Highlands aims to be a comprehensive improvement of Minecraft biomes, trees, and terrain. If you've ever felt bored exploring the world of Minecraft, this is your mod. In 1.8, Highlands is going into uncharted territory, where no biome mod has gone before. It's been designed from the ground up with features from the old Highlands as well as brand new biomes and trees. Highlands also gives you an incentive to explore into uncharted territory, whether to search for the perfect mountain to build a base on, to complete your botanical garden, or to search for more lucrative mining opportunities.
Features:
18 new biomes!
8 trees, all with their own wood, leaves and planks!
6 small plants!
Custom world type and mountain generation!
Fully compatible with customized world settings!
Settings to disable biomes you don't want!
Biome rarity fix!
Ore generation changes per biome!
Forest generation based on height!
Improvements to vanilla biomes!
Highlands 3.1.0 for Minecraft 1.8.9 available for download! Fixes the bugs with leaf decay, thornbushes, and ocean temples. Now on Github with 99% fewer ads! Make sure to download highlands-3.1.0.jar.
Adirondacks - Tall mountains of dirt and exposed stone, with forested foothills.
Alps - Inhospitable mountains covered in deep snow, with pine forests in the valleys.
Badlands - Plateaus and valleys of clay and dirt.
Bald Hill - a tall treeless hill that provides a good lookout point over forests.
Bamboo Forest - a dense forest of thin bamboo plants.
Dry Forest - a low landscape covered in Aspen trees and shrubs.
Dunes - rolling sand hills with dry grass and occasional palm trees.
Grey Mountains - Ominous rocky crags covered in boulders and gnarled plants. The forested valleys contain many dead trees.
Highlands - rolling hills covered in shrubs and flowering plants.
Lake - a small body of water that appears in many inland biomes. Poplar trees can grow on the shores.
Lowlands - Scattered lakes and low hills with stone and pine trees.
Meadow - An idyllic plain with poplar trees and many flowers.
Mojave - A dry semi-desert with red sand and Acacia trees.
Pinelands - Tall but weathered hills and mountains with pine trees and shrubs.
Poplar Hills - Lakes and hills covered in poplar trees.
Redwood Forest - A dense forest with fir and giant redwood trees, and a podzol floor.
Tropical Hills - Tall hills with a forest of Eucalyptus trees.
Tropical Islands - A player lost at sea might discover one of these palm tree covered islands.
Trees and Plants:
Aspen - A medium tree with light colored wood and autumn leaves.
Bamboo - A small tree with a very thin stem.
Eucalyptus - a tall straight tree that grows in the tropics.
Fir - A tall thin pine tree with dark wood.
Palm - A tropical palm tree.
Poplar - A small tree that grows straight and thin.
Redwood - A giant redwood tree that can grow to be more than 40 blocks tall.
Dead - An oak tree that has lost all of its leaves.
Great Oak - Oak trees can grow much more massive in the forests of Highlands.
Shrubs - pine and oak shrubs that grow low to the ground.
Waterflower - Small blue flowers on a dark stem.
Cattail - Reeds that grow in the swamps and wetlands.
Cotton - A bush with fluffy white tufts that can be spun into cloth.
Blueberry Bush - Wild blueberries that grow in hilly areas.
Raspberry Bush - Wild raspberries that grow in hilly areas.
Lavender - A purple flowering plant.
Tropical Leaf Fern - a fern-like plant with one big leaf.
Thornbush - A bush with prickly thorns.
Dune Grass - A dry tuft of grass that can grow on sand.
Screenshots:
Questions and Answers:
Q: How do I use the new world type?
A: There are two world types, called Highlands and Highlands LB (Large Biomes), located in More World Options. To use them on a server, type the name in all capital letters in the world type field of the settings. HIGHLANDS or HIGHLANDS LB
Q: Which biome has more diamonds (or iron, or gold...)?
A: The additional ore is at least sort of realistic, try looking in biomes similar to where the ore is found in real life. Of course, for redstone you're on your own...
Q: How do I install this?
A: Like any other Forge mod, just put it in the "mods" folder. You need Forge installed first.
Q: Where are the settings?
A: Highlands.cfg located in the "config" folder.
Q: Can you disable spawning of vanilla biomes, or disable Highlands biomes in vanilla worlds?
A: Sadly not yet. That feature will get updated to 1.8 soon.
Q: Why don't some recipes work?
A: Recipes are unfinished, sorry. Plants don't drop items directly but can be crafted into them, in some cases. Berries are not updated yet. Wooden blocks use oak stairs and slabs as a placeholder for now.
