the structure is level, then it is 1 block up, 3 blocks, etc; or only 1-3 blocks are removed from the former surface, again more next to the structure). I also disable or modify the generation of trees in chunks with certain structures so they don't end up getting overwritten by them (igloos disable trees in their chunk; mansions disable trees in their chunk as well as parts of the surrounding 3x3 chunks; otherwise, you'd find trees merged with the structure. The code I use to measure ground level also ignores logs, whereas vanilla includes any solid block (vanilla can also generate village paths in trees that overhang them since they simply generate on the highest solid surface).
Also, Mojang did change villages in 1.14 so they no longer generate on pillars but actually place blobs of land below them, or are supposed to, although there is still a lot of awkward generation as seen from the following issues (and you cant even fix it by adding flatter biome variants like I did because biomes and terrain are now separate, or mostly, since I assume there are still special biome variations like "Mesa Bryce" (the spikes of land could be seen as more of a feature than terrain though, I do generate them during terrain generation but as separate entities from the overall height map):
MC-126931 height of village structure placement is sometimes wrong
MC-140383 Villages spawn on top of floating islands, holes, and ravines
(some of the examples do show water lakes, which were likely removed in 1.18 due to the issues they caused and can still happen with lava lakes, which is again an issue specific to post-1.12.2. Maybe it can occur at the very edge of a village in earlier versions but I've never seen it)
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Curse PremiumIt seems as though villages often generate near or on top of ravines or gaping holes in the ground. I have a case where one village generated on top of such a cavern opening, the pillar being more than twenty blocks high (this was generated in 1.7):
I haven't seen similar generation beyond 1.14, which would make sense given the changes you noted. But this particular village seems unusual, as though it shouldn't have been allowed to generate like this.
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Curse PremiumEpisode 94: Something Old, Something New, Something Blue - but not really anything borrowed, sorry.
I'm exploring, but I'll still pick up a little sugarcane when I can! Even an oddly placed one like this.
I contemplate going in to the wendy bayous to maximize my mapping, but decide to stay in relatively open water instead.
The acacia-looking tree is actually an acacia - sort of. RTG puts acacias made of dark oak material into its Roofed Forest. Pink thought they looked good. The flat tops do work out.
Soon I find a river running into the swamp from the south, so I end up spending a lot less time in the swamp than I expected - for now, anyway.
The river forks. I run over to grab the cane on the left and then take the right fork, which is heading south. I'm curious whether this connects to the southern oceans.
And the answer, evidently, is no. There's a cold zone, meaning a frozen river, and what looks like a mountain further on, which will stop even the frozen river.
I chop and re-place the boat, to try ice boating, but I hear zombie noises. Something must have spawned in the dark forest you could see in the last pic. I pull out my sword, but then fatfinger the E key and get stuck in my inventory. While I'm bailing myself out of the modular inventory screen.
It lights me.
I run a bit to get some distance, and then turn around -
To find the zombie has gotten stuck in my boat. It burns to a crisp before I can take a shot, so all you see is the rotten meat floating next to it. Sorry, my keyboarding skills are really off today.
I get in the boat and start iceboating. I'm getting better at it - one trick I've learned is that you don't want to go full speed - that's just too fast with the directional control issues. Overall, I'm definitely faster than on water.
As expected, though, the mountain is the source of the river. I get out and cross the mountain. On the other side I find another river, continuing south.
This returns to temperate climate soon enough - unfortunately Dark Forest.
It's a nice wide river though, so I feel pretty safe apart from one portage. Unfortunately, as you can see, I must have put down my map for a bit while I was iceboating and so I missed some mapping. Grrr.
And the river does indeed reach the sea, still in Dark Forest.
There's a Millenaire sheepherder, on a little clearing between the sea and some kind of back bay. I don't say hi, although I do map round the edge of the bay.
The bay has another river coming out of it, to the east, though the Dark Forest. I take it, hoping to get the forest mapped without having to brave it or fetch my airship.
This river also goes to the sea. And I do get the area below me mapped - except for ONE DOT. After some thought, I decide to just live with it.
Across the bay is a Byzantine village, on another river. I head over to check in, but they don't have anything I want to trade. Actually, they don't have ANYTHING to trade, which surprises me. I guess I went by on the coast too quickly for them to do anything.
It's sunset, and a hospitable town worker lets me crash in his house.
The village is built over a cave system and there are a number of openings. The town planning commission needs to up their game.
The river runs east for a little while and then turns north, which would be perfect for mapping.
