Orbis Novus: Terrain

Realistic mountains, eroded valleys and river networks. Valleys are worn down by erosion and rivers run in networks down to the sea.

The terrain comes from the game's own noise generator, driven by the mod's density functions. That keeps vanilla caves, aquifers, ore veins, biome features and other mods' structures and features working. The Nether and the End stay vanilla. Every world is infinite and seeded, so one seed always makes the same world. Chunks generate at close to vanilla's speed: 28 to 33 ms each in testing, against vanilla's 27.

Making a world

On the Create World screen, use the World Type button to pick Orbis Novus. It starts as Patchwork Earth. Customize opens the settings screen, laid out like the old Customized world screen:

• Style: one of the ten below, or Custom Mix.
• Basic: sea level, base height, height variation and hill size.
• Mountains & Erosion: detail, peak sharpness, ridges, twist, erosion, slope limit, terraces and the snow line.
• Water: rivers, how many lakes, and islands.
• Mix: how much of each style Patchwork Earth or Custom Mix uses, and how big the regions are.
• Advanced: basins, craters, spires, and floating islands with their heights.
• Features: grass, flowers and trees; ores; lava and water pools; structures. All are on by default.
• Presets: every style, plus Sky Teeth, Flatlands, Drowned World, Lake District, Endless Canyons, Shattered Shards, Sky Archipelago and Crater Sea.
• Randomize, Copy and Paste (the settings as JSON), Defaults, Done and Cancel.

The settings are saved with the world.

The styles

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  Green Vale: rolling green hills with oak woods and rivers.

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  High Teeth: snowy alpine peaks over pine valleys.

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  Far Spires: towering amplified spires and gorges.

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  Skyreach: grassy islands floating over a shallow sea.

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  Red Steps: terraced badlands canyons.

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  Warm Shoals: jungle islands in a warm shallow sea.

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  Verdigris Reach: a teal fungal alien world under needle spires.

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  Grey Silence: a dead grey moon covered in craters.

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  Painted Stillness: flat pastel-banded columns, like a sculpture field.

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  Patchwork Earth: rolling hills, alpine peaks, mesa steps and island seas, region by region. The default.

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  Custom Mix: any of the nine styles above (but Patchwork Earth) region by region, weighed on the Mix page.

Custom Mix

Custom Mix sets the single styles side by side, region by region. The Mix page has a slider from 0 to 5 for each style, plus one for region size.

Each region keeps its own style's land, biomes and ground. A Grey Silence region is grey moon dust even right next to Green Vale, and at the border the ground speckles from one to the other. Dry styles keep clear of a neighbour's sea, and floating islands thin out near the border. The sliders on the other pages apply to every region.

Natural features (26.1.2, 26.2, 26.3)

On these versions Terrain also adds natural features to the Overworld's biomes, by biome tag, in every world: procedural trees (redwoods, willows, baobabs, twisted pines, a rare world tree and more), rocks, fallen logs, standing stones, sea stacks, hot springs, waterfalls and other landforms. If a wood mod such as Biomes O' Plenty is installed, its logs can stand in for vanilla wood. The 1.21.1 build doesn't have these yet.

Dedicated servers

On a dedicated server, set these in server.properties before the world is first created:

level-type=orbisnovus_terrain:orbis_novus
generator-settings={"values":{"sea_level":70,"amp":120},"off":["ores"]}

level-type picks the style. Use orbis_novus (Patchwork Earth) or one of these, all prefixed with orbisnovus_terrain:: green_vale, high_teeth, far_spires, skyreach, red_steps, warm_shoals, verdigris_reach, grey_silence, painted_stillness, patchwork_earth, custom_mix.

generator-settings is optional. It takes the JSON that the Customize screen's Copy button gives you:

• values: the slider numbers, by key.
• mix and region (Patchwork Earth and Custom Mix only): each style's weight by style id, and the region size.
• off: any of vegetation, ores and lakes.

For example, a Custom Mix of three styles:

level-type=orbisnovus_terrain:custom_mix
generator-settings={"mix":{"green_vale":2,"verdigris_reach":1,"grey_silence":1,"high_teeth":0,"red_steps":0,"warm_shoals":0,"far_spires":0,"skyreach":0,"painted_stillness":0},"region":1500}

Structures follow the usual generate-structures setting. Once the world exists, its settings live in its level.dat, and changing server.properties no longer affects it.

Datapacks

The Customize screen covers each world. Beyond that, everything is datapack JSON:

• data/orbisnovus_terrain/worldgen/noise_settings/<type>.json sets the shape and the surface blocks. Every field is optional: heights, ridges, terraces, islands, rivers, spires and craters.
• data/orbisnovus_terrain/worldgen/world_preset/<type>.json holds the biome rules. The first match wins, and each rule names a biome or biome tag, with optional ranges of height, depth, temperature, humidity and river.
• To add a world type of your own to the World Type button, add a new world_preset and an entry in data/minecraft/tags/worldgen/world_preset/normal.json.
• Natural features (26.1.2, 26.2, 26.3): data/orbisnovus_terrain/tags/worldgen/biome/nature/<feature>.json says where each feature goes. To turn a feature off, override its tag with an empty list.

Compatibility

• Orbis Novus: Dungeons: its dungeons, settlements, castles and citadels generate in every Orbis Novus world type.
• Structure and feature mods: their structures and features generate, since the world runs on the vanilla generator.
• Biome mods (Biomes O' Plenty, Regions Unexplored and others): the Orbis Novus world types use their own biome rules, which pick vanilla biomes and a few common biome tags. Normal worlds are unchanged. Modded cave biomes and their carvers are handled.
• Distant Horizons: works in its normal mode, where it runs the world generator itself for far chunks.
• Uninstalling: a world made with an Orbis Novus world type needs the mod to generate new chunks. Normal worlds keep working without it.

Coming in 1.1

Six new styles. Each is a world type of its own and a Custom Mix part, with weight 0 by default so that 1.0 worlds keep their regions:

• Folded World: rock layers folded into S-curves, so cliffs show them as coloured bands.
• Tidal Continents: continents joined by tide flats that flood and drain once an in-game hour. The tide moves real water, but only near players, and the cost is small: about 0.06 ms a tick on a test server.
• Shattered Plates: flat slabs of land, each tilted its own way, with lava in the cracks.
• Sinkhole Karst: flat land full of huge round sinkholes, 50 to 200 blocks deep, with jungle or lush caves at the bottom.
• Ribbon Rivers: rivers raised 30 to 80 blocks on stone walls and arches across the lowland.
• The Bowl: a giant valley. Spawn is flat and round, and the land curves up towards the horizon all round.

And three options for every style:

• Latitude Bands: biomes run in bands north and south of spawn, hot near spawn and cold further out. You set the band width, from 1000 to 16000 blocks.
• Erosion Age: from young and jagged to ancient and rolling.
• Ruins: broken roads between regions, sunken walls, old foundations and pillars.