🌍 Latitude v1.2.5 — Full Release (MC 1.21.11)

This release focuses on long-standing world-generation edge cases and visual consistency, with major fixes to climate correctness, terrain shaping, and world border effects. Several issues that required deep vanilla interception are now fully resolved.

❄️ Warm-Band Snow Anomalies — Resolved

After extensive investigation, all remaining cases of snow appearing in warm climate bands (equator, jungle, tropical regions) have been fully eliminated.

What was happening

Vanilla Minecraft was still attempting to place snow via internal systems (e.g. FreezeTopLayerFeature) based on base biomes (snowy taiga, snowy plains, frozen rivers), even after Latitude correctly reassigned the output biome to warm zones.

What’s fixed

• Snow blocks are no longer placed in warm bands.
• Powder snow (including cave-mouth sink traps) is fully blocked in warm bands.
• Snow layers are prevented in warm climates.
• Fix applies consistently across:
  • cave mouths
  • hillsides
  • partially exposed terrain
  • edge-case chunk generation paths

Implementation details

• Intercepts snow placement at the final worldgen write stage (ProtoChunk + ChunkRegion).
• Warm-band snow is replaced safely:
  • powder snow / layers → AIR
  • snow blocks → DIRT above sea level, STONE below
• Debug logging and HUD counters are now opt-in only via JVM flags.

Result: Latitude climates are now strictly respected. No more tropical snow.

🌴 Mangrove Hills — Fixed

• Resolved incorrect mangrove generation on steep or inappropriate terrain.
• Mangroves now respect terrain suitability and patch logic consistently.
• Eliminates visually jarring mangrove “hillside blobs” outside intended zones.

🌪️ East/West World Border Sandstorm — Fully Working

The east/west world border sandstorm effect is now stable and visible in all configurations.

Improvements

• Renders correctly with or without shaders.
• Compatible with:
  • Sodium
  • Iris
  • Shaderpacks enabled or disabled
• Eliminates flickering and non-rendering issues near the E/W borders.
• Provides consistent atmospheric feedback when approaching world limits.

🧹 Debug & Performance Cleanup

• Disabled verbose biome debug spam (LAT_PICK) by default.
• Snow-guard logging and warm-snow HUD overlays are now off by default and enabled only when explicitly requested.
• Maintains full diagnostics without impacting normal gameplay or logs.

✅ Summary

Latitude 1.2.5 represents a major stability and correctness milestone:

• Climate bands now behave exactly as designed.
• Long-standing vanilla edge cases are fully neutralized.
• Visual polish and immersion near world borders are significantly improved.
• This release is suitable as a stable, full release moving forward.

Thank you for your patience while these deep world-gen issues were hunted down and fixed properly! This project is just a hobby of mine and I'm a one-woman team, so it's been quite a trek! :)