If north weren't into a mountain range. I learned my lesson over the past few episodes and I'll leave this for a future airship operation.
Now it's time to tackle a different problem.
The massive Dark Forest I've been dealing with all along the coast. Pretty much all of the green between me and the snowy zone is Dark Forest, plus all the way to the coast, plus who knows how much inland. This might cause mapping problems. I adopt my usual first line tactic, walking the edge and hoping I get it all, even though that's unlikely. I only got the part near the coast because of a fortuitous river.
First I hit a lake, which I boat map, and then I spot this clearing inside the forest, with only a negligible screen of trees separating it from the outside. Per procedure, I go in and start walking the perimeter of the clearing.
The clearing is long, thin and wendy, so I walk it with my sword out. At the tip is a river, but this one is too narrow to boat safely. So I work my way back outside and keep walking the outside of the forest.
The mountains wrap around a bit to the north, and then as I turn west along the top the edge is swamp.
Then some regular forest, with a Tinker's floating island far above. I kind of wanted to go over and see if it was a purple slime island, but I forgot to do it.
I come across a lake and boat it out. This gives an opportunity to show how enormous this Dark Forest is. Almost all the dark green from where I am all the way to the ocean is Dark Forest (there is a bit of oak forest just below me and some birch to the east, but otherwise...)
Heading south into the aforementioned Oak Forest, I encounter a dayspawn brigade. For some reason there are several vanilla lighting bugs all clustered together (you can see one to the right of the Zombie). I off the dayspawners and place temporary torches to dispatch the lighting bugs.
Staying out of the forest eventually forces me all the way back to the river I took south to get here, near the spot where I first reached the snowy area. Now I head south along the border between the snowy zone and the roofed forest. But it's looking grim to finish the mapping from the outside.
A screen refresh and a color change inform me that it's now mid-autumn. But what's this? A clearing! Maybe I've got a chance to finish the mapping after all.
The clearing gets most of the area above me, but not quite all. There's still a few dots. I think about the hassle of hauling the airship down here and decide to
Risk it all treetopping the autumn colored Dark Forest. It actually turns out to be - not too bad. There's a little more up and down than in a vanilla Dark Forest because most of the trees aren't flat on top, but with a little care to avoid the holes I get around OK, if a bit slowly.
In the middle of the little spot I'm trying to map lies a small clearing, not easily accessible from the outside. It would be a little bit of hassle to get down, so I walk around the edge. And soon:
I'm done! Well, with this area. Treetop Zeno has arrived! I'd do a little dance - but I don't want to fall through a hole.
So I turn south to the rest of the Dark Forest.
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Curse PremiumEpisode 95: Maybe Mastering Mountain Mapping
I've gone into the Dark Forest on the treetops. Now I need to get out.
It's fairly routine, but there *are* boobytraps.
I get back to the clearing I came from. I'd certainly survive a jump down, but it seems - tacky.
So I clamber over to the pillar I used to get up and dig down on it.
I map out the rest of this clearing (it's big)
Struggle along the border of the Dark Forest and Ice Mountains
And head to the sea along the boundary of the Dark Forest and some thankfully ordinary Taiga.
And I'm done! I got this whole enormous Dark Forest mapped from the ground and the water (and the treetops).
Now I map that little bulge to the left, through Taiga and regular Forest. I'm enjoying the fall colors.
Then the edge of the snowy zone.
Soon I've filled in that spot along the Frozen River that I missed because I put down my map for a bit. Then I continue on, wrapping around the area to my left.
There's mountains ahead of me, and Extreme Hills on the coast (judging by map colors) so I probably won't be able to map it all, but let's see what I can do.
When I reach the mountains I turn south. This will probably leave me "trapped" by this mountain range, with most of the terrain on this side of the range mapped. I figure, though, I'll be able to weasel my way to the coast and then boat west to the other side of the range and map there.
I have to squeeze by yet more Dark Forest, but when I get to the coastal Extreme Hills
It's not that rugged on the east side, and I map all the way to the coast. I climb up this hill for the view, and it is nice!
Then west along the coast. I figure I'll be driven into the ocean, but I manage to walk along the edge of that big mountain ahead, helped by a little patch of swamp along the cost which makes the slope a little less problematic.
On the other side of the mountain I find a large mountain valley. This I can map.
This is going to wait, though.
There's a pass leading west past that mountain.
I'm finding the mountains much less of a hassle this time. Part of this may be that RTG has noise based variation in Extreme Hills - so the surface roughness and hill sizes vary from place to place. Part is that I'm sort of getting the hang of dealing with the structure of RTG Extreme Hills - large valleys separated by sharp ridges. And part is that being next to the water gives me "escape routes" where the ridges run into the ocean.