Technical stuff:
Source code, if you want to take a look, is on Github here: https://github.com/sdj64/Highlands
Highlands is licensed using a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. That means you can modify it for your own use or to share with other people, but only if you credit the original author (sdj64) and share it with the same license.
You are free to use Highlands in modpacks, but please provide a link back here to this thread. You probably don't want to put it in a modpack yet since updates will be coming frequently to fix problems and provide new features.
Almost... The screenshots were actually taken using different realistic styled customized world settings. After posting them, I actually got something much closer to Mountains O'Many working even better. See the second screenshot, most settings are the same as MoM except for the noise scale, which is larger.
Some more screenshots for you all! The border between two new biomes, Tropical Hills and Dry Forest, and an amazing mountain composed of multiple biomes. Also, as you can see in the second screenshot, small plants are working!
Thank you for the long list of suggestions! I do plan to improve the tropical and subtropical stuff more. I visited Ecuador earlier this summer and I saw a big variety of landscapes there that I'll try to incorporate in some way.
Realistic water might not be easily possible. Forge doesn't support rendering custom fluids, and I think that making the distinction would be more trouble than it's worth. Sea water would have to look exactly like fresh water, and then people would say "help, I filled my bucket with water and now it's killing my crops rather than watering them". Coastline biomes are possible but limited by the width of the coastline, which is currently very narrow unless Large Biomes is chosen or unless you make it a regular biome, then it will generate in non-coast places.
In my opinion, Minecraft made a big mistake with its terrain generation in choosing the biomes first and the height second (based on the biomes). This is completely backwards from real life and prevents the flora and ground composition from really following terrain features. I wish I could fix it for good but I just don't have the time and skill to do so.
I've been working on a new chunk generator, the piece of code that generates the terrain layout of the world. The new generator works a lot like customized worlds, letting me play around with settings and create some pretty awesome mountains that are taller and more realistic than in default worlds. I attached some screenshots below. Also, saplings work now for all the trees in Highlands. Still to go are the small plants, and a few more biomes. Download will be released soon!
The first screenshot is the Badlands biome
This screenshot is vanilla Minecraft's Extreme Hills.
After a long break from Minecraft I was convinced to come back for some projects. I'm working with the team behind JurassiCraft to help with biomes and world generation, and as part of that I'm working on updating Highlands.
Because of the changes to blocks and world generation in the meantime, a lot of the mod has to be remade from scratch. So whether you liked the original Highlands or you're new to Minecraft in 1.8 and have never been able to have a mod that adds biomes, please suggest what features (either from Highlands 2.0 or completely new) that you'd like to see.
Yeah, consistency is important, but it's not the fix in this case. I changed it for consistency, but what fixed it was adding these lines so the blockstates .json looks like this. Originally I was forgetting the commas and it gave errors. It pays to read everything carefully...
When run, it gets all of these errors. Aspen is one of 6 tree types that all have errors. All of the logs and planks work, so I'm confused what I'm doing wrong.
[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:fir_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:aspen_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:eucalyptus_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:palm_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:palm_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:aspen_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:redwood_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:poplar_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:eucalyptus_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:palm_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:eucalyptus_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:poplar_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:redwood_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:aspen_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:fir_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:fir_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:fir_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:aspen_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:eucalyptus_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:redwood_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:poplar_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=true not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:poplar_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:palm_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=false not found<br>[16:29:19] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:redwood_leaves#check_decay=false,decayable=false not found<br>
Hmmm, funny that the spiral trees came up again and I was just checking by. I actually started working on these back then when I was still working on Highlands. They never came out nearly as good as the ones in the video. I don't think I ever uploaded the unfinished work to Github but I did find a screenshot:
If you guys like it, I could get the code to Fabricator77 so he could put it in his next release.
I re-posted version 2.1.4 under "old downloads" in the main post. If you don't use ATG or the language pack support that was introduced in 2.1.5, you can use this version instead, since it doesn't have the mountain biome crash.
Just a reminder that in the 1.6.4 version of the mod, don't overwrite any vanilla biome IDs with Highlands biomes or put multiple biomes in one ID unless ALL of them on that ID are turned off.
Thank you for pointing out the error in the OP. It should be fixed now. Biome height problems in the 1.7 pre-release are still being worked out, as far as I know.
I don't remember saying anything about a virus in the download, but it might have something to do with mediafire. Try using the mirror download link if you encounter this. As the other people suggested it's likely a false positive.
