Overview

This is the DATAPACK version of this project. The mod version can be found here.

Northbound changes Minecraft's world generation to place biomes based on latitude (your position north or south of the spawn point), placing biomes into climate zones similar to the real world.

Top down map of a world generated using Northbound, showing colder biomes to the north and warmer biomes near the south.

Map of a world generated using Northbound, centered around the spawn point.

Typically, you'll spawn in a temperate biome such as plains or forest. As you move north, you'll eventually encounter some colder biomes such as dark forests and taigas, then finally, you'll reach the polar zone and come across snowy biomes.

Similarly, as you move south, you'll first travel through arid biomes such as deserts and badlands, then you'll reach the tropical zone filled with biomes such as jungles and mangrove swamps.

Climate Zone	Common Biomes
Tropical	Jungle, Savanna
Arid	Desert, Badlands
Temperate	Plains, Forest
Cold	Taiga, Giant Tree Taiga
Polar	Snowy Plains, Snowy Taiga

Notes

Most commonly, you'll spawn in a temperate biome, but sometimes you may not. Regardless though, you'll still find colder biomes going north and warmer biomes going south (you'll always spawn in the "Northern Hemisphere", except for extremely rare circumstances where a large ocean forces you to spawn far from 0, 0.)
It is possible for all vanilla biomes to generate, but their distribution is changed. Some biomes like deserts and flower forests are more common than in vanilla, others like savannas and dark forests are less common.
The climate zones repeat around every 16,000 blocks on the Z-axis (or 65,000 blocks when using large biomes).

Map showing the repetition of climate zones on the north/south axis.

Repetition of climate zones.

Compatibility

This datapack is only supported for Minecraft versions 26.2, 1.21.1, and 1.20.1. Minecraft won't stop you from loading the datapack for versions in between, but you can expect some things to not work properly. Northbound works with all vanilla world types, including default, large biomes, and amplified.

Northbound is known to be compatible with:

Terralith
Biomes O' Plenty
Continents

Map demonstrating compatibility with Continents, showing continents and islands generated with Northbound's climate zones

Compatibility between Northbound and Continents.

Northbound is known to be incompatible with:

Tectonic
- A compatibility patch is currently being developed.
Concurrent Chunk Management Engine (C2ME)
- Ironically, this mod fixes a bug that Northbound relies on in order to be possible in vanilla.

Other world generation mods may or may not be compatible. In general, mods or datapacks that only add new biomes without changing terrain generation are likely to be compatible, while mods or datapacks that change terrain generation are most likely incompatible.