The Ultra-Realistic Update

The mod has been rebuilt from the ground up. In 4.1.5 the Earth was drawn from a coarse map, one pixel to about 60 blocks, and most of the detail was guessed from altitude. Now every map is real data at up to 8 blocks per pixel, and TerraFirmaCraft is told what each place actually is.

Start a new world. Terrain generates differently everywhere, so chunks from an older version will not line up with new ones.

What's new

A detailed coastline. The continent map is eight times finer in each direction. Cyprus, Crimea, Denmark, the Caribbean islands, the fjords of Norway and the boot of Italy have their real outlines. Narrow straits such as Gibraltar, the Bosphorus and Magellan are open to sail through.

Real islands. Islands come from the map instead of being scattered at random, from Britain and Japan down to single ocean islets. Atolls form where coral reefs really grow.

Real lakes, fresh and salt. No more ocean in the Great Lakes. Baikal, Victoria and the lakes of Finland and northern Canada hold fresh water; the Dead Sea, the Great Salt Lake and the lakes of Kazakhstan and Tibet are salt. Lakes in a rift, such as Tanganyika and Malawi, are rift lakes.

Real rivers. The Danube, Mississippi, Nile, Volga, Ob, Amazon and every other river with a large enough basin run where they really do. Their width follows their real discharge, they fan out into deltas where real deltas exist, and desert rivers that are dry in reality stay dry. TFC still carves, bends and floods them as its own rivers.

Real tectonics on land. A tectonics map replaces the old altitude, divergence and hotspot maps. It describes each place (lowland or mountain, rift or collision belt, volcanic arc, a coast the sea reaches into) and TFC picks the biome itself:

• Tibet is a plateau, not a block of mountains.
• The Urals and the Appalachians, missing before, are old mountains.
• The Andes are layered from west to east: oceanic mountains, volcanic oceanic mountains, volcanic mountains, collisional mountains.
• The Ethiopian rift valley lies between two highlands.
• The Alps, the Himalayas and the Tian Shan are collisional mountains.

Real oceans. Shelves, reefs, trenches, volcanic arcs and mid-ocean ridges come from the map. Ridge crests follow the real axis of the plate boundary.

Real volcanoes. Hotspot shield volcanoes stand at their real locations, from active to ancient: Hawaii, Iceland, the Galápagos, Réunion and the rest.

Real climate. The climate zone map is gone. Temperature, rainfall and rainfall seasonality are now three separate maps with real values, so every place has its real climate zone and seasons, wet summers and wet winters fall in the right half of the year in both hemispheres, and all of TFC's biomes still occur without changes to its generator.

Over the poles. Past the top and bottom edges of the map the world is now turned round, as the globe is beyond a pole.

Waypoints on the right coast. The 400+ waypoints of the geography map now sit on a coastline that matches them.

Options

Each part of the world has its own switch on the world creation screen and in the config: continents, lakes, tectonics, volcanoes, rivers and climate. With all of them off, generation is plain TFC.

The old options altitude_from_map, hotspots_from_map and koppen_from_map were removed.

Fixes and performance

• The mod needs several hundred megabytes less memory, most of it while a world is being created.
• Fresh river water no longer replaces sea water off a river mouth.
• With continents from the map but procedural tectonics or climate, land height and climate no longer come out wrong.

For profile and modpack authors

This is a breaking change for custom map profiles.

• Removed: altitude.png, divergence.png, hotspots.png, koppen.png.
• continent.png now has five gray bands: ocean, island, fresh lake, salt lake, land. A plain black and white map still works as ocean and land.
• tectonics.png + tectonics.json (new, required for tectonics from the map): an indexed image whose palette entries are classes described in the JSON.
• temperature.png, rainfall.png, rain_variance.png: grayscale maps with real values.
• rivers.bin, ridges.bin (new, optional): the river network and the ridge axes.

A world is only complete with a continent map and a tectonics map filled in. Formats and a walkthrough are in the README.