Explorer's Compass

Explorer's Compass is a Minecraft mod that lets you search for and locate structures and biomes anywhere in the world, without leaving the chunk you are standing in.

This repository is a fork of MattCzyr/ExplorersCompass that adds biome search, bookmarks, location sharing, a heads-up direction strip and more. Structures alone are what the upstream mod covers; biomes are its sister mod, Nature's Compass.

Features

Searching

• Locate any structure or biome the world can generate, in the dimension you are in.
• Select several at once (Ctrl+click) and the search answers with whichever is nearest.
• Search a whole group — every village, every ocean ruin — rather than naming one.
• Search past what you already found for the next instance of it, and the one after that.
• Filter the list by mod, by dimension, or with a small query language; sort by name, group, dimension or source mod.
• See what a structure looks like before spending a search on it: the server assembles it the way world generation would, without placing any of it anywhere, and the compass draws it as a model you can turn, zoom and cut layers off to look inside. It is one cell to one block: what you see is the structure at its own size, not a sketch of it. Small ones are drawn from the blocks' own models, chests and beds and banners included; large ones are drawn as coloured blocks instead, at the same size, so that a mansion or a stronghold can be looked over rather than waited on.

After a search

• A heads-up panel says what the compass is doing: search radius and progress while it runs, then the coordinates, the distance and the compass point once it lands.
• A direction strip across the top of the screen marks where the target lies against the horizon, turns green when you are facing it, and points the way to turn when it is off screen.
• The compass needle itself points at the located place, as a compass should.
• Every located place is remembered. Point the compass back at one, share it in chat with click-to-copy coordinates, or travel to it where the server allows that.

Integration

• Waypoints in Xaero's Minimap are created for each located place, when that mod is installed.
• Resource packs can give the compass a different look per structure through custom model data.
• Data packs and modpacks can define structure groups of their own.
• Translated into English, German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Configuration

Server-side options live in config/explorerscompass-common.toml, client-side ones in config/explorerscompass-client.toml.

Things worth knowing about:

• maxRadius, maxSamples, maxBiomeSamples — how hard a search is allowed to look before giving up. Raising them finds more distant targets at a higher cost.
• maxSearchTimePerTick — the slice of each server tick that searching may consume, shared by every search running at once. Lower keeps the server responsive; higher finishes sooner.
• asyncBiomeSearch — runs biome searches off the server thread, shared out over as many threads as searching is allowed, which finishes them several times sooner and costs the server nothing. Safe because which biome generates somewhere follows from the seed and the generator's noise alone. Turn it off if a biome-source mod turns out not to be thread-safe.
• asyncStructureSearch — the same for structure searches, also shared out over threads, by working out where a structure would generate the way world generation decides it rather than asking chunk storage about every location looked at. That question is almost all of what a structure search costs, and answering it this way reads no part of the world. The location the search settles on is still checked against chunk storage before the compass points at it; where the two can differ is ground generated under settings that have since changed, and there the compass answers with where a structure would generate now. Turn it off to have every location answered by chunk storage as before.
• structureBlacklist / biomeBlacklist — what the compass will not show or search for. * matches any number of characters and ? matches one, so minecraft:*village* works.
• allowTeleport, allowSharing, and their cooldowns — what players are allowed to do with a result.
• allowStructurePreview, structurePreviewResolution, structurePreviewMaxBlocks — whether players may see what a structure looks like, how finely it is shown, and how much of it is drawn. Each structure is assembled once and then kept for as long as the server runs, so a preview costs nothing to open again. structurePreviewDetailLimit, client side, is where a preview stops being drawn from real blocks and starts being drawn as coloured ones.
• showDirectionBar, directionBarWidth, directionBarSpan — the horizon strip. Pair a wide strip with a large span to have the whole horizon on screen at once.
• overlayBackground, guiHeaderBackground, guiSidebarBackground, guiStatusBarBackground — each panel can be filled in or left outlined and see-through on its own.

Credits

Explorer's Compass was created by ChaosTheDude (MattCzyr/ExplorersCompass). This repository builds on that work.

License

This mod is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.