Basic world customization

Under construction.

This tutorial will help you shaping your world. In this tutorial ModeBiome:Normal is described, and not ModeBiome:OldGenerator and also not ModeBiome:FromImage. The tutorial is written for both singleplayer and multiplayer, with or without the User Interface.

Start again with a new world. First of all, open the WorldConfig.ini file and look at the settings below 'Biome Generator Variables' (for the UI: World tab -> Biomes tab). Scroll a little bit down and you will see four variables:

NormalBiomes, IceBiomes, IsleBiomes and BorderBiomes.

To understand them you need a little more background information. The Minecraft world is made of continents. On the mainland the NormalBiomes generate. The rest is filled by the biome Ocean. To make things a bit more interesting you can give biomes a border (for example, beaches are a border between the biome Ocean and most other biomes) using the BorderBiomes. Also you can generate biomes inside other biomes. They are called IsleBiomes. For example, MushroomIsland is a isle biome inside the Ocean biome. Some areas of the map are marked as 'frozen'. When a frozen area is generated on top of a continent one of the IceBiomes will spawn (instead of a 'NormalBiome'). If it's generated on top of an ocean the biome FrozenOcean will spawn (however you can toggle this off).

##Technical biomes There are also some 'technical biomes'. This section describes their function in the default settings, and maybe inspires you to create your own. Keep in mind that you can change everything: if you would want, you could even generate the TaigaHills biome as a border between jungles and deserts.

River is one of the technical biomes: it's called a river, but it is just a biome with a lot of water. The world generator places that biome on top of the continents (in the shape of a river), and when a frozen area generates on top of a river, the biome FrozenRiver generates instead (however you can toggle this off). You can edit the RiverBiomeConfig to generate something that doesn't look like a river at all:

<Like I said, this page is under construction. Imagine a picture with a mountain in a river shape>

There are also some Hill-biomes: TaigaHills, JungleHills, DesertHills and ForestHills. Those are added as a IsleBiome and they generate inside the Taiga, Jungle, Desert and Forest. When you see a large hill inside one of these biomes, you can be sure that you are looking to a HillsBiome. (Extreme Hills is added to the 'NormalBiomes' and doesn't generate inside other biomes). River (which is just a biome with much water) is also added as a IsleBiome: it is generated as an isle inside the swamps.

MushroomIslandShore is generated as a BorderBiome between the MushroomIsland and all other biomes (usually an ocean) to smooth out the transition, and Extreme Hills Edge (also a BorderBiome) is added to smooth out the transitions between the Extreme Hills and most other biomes.

Most people working with Terrain Control use a lot of technical biomes to generate the terrain they want. They are used to smooth out the transition between two biomes, to make a biome more interesting, to generate snow peaks, etcetera. For example, Burckhart has used a lot of BorderBiomes and IsleBiomes to generate a mountain range.

##NormalBiomes Here you can see a map of just land and ocean.

The green areas are filled with the NormalBiomes and the blue areas are filled with the biome Ocean.

You can use the variable LandRarity to adjust the ratio between land and ocean:

Now it's time to see how that green land is filled. If you look at the NormalBiomes variable, you will see the following:

NormalBiomes:Desert,Forest,Extreme Hills,Swampland,Plains,Taiga,Jungle

Which gives the following biome map (as you can see, we have zoomed in):

If you want a hot world, you can remove most biomes from NormalBiomes:

NormalBiomes:Desert,Jungle

(If you still see some cold areas ingame, it's because of the IceBiomes. We see about them later.)

You can also add biomes that are normally not a NormalBiome to the list. Here we add the biome MushroomIsland as a NormalBiome (now it generates both as an island in the biome Ocean and as a NormalBiome):

NormalBiomes:Desert,Jungle,MushroomIsland

<TODO: picture of Mushroom biome>

That was it for NormalBiomes for now. Later on we will add our own custom biomes.

##IsleBiomes TODO: Here we play around with some isle biomes

##BorderBiomes TODO

##IceBiomes TODO

##CustomBiomes By default only the vanilla biomes are in the BiomeConfigs folder. To add your own biome you must first add it to the CustomBiomes list. This will make Terrain Control generate it's settings file (or use the file if it already exists). However, it doesn't generate them in the world. Just like the vanilla biomes you must add it to one or more of the four biome lists. So your custom biome is always on at least two places in the WorldConfig.ini.

(However, you can also let your biomes generate from an image, in which you just add it to the CustomBiomes list and to the image. More about that over here.)

After each entry in the list you will see a ":" with a number after it (if you don't add it by yourself, Terrain Control will add it):

CustomBiomes:MyBiome:50,MyOtherBiome:51

This is the biome id which is saved in the world. Never change this without resetting the world! (Imagine you had a custom Jungle biome with id 50, and now the id 50 is used by a snow biome. This would cause all custom Jungles to be frozen!) Also, never use a id that is already in use by vanilla. Currently vanilla uses the id's 0-22, but as new biomes are added to vanilla, new biome id's will be used. If you use a biome id above 40 you should be fine.