Latitude

The first Latitude release for Minecraft 1.21.1 since 1.3.0, and it is a big jump: everything from 1.4 and the whole 1.5 line arrives at once. If you are coming from 1.3.0 on this version, read this as one long release rather than a point update.

Existing worlds keep the terrain they already have. Everything below shapes newly generated chunks. Explore outward from an old world and you will see the new rules take over at the edge of what was already generated.

New

• Biome packs work with Latitude now. Biomes O' Plenty, Terralith and friends have their biomes sorted into the climate band each one belongs to, instead of being ignored or scattered. There is a TerraBlender bridge for packs that use it.
• Operator commands. /latitude gives you a small set of tools for finding your way around a Latitude world — including a latitude-aware /locate that answers with somewhere you can actually reach, and a teleport that lands you on solid ground.
• A door to the vanilla world types. The world list now has a way through to Minecraft's own create-world screen, so a Latitude install is no longer a one-world-type install. Your name and seed come with you, and there is a way back.
• Your saves say which climate you left off in. Each world in the list carries the band you were last standing in, next to the date.
• Riverbanks in dry country. Rivers cutting through desert and badlands now get banks that look like they belong there rather than stopping at the water's edge.
• Immersive mountains. Mountains act like mountains now – trees thin out at high altitudes, where forests give way to meadows, rock, and snowy peaks.
• A tree line at the pole. Trees thin out and then stop as you go north or south, the way they do on Earth, and the plants that need a floor no longer end up floating when the ground beneath them is taken away.
• Villages are sited on purpose. A village will not turn up past the tree line, will not contradict the climate it is standing in, and will not be dropped onto ground it cannot sit on.
• A safer first step into a new world. Latitude picks a spawn that is on land, in the band you chose, and not inside a hazard.
• The loading screen is Latitude's. Entering a Latitude world — new or existing — shows the Latitude loading pane instead of the bare vanilla screen.
• 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

• The climate map reads like a real world. Band boundaries wobble instead of running as straight lines, deserts sit where deserts sit, and mesa country is rare inland scenery rather than a seed lottery.
• The poles feel like the poles. Snow line, ice, fog and the polar cap were all retuned together, and the transition into the subpolar band now thins out in patches instead of changing along a hard line.
• The compass HUD and HUD Studio gained the location-detail readout, snapping, and per-element placement.
• The create-world screen was rebuilt around a climate picker with a live map, an intro title, and a layout that copes with high GUI scales by moving to tabs instead of cramming three columns.
• Edge storm warnings now tell you whether the storm is to your east or your west.
• Less repeat work while exploring. Latitude no longer redoes a custom-biome scan that was only needed for diagnostics that are switched off, and several worldgen paths cache what they had been recomputing per chunk.
• 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

• /locate and the world agree with each other. Structure prediction used to judge the raw biome while generation judged the one Latitude had painted, so /locate could promise a desert pyramid that never existed. Both now judge the same biome.
• No more snow in warm bands, and no windswept snow appearing below the snow line.
• Frozen rivers no longer sprout warm-climate plants.
• Mushroom islands stopped appearing as thin slivers pressed against other terrain.
• The pale garden no longer breaks up into disconnected patches.
• Alpine surfaces keep their snow and stone consistent with the height they are at.

Known limitations on Minecraft 1.21.1

These are differences from the 1.21.11 and 26.x releases of the same version, and they come from what this Minecraft version provides rather than from choices made here.

• Blocks that Minecraft added after 1.21.1 — the firefly bush, leaf litter, wildflowers, the dry grasses, and the pale garden's moss — simply do not exist here, so the rules that mention them have nothing to act on.
• In the world list, a row whose text is too long is shortened with an ellipsis but gets no hover tooltip. 1.21.1 does not attach one to that line at all.
• Fog narrows as a single range rather than the four separate ranges the newer versions expose. The effect is the same wall of fog; it is just described to the game in one piece.
• The loading screen waits for the whole terrain queue to be drawn rather than checking the chunk you are standing in, because this version does not publish the per-chunk answer.