Dynamic Waters: Realistic Flowing Rivers
- By
Curse Maven Snippet
What's new
Dynamic Waters 13.0.0 (NeoForge 1.21.1)
The biggest update so far. Next to 11.x almost all of the mod has been rebuilt: new mountain rivers, new lowland rivers and deltas, lakes, riverbanks, water plants, a new Flow Wand, settings in game and a lot of performance work. This is the full list of what changed since 11.x
Create a new world. Rivers are part of world generation, and rivers in chunks generated before the update will not match the new ones. Install on both the client and the server.
Mountain rivers (3D rivers): new system
The old mountain river pathfinder is gone. Mountain rivers now come from the terrain's own drainage (D8 routing). Rain falls on the terrain your world generator made, every hollow fills up to where it spills over, and every patch of ground sends its water one of eight ways downhill. Where enough water gathers, a stream begins.
-Rivers always lie in real valleys and always run downhill.
-Tributaries meet at real confluences, and rivers never cross each other.
-Rivers grow wider with every tributary. Their width now comes from how much water they carry; there are no fixed width settings any more.
-Wet climates get many brooks, dry land only a few big rivers.
-Natural meanders, with bends that never fold into each other.
-Steep streams step down in flat pools and waterfalls cut into the slope, never built up on top of it.
-Where a stream reaches the wall of a lowland gorge, it carves a ravine of tiered falls down to the river.
-Rivers carry on seamlessly from one 1 km area of the world to the next.
-Cut ground (falls, ravines, banks) is dressed with the biome's own blocks instead of bare stone.
-New settings: Mountain River Density (Very Low to Insane) and Waterfalls (Cliffs / Few / Normal / Many).
-Optional mountain river tunnels (experimental, off by default).
Mountain lakes (new)
-Natural basins fill up to their rim, at whatever height they sit, from small ponds high in the mountains to long lakes in the valleys.
-Rivers flow into and out of lakes, and a lake is always deeper than the rivers that feed it.
-Shores are graded down to the water and lake beds follow the shape of the basin, without walls or holes along the shore.
-A river with nowhere else to go ends in a lake instead of stopping in the middle of nowhere.
-Can be turned off.
Lowland rivers (2D rivers): rebuilt
-Wide, winding rivers to the sea, with meanders and natural Y-shaped junctions.
-Deltas at the coast: winding arms, creeks, sandy flats and low green islands. Only the river's main arms keep a current; the rest of the delta is still water.
-Where high ground is in the way, a river cuts an open gorge with terraced rock walls. Lowland tunnels are optional (off by default).
-Frozen rivers in cold lands.
-Mountain rivers join lowland rivers properly: as falls from a gorge's rim, or as rapids from the water's edge.
-New setting Lowland Rivers: Dynamic Waters, Vanilla (Minecraft's own rivers, with a current) or None.
-New setting Lowland River Density (Very Low to Insane).
Banks, beds, plants and boulders (new)
-Riverbank palettes: every river and lake gets a bed and banks that suit its biome. Gravel and cobbles lie where the water runs hard, sand, clay and mud where it slows down. Gravel bars form inside bends.
-Water plants: kelp in lakes, seagrass, lily pads and reeds on calm water, and rare sea pickles in warm waters.
-Boulders in the lowland rivers, painted in the biome's own stone.
-Palettes and plant sets can be edited in game with a live preview. They are saved as plain JSON files, so you can ship your own with a modpack.
Current and physics
-Rain makes rivers run faster, thunderstorms faster still (adjustable).
-Minecraft's own rivers can get a current too (Vanilla mode).
Flow Wand and commands
The Flow Wand (crafted from nine water buckets) gets a zone mode: mark two corners to set the flow of a whole area, or make it still. Zones are saved with the world and drawn while you hold the wand.
New /flowzones list | remove | clear (operators).
/locate_river_terrain finds the nearest mountain river (operators).
/dynamicwaters disableWelcome turns off the welcome message.
/locate_river was removed.
Settings in game (new)
-Every setting can be changed in game: use the D button on the title screen, or Config next to Dynamic Waters in the Mods list.
-New title screen panorama (can be turned off).
-The world loading screen shows how far river generation has got.
Performance and stability
-Lowland rivers are laid out in the background as chunk generation starts, so a world no longer hangs at 0% while it loads.
-Mountain rivers are worked out on worker threads and saved in the world folder, so each part of the world is computed once instead of on every start.
-Rivers are now identical however and whenever their area gets generated. Before, a river could come out differently after a restart, or in singleplayer after joining, and be cut off where newer chunks met older ones. This was most visible at deltas.
-Mountain rivers that would run into a delta are now left out completely, together with their tributaries and the lakes they pass through. No more stubs ending in a meadow next to a delta.
-A lowland river that loses its upper course to a neighbouring river now begins normally instead of starting at full width, cut off square.
-World start is much faster: the strongholds' placement search no longer computes rivers across the whole world.
-Joining a world no longer computes far-away rivers on the server thread.
-No river generation or currents in the Nether or the End (lava used to get a river current there).
-Fixed "Failed to load chunk" errors after leaving and rejoining a world.
-Structures stay clear of the lowland rivers: no half-houses hanging over the water, no portals left standing on a pillar in a gorge.
Compatibility
- Abridged: its bridges now spawn over Dynamic Waters' lowland rivers, with their ends on the banks.
Removed or changed settings
- Removed the experimental River Widths section.
This mod has no additional files