There are some caves in the pass, but I don't care to investigate.
Beyond the pass is the other side of the range, and a large swamp. It looks like there's a lot of water from the map and I try boating; but it doesn't work very well. I'm still in the usual situation boat a bit, get out, walk a bit, etc.
On the other side of the swamp proper is a very complicated mix of multiple forest types, swamp, and Extreme Hills. I've said it before, but I like this kind of thing and I think it makes terrain more interesting. Even in all the massive explorations I've done in this journal, I've never seen anything quite like this.
Then a wide friendly pass between the Extreme Hills range to my left and this one outcrop to my right. I'm trying to stick to the left/south side.
I do encounter a ridgeline, and following my new Wu Wei policy, I walk alongside it, sticking to lower and less rugged parts of the Extreme Hills.
The ridgeline gradually curves around, with excellent views of that plain ahead and to my right, and that outcrop mountain on the right, plus what looks like a large, inviting lake.
Of course I accept the invitation! You know how I am.
After I've circled the lake, since there are mountains blocking me from going further west, I figue it's a good time to head back east. I land and prepare to head off.
Ooh, but what's this? Exposed iron at the lakeshore? I'm pretty short of iron right now, so I pull out my pickaxe and mine it up.
And now that I think about it, I should have been looking for iron in all the mountain climbing. Something to remember in the future.
On the north side of the outcrop mountain is this broad sweeping valley with views of forest and swamp in the distance.
I gotta say, not only are the red leaves too bright for swamp, they go on too long. Seems I've been looking at red swamp leaves for quite a while.
Still collecting sugarcane.
Night falls and I climb up on to a swamp tree to catch the sunset.
Next episode: Rather more excitement than I like.
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The fourth image in your latest update shows a good example of why I said I like RTG shore generation. It's rare that you get such a thing in vanilla. The shores are usually far steeper.
If that had a large beach there, that cove would be begging for a beach house.
I'm looking forward to it!
I once used a cargo ship, haha, so nothing about an airship prevents it from counting.
That's 1.12 though, which isn't equivalent to how modern versions do it. Villages back then were pretty bad about some of that stuff. Of course, they have their own oddities now too, but I was referring to that completely straight cut into the corner you showed. I don't see such things in modern Minecraft, even though the structures often generate, as you said, in more extreme and non-flat conditions. But that's also a modded, and very large, structure so it's hard to saw how much of it is from that.
It's a sign, haha. They want to be hilly.
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Curse PremiumI must have misread your earlier comment about RTG beaches, because I thought you said you *didn't* like the way they slope off slowly. I would like a little more variety, TBH; I like the gradual slope but it would be better if sometimes it had drop-offs (beside mountain sides, which do sometimes drop off).
Yes, I know vanilla villages have been improved somewhat. I played a little in modern minecraft a few months ago, and journaled it, as usual, although I doubt I'll ever publish. I thought the villages were much improved in their architecture, and somewhat improved in their placement. The somewhat flatter new terrain helps some, of course.
Large structures in procedural terrain are a problem. That's just how it is. But I think this is the first time I've seen something that bad in this huge continent, so I can live with it.
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The only thing I can think of that I would say I don't "like" about RTG beaches might be that they aren't all too existent to begin with (at least in the sizes I'd prefer to see them at), but that's not something exclusive to RTG anyway. Vanilla doesn't, and never has, do/done beaches like I'd want either. I've only ever seen large beaches done well in custom maps.
But anyway, yeah, when I was talking about RTG shores, I was saying I liked how it does them. It definitely has the same behavior vanilla does in that it tends to do them all a similar way (with the differences being how each of them do it), so I presume making a terrain generator that's both high in variety and doing it "right" isn't easy to do.
You're also probably the only person I saw refer to new (presuming this was 1.18 or newer anyway?) terrain as flatter at all. Old terrain (pre-1.18) was far too flat almost all of the time, and new terrain is far more mixed.
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Curse PremiumPerhaps rougher is a better word than less flat - irregular over fairly small areas. And 1.7. era generation is only flat in Plains and Swamp; anything that could have Hills in it could and fairly frequently did have abrupt spikes of 3D noise. And Extreme Hills, of course, was frequently nuts, although it was supposed to be, so that would be pretty OK - except that villages could not infrequently spill over to gruesome results.
