Latitude

The 26.1 line catches up with everything from 1.5.1-beta.1 through beta.5 in one release, and now ships as a single jar covering Minecraft 26.1, 26.1.1 and 26.1.2. Beta: shipped for testing before the 1.5.1 stable tag.

Minecraft 26.2's sulfur caves do not exist on this line, so the sulfur work from the 26.2 releases is not part of this one. The TerraBlender compatibility fix that came with it is here, and with it the badlands terracotta repair described below.

New

• You can reach Minecraft's own world-creation screen again. Latitude replaces the create-world screen, which left no route to Superflat, datapack-only worlds, or another mod's world type once Latitude was installed. A new Other World Types & Datapacks… entry in the Rules panel hands off to Minecraft's normal screen, carrying the world name and seed you already typed. Worlds made there are ordinary Minecraft worlds — Latitude does not offer its own preset on that screen, so there is no way to end up half in and half out.
• Desert riverbanks can be green now. Where an arid biome meets fresh water, the bank sometimes grows a strip of grass and wildflowers instead of running bare sand to the waterline. Deliberately not everywhere: long stretches stay bare, and which stretches green up is fixed by the world seed. The biome itself is unchanged — still desert, still desert mobs, still desert structures; only the planting is different. New terrain only.
• A new title-intro animation plays once per screen-open in the compact create-world layout.
• Ctrl+Tab now cycles the World/Settings tabs, and switching tabs no longer leaves a text field on the previous tab quietly holding your keystrokes.
• A still background for the create-world screen. A Still tab hangs under the bottom-left corner of Latitude's create-world panel, styled like the World and Settings tabs above it. Switch it on to swap the moving panorama for a flat dark backdrop; the choice is remembered between sessions.

Improved

• Smoother transitions into the polar region. Taiga now thins out in patches across the subpolar edge instead of disappearing along a straight latitude line. The polar tree line is preserved.
• Desert is the staple of the arid belt again, with badlands as a rare accent. Badlands had been crowding desert out almost entirely; its region noise also scaled with world size, so some seeds handed badlands most of the arid belt while others got almost none. The region size is now capped and the coverage calibrated: badlands holds roughly 15% of the dry belt in coherent kilometre-scale mesas rather than one continent-sized sheet. New terrain only.
• Swamps now appear only in genuinely wet regions. Previously "not explicitly dry" was enough, which let swamps form on medium-moisture land. Expect noticeably fewer, better-placed swamps (roughly a third fewer overall); mangroves are unaffected. New terrain only.
• Each climate zone now spawns you at the middle of its own band. Most visibly: requesting a Subtropical start previously spawned you just across the line in Temperate, every time. All five zone starting latitudes shift slightly as a result (e.g. Tropical 18°→11.75°, Subpolar 65.25°→58.25°) — each now the honest centre of its zone.
• The tree line and foliage limit are now correctly separate rules — trees stop at 72° latitude, ground vegetation continues to the pole.
• Windswept terrain has its own lower snow line so it reads as snow-capped.
• Rivers and beaches can now come from installed biome packs, not only vanilla.
• Edge storm warnings now say whether the storm is to the east or west.
• Less repeat work while exploring new terrain. Latitude no longer repeats a custom-biome scan that was only needed for disabled diagnostics during chunk decoration.
• Create-world screen polish: tighter margins and spacing, a visual divider between climate zone entries, and the second tab now correctly reads "Settings" (it was mislabelled "Rules").
• Reduced unnecessary log-file bloat from the create-world screen, and corrected license inconsistencies to confirm alignment with GPL-3.0-or-later.
• Create-world screen layout. Panels sit tighter with less empty space, the World and Settings tab headers are now real buttons you can reach and activate from the keyboard (and Minecraft's narrator announces them), and panel backgrounds are slightly see-through so the panorama behind shows through.

