v4 is a milestone release featuring a massive overhaul of the base terrain shape, creating unique, awesome landforms and finally reaching the initial goal of an "Epic Fantasy" terrain style. There is a strong focus on generating many kinds of steep cliffs to make terrain more difficult and interesting to navigate, particularily on mountains, in highlands and in the highly eroded terrain next to swamps.
Everything is a little larger in scale and mountains can now reach up to Y=512 in some cases. Distant Horizons is heavily recommended to appreciate the wonders!
Another minor feature is "erosion" on steep terrain everywhere, meaning stone will replace grass when a hill gets close to being a cliff.
Also, "hot" and "tropical" temperature zones have been un-swapped, I think this works better for world cohesion.
The extra complexity introduced in v4 means world generation will a bit slower than before. Please have patience and use plenty of worldgen optimization mods.
Not tested with 1.21.2/1.21.3 but might work.. please submit a GitHub issue if it doesn't
- Altered continents, nicer shapes and more variation in sizes. Also affects mushroom islands
- Tweaked erosion noise for more sudden shifts between erosion levels (=more cliff-sides) and better mountainous area shapes
- Removed the "extra offset" that affected terrain height, after some testing it turns out it negatively affected the aesthetic of the game especially in mountainous areas.
- Tweaks to ridges (peaks/valleys), made the valleys go much deeper and sometimes generate large lakes.
- Removed river caves in mountain areas, instead generates deep saddle valleys. I liked the river tunnels but they felt too unnatural.
- Altered the temperature bands to have more equal sizes and also be a bit more unpredictable.
- Altered vegetation noise to be less janky.
- Altered continents, nicer shapes and more variation in sizes. Also affects mushroom islands
- Tweaked erosion noise for more sudden shifts between erosion levels (=more cliff-sides) and better mountainous area shapes
- Removed the "extra offset" that affected terrain height, after some testing it turns out it negatively affected the aesthetic of the game especially in mountainous areas.
- Tweaks to ridges (peaks/valleys), made the valleys go much deeper and sometimes generate large lakes.
- Removed river caves in mountain areas, instead generates deep saddle valleys. I liked the river tunnels but they felt too unnatural.
- Altered the temperature bands to have more equal sizes and also be a bit more unpredictable.
- Altered vegetation noise to be less janky.
- Mountain areas (low erosion) are slightly rarer in general, leaving more space for flat and eroded terrain
- Changed the way windswept and swampy areas are generated. Swamps are often larger and sometimes surrounded by windswept like in vanilla.
- Adjusted the continents, allowing them to sometimes generate a bit larger than before, and added a feature where land is sometimes more scattered (like archipelagos)
- Changed the way mushroom islands generate, forming large island groups
- Changed rivers to be much less likely to form rings, instead they 'snake' though the landscape like actual rivers
- As a side effect they can sometimes be very wide (other times very narrow) and can form big lakes on occasion.
- Changed the way "peaks" (high PV) generates, is no longer directly tied to erosion, instead form river-like lines leading to very nice mountain shapes.
- Adjusted humidity/vegetation noise for larger biomes, also "average" biomes are now more common than "extreme" biomes (dark forest etc) in general.
- Fixed too-tall peaks reaching beyond world height
- Fixed overly steep hills (and too high continentalness)
- Adjust continent sizes again, this time a bit smaller...
- Changes to how erosion and ridges are calculated
- Most notably, ridges is basically tied to erosion so that low erosion = peaks, gives much nicer looking mountains and more meadows, cherry groves
- Badlands (subtropical + low erosion) have slightly lower peaks than other biomes
- Marked Fabric API as a dependency (without Fabric API, the Larion datapack would never load)
- Two backports, one for Minecraft 1.20 - 1.20.4 and one for 1.20.5 - 1.20.6