Inland Waters

Such deep beautiful lakes, but so empty. This mod turns natural inland lakes into rivers so fish, squids, and drowned can spawn!

A lightweight server-side mod that changes natural inland lake biomes to minecraft:river (or minecraft:frozen_river if cold or frozen).

What It Does

• Brings Lakes to Life: Turns empty lakes into river biomes with native aquatic mob spawning and colormaps.
• Modded Biome Support: Fully works with modded biomes out of the box.
• Smart Detection: Only converts deep water (minDepth >= 2). Preserves 1-block puddles, beaches, underground caves, and swamps.
• Mountain Lakes: Automatically detects high-altitude lakes and calderas up to the world ceiling ($Y=320$).
• Full Retrogen: Works retroactively on already generated chunks in existing worlds as you explore them.
• Vanilla Rollback: Built-in revertToVanilla toggle to restore original seed biomes.

Chunk & World Safety

• Safe for Chunks: Never corrupts, resets, or damages chunks. Zero cascading worldgen lag.
• Safe for Vanilla Worlds: Adds zero custom blocks or items. 100% server-side; vanilla clients can join without installing the mod.

Configuration

Configure in-game via Mod Menu (requires Cloth Config), or edit config/inland_waters.json:

• enabled (default: true) — Master toggle for lake detection and replacement.
• minDepth (default: 2) — Minimum water depth in blocks to count as a lake.
• revertToVanilla (default: false) — Restores original vanilla biomes upon loading chunks.
• excludedBiomes (default: ["#c:is_swamp", "minecraft:swamp", "minecraft:mangrove_swamp"]) — List of biome IDs or #tags to never convert into rivers.

Requirements

• Fabric Loader (0.20.0+) for Minecraft 26.3
• Fabric API
• (Optional) Cloth Config & Mod Menu for in-game settings

100% server-side. Vanilla clients can join without installing the mod. Works in singleplayer and multiplayer.