RTG + Geo beaches could be wider everywhere with the "wider beaches" Geo setting, but I haven't used it. The plunge rate is mostly set by the depth of Ocean biome (the usually coastal Ocean per se, not Deep Ocean). I have it set to fairly shallow, to make land easier to spot on long ocean voyages. It could potentially vary more, and perhaps that would be a good tradeoff; not many players essay long sea voyages where they need to spot land but a lot look at different beaches. That would be part of a broad overhaul of RTG terrain though; I don't like changing one or two biomes because of incompatibility with existing worlds.
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Oh, perhaps I should explain that I made that statement more in regards to 1.6 and earlier terrain, so if 1.7 to 1.16/1.17 were different here, then perhaps my statement would apply a bit less. I guess I commonly see all pre-1.18 terrain as similar enough in many regards, especially compared to the much larger differences 1.18 brings.
But anyway, your remark surprised me since I think most people seem to find that current generation is less flat than before, not more flat.
I didn't know there was a simple setting for that or else I probably would have tried it when I was playing this. This sounds like it might overdo it, though?
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Curse PremiumThe wider beaches in Geo are double-width. RTG would alter that with the beach post-processing; less than double next to mountains; not sure about elsewhere.
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By "double wide", I take it you are referring to depth instead? As in, the distance between the shore and where it transitions from sand away from beach?
In any case, I'm not sure how large RTG beaches tend to be, but using vanilla beaches an example, those being twice as deep wouldn't be enough. I wish they were more of a miro-biome rather than a small but semi-frequent shore feature, which is more what they feel like.
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Curse PremiumWidth means the horizontal distance assigned "beach" biome. But, that will also affect the terrain heights. In vanilla, most of the time, the added width will be slightly-above-water sandy beach, while the rise on the land side and the drop on on the ocean side will be about the same width as before. RTG blends terrain at a greater distance, so you might see more of a gentler slope in the beach region. Next to flattish biomes like Plains and non-hill Forest, you'd probably get a beach "shelf" kind of like you would in vanilla.
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Yes, that's definitely another problem with vanilla beaches. Along with not being large/deep enough, they're usually not very flat. These two things make them poor "beaches" and more of just "periodic sand shores".
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Curse PremiumEpisode 96: Expending Energy on Excessive Excitement
Continuing east, the swamp ends against the foothills of the mountain range I was dealing with, fairly successfully, last episode. Now, though, I wouldn't have the option of escaping to the sea if I hit some serious obstables, so I'll leave it for the airship and I turn left, toward the northeast.
Turns out, though, that this is the end of this mountain range. So I've successfully mapped an admittedly quite small mountain area, from the ground without serious complications. A good day.
I continue north through Birch Forest draped in fall color.
Then a plains area with a copse of large oak trees.
Past that I'm getting back to the snowy area, although it looks like I'm almost done with it. The Cold Taiga Hills sub-biome to my left adds some interest to what in vanilla can be a boring climate.
Then a big tree Oak forest, with some nice variety from the Spruce trees mixed in.
The big trees are a bit hard on the Minecraft decoration system, which doesn't like such big things that not infrequently spread into adjacent chunks. But views like this are just so rewarding. Makes all the work I put into the tree system worth it.
Continuing north, a Dark Forest blocks my way. But it's not very thick, and I can see through in spots to the plains on the other sice. VERY uncharacteristically, I decide to charge through, feeling a bit more confident in my combat abilities. It almost goes wrong, though, as a creeper spawns ahead and to the side of me. No pic, because I was dashing to avoid it.
I get through to the other side without setting off the creeper
And almost fall into the ravine. Phew, that was close!
And then:
WHOOMP!
I take damage? Did something follow me out of the Dark Forest?
No! It's bandits! I'm nervous because there's no water to escape to.
But, fortunately, they don't have anybody firing poison arrows, only melee fighters. And my sword is already in hand so none of my frequent fumblefingering. It turns out, between high power armor and a seriously sharp sword, I'm able to handle three melee bandits pretty easily.
I spot their nearby base and loot it, but they don't have much (unlike the bandits I fought in Episode 59) - just some copper coins, arrows, and a few raw chickens. I still take it.
The bandit camp is actually in the Dark Forest, a bit, so I leave immediately once I've checked the chests. Don't want to get creepered, especially in these one-door buildings, and I assume the one I saw is still around.
When I reach my previous explorations to the north I consider just going home but decide I'm good for a little more exploration, so I turn west (left), through *this* unusual mix of Taiga, Swamp, and Extreme Hills. Go mixed biomes!