Fabricator77 has contacted me and says he wants to continue the mod. He has experience with 1.7.2 and with biomes so he should be qualified for the job. Looking forward to seeing his work!
Sorry for the long delay. Things have been busy for me and I really haven't had a chance to work on Highlands. Also, I haven't heard from Zombiepig in a while so I don't know if he made any more progress on the 1.7 port since he posted in here all the way back in February...
As for the oriental forest, I think that it is a good idea. But I'm not sure I can be the one to do it. I keep saying I don't have the time, but in truth I do have the time, just not the motivation for Minecraft anymore. I have been playing other games and doing other things besides Minecraft, and with the introduction of Gradle there is one more barrier since I have to learn that before I can do anything new. I know it sucks to hear it, and I feel bad saying it too, since you all have been such a supportive community.
I made the first step early last fall by making Highlands open source, and I think I should go the rest of the way and say, if anyone wants to continue Highlands, please do. I would have asked Zombiepig but then he stopped working on it. Both my code (as far as the current version available for download) and Zombiepig's unfinished port are up on Github if you want to take a crack at it.
Sorry if that sounded too heavy, I'm not dead and I will still check in once a week or so if you have questions. If you want an answer sooner best is to PM me, since that goes to my email.
It *is* in the source, but it's missing from the distribution. Ironically, it's a class to provide better description of crashes (it's supposed to look up some block info to add to the crash report) but it actually hides info we'd have.
CallableLvl1 is called up when the world tries to tick a block that's no longer there.
I improved the crash rate around mountains a lot by adding
if (block == Block.sand) break;
to the exclusions when choosing blocks to replace in the WorldGenMountains procedure. I think that bug could be fixed entirely if you excluded any block that's tickable (there's a field or interface for that; I forget exactly what but I'm sure you can find it.)
Alright, I'll take a look. I probably should release another bug fixing update for 1.6.4 sometime next week. I finally got Gradle working so I can work on 1.7 as well. Haven't heard from Zombiepig in a while, so I'm not sure how well his updates are coming along.
I appreciate your effort but I can't hear you in the video. The game volume is very loud and I think you're trying to speak but I can't hear the words. Also I never recall giving you that letter at the start.
16
Highlands aims to be a comprehensive improvement of Minecraft biomes, trees, and terrain. If you've ever felt bored exploring the world of Minecraft, this is your mod. In 1.8, Highlands is going into uncharted territory, where no biome mod has gone before. It's been designed from the ground up with features from the old Highlands as well as brand new biomes and trees. Highlands also gives you an incentive to explore into uncharted territory, whether to search for the perfect mountain to build a base on, to complete your botanical garden, or to search for more lucrative mining opportunities.
Features:
18 new biomes!
8 trees, all with their own wood, leaves and planks!
6 small plants!
Custom world type and mountain generation!
Fully compatible with customized world settings!
Settings to disable biomes you don't want!
Biome rarity fix!
Ore generation changes per biome!
Forest generation based on height!
Improvements to vanilla biomes!
Highlands 3.1.0 for Minecraft 1.8.9 available for download! Fixes the bugs with leaf decay, thornbushes, and ocean temples. Now on Github with 99% fewer ads! Make sure to download highlands-3.1.0.jar.
Biomes:
Alps - Inhospitable mountains covered in deep snow, with pine forests in the valleys.
Badlands - Plateaus and valleys of clay and dirt.
Bald Hill - a tall treeless hill that provides a good lookout point over forests.
Bamboo Forest - a dense forest of thin bamboo plants.
Dry Forest - a low landscape covered in Aspen trees and shrubs.
Dunes - rolling sand hills with dry grass and occasional palm trees.
Grey Mountains - Ominous rocky crags covered in boulders and gnarled plants. The forested valleys contain many dead trees.
Highlands - rolling hills covered in shrubs and flowering plants.
Lake - a small body of water that appears in many inland biomes. Poplar trees can grow on the shores.
Lowlands - Scattered lakes and low hills with stone and pine trees.
Meadow - An idyllic plain with poplar trees and many flowers.
Mojave - A dry semi-desert with red sand and Acacia trees.
Pinelands - Tall but weathered hills and mountains with pine trees and shrubs.
Poplar Hills - Lakes and hills covered in poplar trees.
Redwood Forest - A dense forest with fir and giant redwood trees, and a podzol floor.
Tropical Hills - Tall hills with a forest of Eucalyptus trees.
Tropical Islands - A player lost at sea might discover one of these palm tree covered islands.