Fixed

• Oceans are the right depth again. Outside the tropics, the first water off a beach could be labelled deep ocean, so shallow coastal water got deep-ocean fish, colour, and mob spawns. Every climate band now matches the water's real depth. This is the largest change in the release by area, but it is a correction to labelling, not a reshaping of terrain. New terrain only.
• Lush forests no longer grow inside the desert belt. Randomness at the band boundary could push temperate forest as far equatorward as 31°, dropping green woodland islands into arid country. Temperate growth now stops at the true 35° line with a soft edge. New terrain only.
• Windswept hills no longer dominate the polar band, and no longer show bare grey grass with no snow at cold-but-not-freezing latitudes. Three separate causes, all fixed.
• Savanna no longer dominates the tropics. It is now a coherent region with real borders, set inside a proper mix of forest and jungle, and still forms the transition band hugging arid areas.
• Structures are judged by their whole footprint, not a single centre point. A desert pyramid or outpost whose bounding box reached into badlands could previously generate half-in anyway; the entire footprint must now sit on legal ground. As deliberate design, no structure generates within 100 blocks of the world's east/west border danger zone.
• Structures now generate using Latitude's own biome map, so they land in the correct biomes even with custom biome packs installed — and generate at all in biomes that previously got none.
• Desert oases actually exist now. The rare "desert surviving inside a wet region" feature was silently dead on most worlds: its coherence noise scaled with world size, so the whole map got about three coin-flips regardless of size.
• Desert riverbanks follow the water instead of printing blobs. The "is there water nearby" test sampled sixteen fixed points, which narrow streams slipped straight through. Banks now sweep outward properly and fade with distance instead of ending on a hard rim.
• Rare biome slots can no longer come up empty without mods. Two accent slots in the dry and tropical belts contained only modded biomes, so on a vanilla world that slot fell through to whatever the raw terrain suggested — occasionally ice spikes or snowy plains at the equator.
• Modded beaches stay beaches. With biome packs installed, an unrecognised beach could be replaced by an inland biome, and in rare cases by a swamp or mangrove that bypassed every coastal check. Modded worlds only.
• /locate biome puts you inside the biome, not on its edge, can now find custom-pack biomes, and returns the actual nearest match rather than the first one found along the search path.
• /locate structure results now land on the actual structure, and teleporting to a buried structure surfaces you safely above it instead of inside it.
• Custom-pack biomes decorate properly. Biomes admitted only through a pack's provider ticket could generate with no flowers, grass, or other decoration at all.
• Dedicated and server-created worlds now place custom-pack biomes at all. That capture previously only happened for worlds created through the in-game screen.
• Muskeg, ice marsh, glacier cliff and eroded_badlands were unplaceable in every world. Fixed; eroded_badlands had been logging a coverage warning on every load.
• Redwood forest now routes through the correct pool, correcting a stale route from an earlier port.
• Wetlands could appear in bone-dry regions, and deserts in explicitly wet ones. Both fixed.
• savanna_plateau no longer overrides a correct low-elevation biome choice, and steep temperate terrain is no longer flattened onto a plains-family biome.
• Badlands keeps its proper terracotta look with TerraBlender installed (pulled in by Biomes O' Plenty). TerraBlender was silently overriding Latitude's terrain rules with an old, untuned vanilla appearance.
• Alpine terrain respects real snow footing, badlands structures keep their desolate look instead of getting dressed up by nearby biomes, and a leftover "orphaned" white-rimmed grass glitch from snow removal is fixed.
• Latitude reliably recognises its own worlds even with other world-gen mods installed. It could previously fall back to vanilla terrain while still showing Latitude's loading screen and HUD — now it either works correctly or fails loudly with a clear error.
• New worlds' spawn point reliably stays inside your selected latitude, and the bonus chest no longer spawns floating over water.
• Cancel could accidentally select a climate zone instead of closing the screen at high GUI scale. Fixed.
• The loading screen no longer flashes vanilla's own screen first, and the compass HUD no longer shifts position when the location label changes length or renders outside a Latitude world.

Notes

• Worldgen changes apply to newly generated terrain. Already-explored chunks keep their biomes.
• Known trade-off: since forest doesn't spawn villages (vanilla behaviour), warm-belt village density drops somewhat now that savanna covers less ground. Villages remain common inside savanna regions themselves.

Known issues

• A rare seam where a lush temperate biome can directly border an arid subtropical one (e.g. flower forest against badlands) at the exact latitude-band boundary. Deferred — a fix is designed for a future pass.
• Windswept hills are correctly restricted to cold mountains now, but are still fairly rare there (~3–6% of that terrain) — an open art-direction question, not a bug.
• Climate-zone rows on the create-world screen have extra spacing at high GUI scale. Known, intentionally left for now.