Streams Reflowing

[2.6.0] - 2026-07-05

Added

• Vanilla-water flow (vanillaWaterFlow, default on) -- now on ALL loaders (NeoForge, Forge, and Fabric). Streams and rivers carry their downstream current on PLAIN minecraft:water -- no custom fluid. The direction is computed server-side per chunk and imposed at render time, so shaders, particle mods (splashes, ripples, wakes), texture packs, water sounds, freezing/seasons, and gameplay mods that look for real water all just work. The flow itself got better too: smooth fine-grained angles (not 8 compass steps), currents that bend along the banks through curves, width flare (fanning out where a river widens, pinching where it narrows), soft wavy edges where a current meets still water, and flow that reaches the still bank water at biome edges. The custom directional stream fluid is now PERMANENTLY dormant: bakedStreamFluid is no longer a config option (hardcoded off). Its registration is kept only so a block already placed in an older save keeps resolving -- nothing can place a new one.
• Stream biome blacklist. Streams and lakes can now be kept out of chosen biomes entirely: list biome ids, #tags, or modid:* wildcards in the new streamBiomeBlacklist config, or add biomes to the #streamsreflowing:no_streams datapack tag. Carve-time, new chunks only.
• Biome-boost blacklist wildcards. biomeBoostBlacklist now accepts modid:* (or a bare modid) to exclude EVERYTHING a mod ships from the near-water biome boost -- e.g. keep a waypoint mod's structures from scattering along every bank.
• Clay on hilly stream beds. Streams and lakes running through hilly country (the minecraft:is_hill / c:is_hill biome tags, plus the vanilla windswept biomes) now lay CLAY along their beds -- a natural, renewable-feeling place to dig clay for building.
• Minimum coastal stream length. Tiny straight stream stubs that formed right at the water's edge are no longer generated (real streams, lake outlets, and arid-biome washes are unaffected). New chunks only.
• Underwater flora (underwaterFlora: 0 off / 1 our lakes / 2 our lakes + streams / 3 ALL water, default 2; underwaterFloraPercent, default 35%). Grows seagrass and tall seagrass on submerged floors. At 1-2 it dresses our own lakes and stream channels; at 3 it covers EVERY body of water, vanilla rivers, lakes, ponds and oceans included. Entirely separate from the biome-boost/bank-flora knobs. Only plants on a natural, water-plantable floor (the #streamsreflowing:underwater_vegetation_floor tag: dirt, sand, gravel, clay, mud and similar), so water over stone or ore never sprouts seagrass from bare rock. New chunks only.

Changed

• Simplified the config file.
• Major performance pass.
• Coastal stream mouths land in deep water. A mouth now enters at the water's edge, carries on to the deepest nearby seafloor, and overshoots a few blocks in -- so mouths connect reliably on very flat shelves and the end of the carve no longer shows as a shallow lip just under the surface. (New chunks only.)

Fixed

• Flow no longer appears seconds after a chunk renders: flow data is pre-built ahead of the player and heavy work is kept off the fast lane (also fixes slow world loads on re-entry).
• Occasional single-block-wide seams of divergent current in river flows (direction aliasing in the bank-follow/flare math; smoothed out seam-consistently across chunks).
• Streams no longer drain into caves. Two leaks fixed where a stream crossed a cave: a sand/gravel bed plug (or gravel bank-style bed) laid over a cave void collapsed into the cave on its first block update, opening a hole in the channel centre -- gravity blocks placed over voids are now rooted with a stone block (hidden inside the cave roof); and a cave passing through the stream's BANK at water level was never sealed (the berm only watches the terrain surface) -- the first bank ring is now plugged with matching terrain where a cave breaches it. (New chunks only.)

[2.5.2] - 2026-07-04

Changed

• River currents now hold one consistent direction. A river that runs along a coastline and meets the sea in several places used to split down the middle, its current fanning out toward each connection point; it now flows one clear way past every contact, reading as one continuous body. On large rivers the direction is also kept consistent from one internal flow region to the next -- oriented seaward by the terrain's broad land-to-sea trend -- instead of occasionally reversing across a seam. (flowVanillaRivers; new chunks only.)
• Stream currents now bend along the banks through curves and meanders, so the flow angles with the shape of the channel rather than pointing straight down the valley. (New chunks only.)

[2.5.1] - 2026-07-03

Added

• No Man's Land compatibility. With rebiomeStreams on, a stream running through a region now adopts No Man's Land's own river biome -- blackwater river in swampy country, lush river in jungle/lush, desert river in the desert -- matching how NML itself places rivers by the surrounding biome's climate. Falls back to minecraft:river in vanilla or wherever no such biome exists.
• Minecraft 26.2 builds (NeoForge and Fabric), alongside the existing 26.1 ones.

Changed

• Humidity-scaled lakes tuned. In a dry region a lake now fills to a RANDOM level -- anywhere from full down to as much as 8 blocks below its rim (it was a fixed drop) -- so arid areas scatter full, part-full, and empty lakes instead of lowering every one the same amount. The separate "leave the basin dry" dice roll is gone: a basin simply holds no water when its lowered level falls below its floor, so shallow dry basins empty out on their own while deep ones keep a lowered pool (a desert can still hold a deep oasis).

Fixed

• The directional stream fluid now freezes in cold biomes. Where vanilla water would ice over -- snowy and frozen biomes -- streams now freeze too (and the ice melts back to water when it warms), instead of staying open in the cold.
• Coastal stream mouths now reach the sea on flat shores. A stream running out across a dead-flat beach used to stop a few blocks short of the ocean; it now carries the channel the rest of the way into the water so the mouth meets the sea. Headwaters also start at or above sea level now, so short coastal streams no longer spawn sunk into flat ground. (New chunks only; this changed how stream mouths route to an outlet.)
• Xaero's Minimap now shows stream water as water, not grey. The stream fluid's block carries water's map colour, so it reads blue on the minimap (and anything else that colours by map colour) instead of a stone-grey patch.
• flowVanillaRivers: the current painted onto vanilla rivers no longer stops in a hard straight line at the internal flow-field region boundaries. That edge is softened with a subtle wave, so a large river's animated current doesn't show an obvious straight seam where one region reached the sea and the next did not.