Trees and Plants:
Bamboo - A small tree with a very thin stem.
Eucalyptus - a tall straight tree that grows in the tropics.
Fir - A tall thin pine tree with dark wood.
Palm - A tropical palm tree.
Poplar - A small tree that grows straight and thin.
Redwood - A giant redwood tree that can grow to be more than 40 blocks tall.
Dead - An oak tree that has lost all of its leaves.
Great Oak - Oak trees can grow much more massive in the forests of Highlands.
Shrubs - pine and oak shrubs that grow low to the ground.
Waterflower - Small blue flowers on a dark stem.
Cattail - Reeds that grow in the swamps and wetlands.
Cotton - A bush with fluffy white tufts that can be spun into cloth.
Blueberry Bush - Wild blueberries that grow in hilly areas.
Raspberry Bush - Wild raspberries that grow in hilly areas.
Lavender - A purple flowering plant.
Tropical Leaf Fern - a fern-like plant with one big leaf.
Thornbush - A bush with prickly thorns.
Dune Grass - A dry tuft of grass that can grow on sand.
Screenshots:
Questions and Answers:
A: There are two world types, called Highlands and Highlands LB (Large Biomes), located in More World Options. To use them on a server, type the name in all capital letters in the world type field of the settings. HIGHLANDS or HIGHLANDS LB
Q: Which biome has more diamonds (or iron, or gold...)?
A: The additional ore is at least sort of realistic, try looking in biomes similar to where the ore is found in real life. Of course, for redstone you're on your own...
Q: How do I install this?
A: Like any other Forge mod, just put it in the "mods" folder. You need Forge installed first.
Q: Where are the settings?
A: Highlands.cfg located in the "config" folder.
Q: Can you disable spawning of vanilla biomes, or disable Highlands biomes in vanilla worlds?
A: Sadly not yet. That feature will get updated to 1.8 soon.
Q: Why don't some recipes work?
A: Recipes are unfinished, sorry. Plants don't drop items directly but can be crafted into them, in some cases. Berries are not updated yet. Wooden blocks use oak stairs and slabs as a placeholder for now.
Technical stuff:
Highlands is licensed using a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. That means you can modify it for your own use or to share with other people, but only if you credit the original author (sdj64) and share it with the same license.
You are free to use Highlands in modpacks, but please provide a link back here to this thread. You probably don't want to put it in a modpack yet since updates will be coming frequently to fix problems and provide new features.
0
Almost... The screenshots were actually taken using different realistic styled customized world settings. After posting them, I actually got something much closer to Mountains O'Many working even better. See the second screenshot, most settings are the same as MoM except for the noise scale, which is larger.
Some more screenshots for you all! The border between two new biomes, Tropical Hills and Dry Forest, and an amazing mountain composed of multiple biomes. Also, as you can see in the second screenshot, small plants are working!
0
Thank you for the long list of suggestions! I do plan to improve the tropical and subtropical stuff more. I visited Ecuador earlier this summer and I saw a big variety of landscapes there that I'll try to incorporate in some way.
Realistic water might not be easily possible. Forge doesn't support rendering custom fluids, and I think that making the distinction would be more trouble than it's worth. Sea water would have to look exactly like fresh water, and then people would say "help, I filled my bucket with water and now it's killing my crops rather than watering them". Coastline biomes are possible but limited by the width of the coastline, which is currently very narrow unless Large Biomes is chosen or unless you make it a regular biome, then it will generate in non-coast places.
In my opinion, Minecraft made a big mistake with its terrain generation in choosing the biomes first and the height second (based on the biomes). This is completely backwards from real life and prevents the flora and ground composition from really following terrain features. I wish I could fix it for good but I just don't have the time and skill to do so.
2
Here's a little progress update:
I've been working on a new chunk generator, the piece of code that generates the terrain layout of the world. The new generator works a lot like customized worlds, letting me play around with settings and create some pretty awesome mountains that are taller and more realistic than in default worlds. I attached some screenshots below. Also, saplings work now for all the trees in Highlands. Still to go are the small plants, and a few more biomes. Download will be released soon!
The first screenshot is the Badlands biome
This screenshot is vanilla Minecraft's Extreme Hills.
8
After a long break from Minecraft I was convinced to come back for some projects. I'm working with the team behind JurassiCraft to help with biomes and world generation, and as part of that I'm working on updating Highlands.
In case you don't know, Highlands was a biome mod that I created and maintained from Minecraft 1.5 to 1.6. You can see the forum post for it here.