Soon I hit a mix of Dark Forest and Dark Forest M (which has vanilla Dark Oak). It doesn't look that far to the other side, so I try charging through again. But I spot what looks like a spawning nest - a Zombie and probably something else too - so I back out and go around to the north.
Then I head back down on the other side (it's a small Dark Forest, probably a sub-biome of the swamp). I still end up going through small bits of Dark Forest, but I don't get hassled.
Night is falling, and for variety I pillar up into the canopy of some tall birches to sleep. In the morning:
Aaah! I'm suffocating! And where's my interface?
The suffocation smacks are coming thick and fast, and I can't figure out why I can't do ANYTHING. Eventually I realize I F1'd off my interface for an evening shot. Then I fumble around for a bit to get my axe in hand. I'm having bad memories of suffocating in my tree farm (even after waving around my axe) in my Return to Minecraft journal - but THIS journal is hardcore and I won't be coming back.
FINALLY I chop my way out, with a physical gasp of relief. Down 6 hearts (remember my armor gives me a bonus 4). This hurt me more than the bandits did this time, and almost as much as they did last time.
This is WAY too much adventure for me. Two relatively close calls, within minutes.
But, oddly, I choose to continue. Going through Dark Forest, continuing after a near-death experience, what's happening to me? Maybe there's something in my coffee?
Continuing west I soon come across this pleasant lake, which I eagerly boat.
From the lake I find a river going south. But soon it turns southwest, and I have to decide how I want to plan the rest of the expedition. So far I really haven't been following a plan other than to avoid leaving any unexplored bits, which have given me trouble on so many past episodes. I figure my choices are to take the river SW into this mostly unexplored map, or to go back east and finish the western part of the map I'be been on most of this episode.
I decide that finishing that area on the previous map is ambitious enough, and get out of my boat.
I cross back to the previous map (to the east) and am rewarded with this interesting mixed biome view as I prepare to explore out this area.
Next episode: Getting it done.
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Curse PremiumEpisode 97: Twisty Turns Take Trip Time
I start mapping this section of my main target map (1 south of the lower Pantheon map) with a spin on this small lake bridging the boundaring between this map and the one immediately west.
Then I head east along the top of the unmapped region.
When I reach the corner I turn south-southwest, passing through the cathedral forest I complemented in the previous episode, although this region has more spruce trees.
There's still a bit of the snowy area to the east to map, but I don't pass through it. I can see the Ice Spikes in the distance.
On my right is a mix of Taiga, Mega Taiga, and their hill variants. Then a plains area.
Near the junction of Taiga and Plains is an open woodland area where they mix. In that area lies a Byzantine village (suddenly seeing a lot of them recently). I head in hoping to sell the arrows I got from the bandits. But while some Millenaire villages buy arrows, this isn't one of them. I lug my unintended trade goods onwards.
I reach the edge of the map and peek over to the next map. This leaves a tiny strip unmapped, so I go a bit firther to finish it.
Even though this requires stepping into some Dark Forest. Yes, it appears you have a new Zeno.
Night is falling, and per my usual dislike of bed plopping, I retreat to the Byzantine village to sleep.
This guy is crafting an icon so maybe they'll have something to sell soon. I think the Byzantine icons would make good decor for the chateau.
Then off to tackle the Taiga/Mega Taiga region. This turns out to have quite a hill in it. I don't have to climb to the top, but I do anyway because I'm expecting some nice views.
Which I find. The hill combines an Extreme Hills sub-biome with a Taiga Hills sub-biome, in the spirit of the biome mixes I've been seeing on this trip, and they managed to combine into an unusually large forested hill. There's also some nice view of the plains and Ice Spikes on the other side.
A little more roaming though flatland Taiga, and I'm done with this section of the map. I decide to head for home. I probably should have done the other side up to the mountain range on that side, because now that area is "leftover", a bit awkward to fit into an expedition. Mistakes were made.
Instead, I make for the swampy area I started, planning to pick up the river and head home.
Soon enough I'm doing just that. I head back up the river to the one break near the hill, cross it, and continue north. But after some more travel, it doesn't look familiar. There should be a break for some Plains and the Ice Spikes in the distance, and I'm just seeing forests.
Because I took the wrong fork in the river just past the portage. The fork I took went northwest on to the next map west. I turn around and boat back to the Pantheon map.
The fork is south, in the wrong direction, so I get out and bushwhack NE through this small tree Birch Forest toward the river I should have taken in the first place.
