Basic world customization

Under construction. The IsleBiomes and BorderBiomes still need to be described.

This tutorial will help you shaping your world. In this tutorial only BiomeMode:Normal is described The tutorial is written for both singleplayer and multiplayer, with or without the User Interface. You should already have installed Terrain Control and you should also know how to change the settings and how to regenerate the world. If not, look here for the installation instructions and here for a beginners' tutorial.

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 one of the 'NormalBiomes'). 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'. They are not considered as a true biome, but they make the terrain more varied. 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:

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. (Although 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 use them to smooth out the transition between two biomes, to make a biome more varied, 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. We set LandRarity on 100. 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 (IsleBiomes and IceBiomes are removed so that the image looks cleaner):

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 change the rarity of the biomes in the BiomeConfigs. If you want to have less jungles in your world, go to the JungleBiomeConfig.ini and set BiomeRarity (which is actually the biome probability) to 25.

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

Isle biomes are biomes that can be placed in other biomes. The biome needs to be smaller (so BiomeSize needs to be higher) to be able to spawn in another biome.

When a biome is used as an isle biome BiomeRarity works slightly different. It is now very sensitive: BiomeRarity:100 will make it spawn everywhere in the biome (except at the borders - to fill that area you should use a border biome). BiomeRarity:99 will make it spawn in about 50% of the biome, BiomeRarity:98 in 25% of the biome and so on.

Mister_Tesseract has made a detailed tutorial about isle biomes. Read it here.

##BorderBiomes TODO

##IceBiomes Some parts of the world are marked as 'frozen'. If a frozen area is generated on top of a continent, one of the IceBiomes will spawn. If a frozen area is generated on top of a river, the biome FrozenRiver will spawn instead. You can toggle this off by setting FrozenRivers (WorldConfig) to false. If a frozen area is generated on top of an ocean, the biome FrozenOcean will spawn. You can toggle this off by setting FrozenOcean (WorldConfig) to false.

You can change the probability of the frozen areas by changing the IceRarity variable. Lower values give less frozen areas, higher values will make more parts of the map frozen.

Please note that the temperature of the biome is not determined by adding it to the IceBiomes list, but by the BiomeTemperature variable in the BiomeConfigs. You can have cold biomes in the NormalBiomes list (Taiga is an example of that in the default configs), and you can have hot biomes in the IceBiomes list. This makes the name IceBiomes a little misleading.

##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 ids 0-22, but as new biomes are added to vanilla, new biome ids will be used. If you use a biome id above 40 you should be save for a very long time.