Features:
18 biomes
8 trees
6 plants
Realistic mountains
Improvements to vanilla biomes
Fixes biome rarity
Wood, Leaves, and Planks blocks
Biomes:
Adirondacks
Alps
Badlands
Bald Hill
Bamboo Forest
Dry Forest
Grey Mountains
Highlands
Lake
Lowlands
Meadow
Mojave
Pinelands
Poplar Hills
Redwood Forest
Steppe
Tropical Hills
Tropical Islands
Trees:
Aspen
Poplar
Eucalyptus
Great Oak
Palm
Fir
Redwood
Bamboo
also: deciduous and pine shrubs
Because of the changes to blocks and world generation in the meantime, a lot of the mod has to be remade from scratch. So whether you liked the original Highlands or you're new to Minecraft in 1.8 and have never been able to have a mod that adds biomes, please suggest what features (either from Highlands 2.0 or completely new) that you'd like to see.
0
Yeah, consistency is important, but it's not the fix in this case. I changed it for consistency, but what fixed it was adding these lines so the blockstates .json looks like this. Originally I was forgetting the commas and it gave errors. It pays to read everything carefully...
{
"variants": {
"normal": { "model": "highlands:aspen_leaves" },
"check_decay=false,decayable=false": { "model": "highlands:aspen_leaves" },
"check_decay=true,decayable=false": { "model": "highlands:aspen_leaves" },
"check_decay=true,decayable=true": { "model": "highlands:aspen_leaves" },
"check_decay=false,decayable=true": { "model": "highlands:aspen_leaves" }
}
}
Also, off topic, but I really like your mod in your signature. Minecraft works really well with the low-res ships of Elite.
0
code is not displaying correctly on the forums, but this is the best indicator of what's wrong, I think:
[16:48:57] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML]: Model definition for location highlands:aspen_leaves#check_decay=true,decayable=false not found
0
So, I'm trying to make some trees and I have a bit of a problem with the json files for leaves. Here is what I have for the blockstates json:
{<br> "variants": {<br> "normal": { "model": "highlands:aspen_leaves" }<br> }<br>}<br>and the models/block json:
{<br> "parent": "block/leaves",<br> "textures": {<br> "all": "highlands:blocks/leaves_aspen"<br> }<br>}<br>When run, it gets all of these errors. Aspen is one of 6 tree types that all have errors. All of the logs and planks work, so I'm confused what I'm doing wrong.
0
If you guys like it, I could get the code to Fabricator77 so he could put it in his next release.
1
If any of you want to do some work in patching one of the 1.6 versions, go ahead.
0
I re-posted version 2.1.4 under "old downloads" in the main post. If you don't use ATG or the language pack support that was introduced in 2.1.5, you can use this version instead, since it doesn't have the mountain biome crash.
Just a reminder that in the 1.6.4 version of the mod, don't overwrite any vanilla biome IDs with Highlands biomes or put multiple biomes in one ID unless ALL of them on that ID are turned off.
0
0
I don't remember saying anything about a virus in the download, but it might have something to do with mediafire. Try using the mirror download link if you encounter this. As the other people suggested it's likely a false positive.
Fabricator77 has contacted me and says he wants to continue the mod. He has experience with 1.7.2 and with biomes so he should be qualified for the job. Looking forward to seeing his work!
0
As for the oriental forest, I think that it is a good idea. But I'm not sure I can be the one to do it. I keep saying I don't have the time, but in truth I do have the time, just not the motivation for Minecraft anymore. I have been playing other games and doing other things besides Minecraft, and with the introduction of Gradle there is one more barrier since I have to learn that before I can do anything new. I know it sucks to hear it, and I feel bad saying it too, since you all have been such a supportive community.
I made the first step early last fall by making Highlands open source, and I think I should go the rest of the way and say, if anyone wants to continue Highlands, please do. I would have asked Zombiepig but then he stopped working on it. Both my code (as far as the current version available for download) and Zombiepig's unfinished port are up on Github if you want to take a crack at it.
Sorry if that sounded too heavy, I'm not dead and I will still check in once a week or so if you have questions. If you want an answer sooner best is to PM me, since that goes to my email.
0
Alright, I'll take a look. I probably should release another bug fixing update for 1.6.4 sometime next week. I finally got Gradle working so I can work on 1.7 as well. Haven't heard from Zombiepig in a while, so I'm not sure how well his updates are coming along.
I appreciate your effort but I can't hear you in the video. The game volume is very loud and I think you're trying to speak but I can't hear the words. Also I never recall giving you that letter at the start.