I reach it, but the delay has put me behind schedule. You can see by my clock it's late afternoon. I can't make the Pantheon by nightfall and have to sleep on the riverside.
Next morning, I finish the rest of the trip to the Pantheon, to worship at the altar of
My map. This expedition has filled in that middle section on the south. I'm now halfway through fall, and it looks like there's about 3 expeditions worth of exploration - one for the area on the west, and two for the east. Having done two so far in the fall, I probably will have one left by the time winter arrives and I need to do my overwintering mining and decoration work.
Next episode: back to the air
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.
There's a lot of variety to see in those last couple. It's nice to be able to see this since I'm not playing it. I think the current season is helping push that variety further though. There's Browns of oak trees mixed with retained Greens of spruce, and the deep Reds of swamp trees. While I love spring and summer more for the lush Greens, the color variety is going to be better during autumn.
I think I realized why the rivers in RTG feel even smaller too. It's the more gradual slopes it does dropping off between land and water. The last river you showed is a good example. It looks like it's somewhere between just below average and average for an "old" river? By 1.18+ standards, it's tiny, but it's somewhere small and normal for the 1.12 it's based off I'd guess? Anyway, despite that, it seems even smaller, and I'm convinced it's the gradual slope. While it might already be less wide on the surface, those gradual slopes result in less water volume too.
On other words, the gradual slopes (which I approve of, mind you) RTG does really beg for wider rivers to accommodate them in my opinion, and I think that is precisely why I've always thought they felt "too small". Not only are they too small on the surface, but so are they below the surface.
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Curse PremiumI too adore Autumn. Serene Seasons Spring has a nice feel with all the saturated greens and blueish tinges, especially after going through Winter (you have to do it to understand; there is a feel that's just not in the pics). But Autumn is absolutely the best for pretty pics. My only gripe is the 6 months of red swamps; it just doesn't look right. Sadly, and surprisingly, Serene Seasons has fairly minimal configuation options (there's temperate seasons, tropical seasons, and no season; I would really expect some by-biome-by-month temperature adjustments.) I'm seriously considering altering the vegetation for swamps to use other leaves like Birch and Jungle in hopes they'll look better with swamp seasonal changes (probably as a config option). That creates a problem in that the resulting trees might not be growable, and I'm musing on the tradeoff.
Interestingly a lot of the prettiness you get from mixed colors doesn't happen in vanilla - you need mixed trees, and vanilla doesn't mix much. There's a real synergism there between Serene Seasons and RTG plus's *variably* mixed trees.
I'm also stewing on a minimod that would erase snow on loading if it's out of season. Then if you go back in summer to a region that you left with snow in the winter it'll be gone when you get there (much like in real life). It doesn't last *that* long when I come back, but it's still weird and offputting.
RTG rivers on average are wider than vanilla rivers from that era, at least in terms of minimum width. They are the way they are primarily because I like boating (as you see) and I just couldn't consistently boat on vanilla rivers. RTG rivers I can boat almost all the time.
It is possible to make RTG rivers wider now due to changes I've put in to the configs. Defaults need to be the (unconfigurable) setting from before because otherwise a world being updated could get damaged from the change in parameters.
Deeper slopes do create a visual problem with RTG rivers. I made them shallower because I was getting complaints from users.
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 Red in the swamps doesn't bother me much, but I'm saying that as an observer and not as someone playing it. I do think it's a bit too saturated though.
Couldn't you change the raw color data directly somehow? What about Purple instead of Red? That would match a swamp, and it would lean partially into Red without being Red itself. Back in the times of 1.6, I used the "Better Grass and Leaves" mod, and it turned the grass and leaves in swamps Purple (it wasn't bright), and I loved it. When I updated to 1.7, the mod never updated (it did have a spiritual successor called "Better Foliage" eventually, but this didn't retain the Purple color in swamps) and I never had those Purple swamps again. I miss them.
What issues do deeper slopes create with rivers? Vanilla always had deeper slopes, and I'm unable to think of what could be an issue with that? I'm not saying the shallow slopes are not preferable. I'm just saying that it reduces the volume of water and I feel like it's why the rivers come across as smaller to me. The shallower slope seems to need wider rivers to truly shine, but that's merely my opinion.
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Curse PremiumThe red is too RED for swamps, but the bigger problem (for me) staying that way for six months of the year is way too much. I assume there's probably a way to hack into Serene Seasons and change its color adjustments, but that's not something I know anything about and I have too much other stuff on my plate at the moment.
Steeper slopes create a kind of "knife edge" effect on the bottom.
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.