Climatic Biomes

By
Akiak
Mods

Better biome placement -- believable continents resembling classic fantasy worlds and modern RPGs

A wooded swamp variant found in cool and cold areas.

Maps of my first play test world. This is from the 1.x series. Version 2.x will create basically the same land but with different climates and biomes.

This is a subtropical forest, too warm for birches to thrive, but home to oak (and other trees oaks represent) along with pines and cedars. The new pine tree represents warm climate conifers and is modeled on the loblolly pine of the southern U.S.

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Based loosely on the Florida panhandle. The pine planks are an old texture from version 1.x.

A scrub / bush / brush / chaparral biome, often found between plains and deserts, and sometimes a large area of their own. In real life, this would be common with a Mediterranean climate, as well at the borders of deserts.

These are grassy swamp variants found in warm and cool areas.

A mountain variant that can be found at any temperature, though its always hot! Extra iron, extra gold, and plenty of extra lava.

These rivers average 32 blocks across and are usually navigable from end to end, some going for thousands of blocks. They even flow into each other to form semi-realistic river systems.

These appear in oceans and can have any normal biome mixed with volcanoes.

Much of the dirt in bogs is replaced by peat, a block that acts like fuel -- not as good a coal block, but better than basic coal item as fuel.

Montane Forests have diverse trees, both evergreen and deciduous, and come on four varieties: cool, warm, dry, and jungle.

Standing on a small mountain I can see a big mountain in the distance. The new realistic world type has plenty of epic terrain and lots of variation, turning biomes into their own hill and mountain variants.

The further inland and further into a mountain biome you go the bigger they tend to be.

This is around y=160; its rare but I've found them well over y=200.

Description

Climatic Biomes 3
by JaredBGreat

Climatic Biomes creates believable worlds with large continental landmasses, while seamlessly integrating modded biomes into a single, persistent climate table.

There are two world-types: Climatic Vanilla, which retains Minecraft's default terrain generation, and Climatic Realistic, which replaces the terrain with a more realistic, RTG-esque model.

Supports all modded biomes. Some may need to be manually inserted in the config file.

Recommendations: Biomes O' Plenty, Environs, Novam Terram, Biomes You'll Go, Traverse, Auxiliary Biomes, Redwoods, Project Vibrant Journeys, Pale Bloom.

Also includes 29 entirely new, vanilla-friendly biomes, intended to fill in the gaps. These can be disabled.

(v3.0.0 introduces biome weights, fixes bugs, improves performance, rewrites documentation, retunes defaults)

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The original goal was not in adding biomes or creating interesting terrain, but in improving the way biomes are placed. It completely replaces the vanilla noise maps and biome groups with a system based on a semi-realistic climate model -- realistic enough to feel believable while avoiding being boring or unbalanced in the number of biomes. The goal is to make the worlds fun and believable, not to be a slave to realism -- it's a game mod, not a scientific model after all. It was not originally planned to add many biomes, just a few to fill in the gap, though it now has 29 biomes (including variations) of its own, most of which can be turned off if you don't want them. It was intended as a "vanilla+" so all biomes are designed to fit a vanilla Minecraft style and merge seamlessly into the game. Basically, this is a mod about worlds that make sense, where biome progress from hot to cold or dry to wet gradients on believable continents.

However, as one last improvement, I've added a new feature, a custom chunk generator for those who like "realistic" terrain. Now, this mod has two world types, Climatic Vanilla (climatic biome placed with vanilla terrain) and Climatic Realistic (climatic biome placement with modded terrain). However, in doing so I've removed the ability to use other mods chunk generators, so if you use another chunk generator stay on 2.14.17 or earlier, newer versions will break those worlds (ugly cliffs).

Version 2.x is a massive improvement over the version 1.x series (which, honestly, more a proof-of-concept than anything else). Efficiency is vastly improved. Now there are large, navigable rivers that cross the land. It supports several other mods out-of-the-box: Biome O'Plenty (but not its option settings), Traverse, NovamTerram, Auxiliary Biomes, Environs++, Project Vibrant Journeys, and Biomes You'll Go, as well as special biomes from Thaumcraft, Vampirism, Ice and Fire, and various other mods. Support for other mods can be added using the configs.

With the Climatic Realistic world type this works like a Cliffs (but not Caves) update for 1.12.2.

Dynamic Trees support is available through this compatibility mod.

As of version 3.4.x you can also create your own biome variation with different terrain.

The world type ("level-type" in server.properties) for servers is climatic_bp for Climatic Vanilla and climatic_real for Climatic Realistic.

TECHNICAL: This was based on some experimenting I was doing on procedurally generating RPG campaign maps. On a technical level, it uses attractor points that radiate a certain influence fields such as hot, cold, wet, dry, or landiness, creating basins of influence that reach over a large scale while adding some fractal noise. This allows for the climate to shift more gradually and less chaotically than with pure height maps / noise maps (as in vanilla) -- while avoid avoiding the excessive smoothness / neatness that would occur without the addition of noise. The world is divided into 4096x4096 block continent zones that each gets their own climate map -- this is a 2x2 of level 5 map items, or about half the area of the Skyrim map. Each area has a continent or group of large islands -- a universal ocean is guaranteed (great with ships mod).

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