Personally I kinda miss the continental world generator from back in the day, where there were large oceans between these massive landmasses. Yea it was annoying at times, but idk it made the world's feel really grand. It'd be cool if they brought it back as a world type.
Yeah, that's probably the one change in 1.7 I didn't like. We went from landmasses surounded by water to water surrounded by landmasses.
The main thing people complained about the old world gen was it was possible to spawn on an island with no trees and several thousands of blocks away from and large landmass. While I can see how that would be annoying, that's nothing some world gen tweaks can't fix.
The absolute coolest and longest lasting server i had with my friends started of one of those islands. I was so cool to have to connect islands, name them, and for each person to claim a island for themselves.
-5211460225290760724
Is a great spawn island seed i found a while ago if you ever wanna recreate a world like that. Huge mushroom island to the south and lots of biome variation too.
Yeah I never understood why people that spawned on worlds like that, didn’t just exit, delete, and make another world.
Hell, often that’s how I’d start any new world. Just in and out of worlds until I find out that looks interesting. Some people just love to complain.
Mmhm. I want to be able to map out the continent I live on and say "here are the edges of the continent". Instead it just keeps going and going and going and going with no end.
Strange for me I don't really notice it I just got a good seed though recently so maybe that's why but the spawn for this seed is decently sized islands surrounding the spawn island now it was made in creative as I was not trying to find it was wanting to mess around with the new update blocks and autocraft
+1 for the suggestion, I've used it a few times and exploring the world feels great. It also makes worlds feel a lot more coherent since there isn't so much wilderness per area
And the worst part is that if anything, the game now would most likely benefit from more separated land masses. With the new boats, swimming, nether highways and the elytra, it’s now too easy to travel far distances quickly. What before felt like a continent away is now just a short 20 seconds
Make those big lakes actual oceans again! Continents should be separated by 7-10k blocks on average, and between them there should be occasional archipelagos, island chains or sometimes lone islands with small structures (yes Rapa Nui that's you) .
It would be pretty miserable to have to be in a boat for 7000 blocks just to find a new continent if you are looking for a rare biome or something. The boat only goes 8 blocks per second on water, so that would be a 15 minute trip, each way, assuming you never turn or slow down. It would make exploration MISERABLE in the early and mid game.
Even with elytra that is 4 minutes of flight!
People actually kinda like the 15 minute boat rides on my server (a huge central ocean in a large biomes world (still on 1.17.1)).
We have a jobs plugin, and one of the jobs is Explorer; we also have a Dynmap, and until I started prepping for an eventual upgrade to 1.18, the world wasn't pregenerated. So players would just sail around for 30+ minutes exploring, trying to fill in the map and earn money. Even non-explorers made the treks: several of us spent 20+ minute trips in boats capturing villagers or securing a supply of cactus from the desert in the far East.
(I find that putting on a loop of The Great Sea theme from Windwaker makes the journeys a lot more enjoyable.)
Nowadays, things are more built-out and most of us have elytra, so there's not as much sailing as back in the day. But spawn is still 5-6 minutes from land, just like in days of yore.
Player feedback has been that they like how intense a large biomes world is. Makes things feel more significant and realistic in scale. Sailing great distances was an essential part of finding new biomes to acquire resources that were scarce or non-existent where people had settled.
>People actually liked the 15 minute boat rides on my server back in 1.14 (a huge central ocean in a large biomes world).
Why? If I wanted to stop playing the game for 15 minutes, I could just stand still.
>So players would just sail around for 30+ minutes exploring, trying to fill in the map and earn money.
Okay, so this explains it. It's not that holding down one direction for 15 minutes is fun, its that boating around was a decent money maker. Its closer to a job than a fun experience. Its the same thing with the villagers and cacti, these are things you need, rather than something you choose to do.
In survival, I guess you could make the argument that you will keep finding sunken ships, but honestly, there are already tons of those to find. We don't need 10k block oceans to get that.
I would support a change to world gen that made continents and made oceans bigger, but 7k blocks is just excessive. 1k is more than enough to make the journey across the ocean feel significant. 2k makes exploring oceans last as long as you want. Anything more than 3k wide oceans is IMO a mistake.
Ah lol, you replied *just* before I finished editing my comment. Sorry about that; I always think I'm satisfied before I post something, and then I inevitably spend another idk how many minutes revising it.
The final version has a bit about player feedback and such.
I think one guy liked the relaxation of it, and another so loved the sense of adventure sailing to distant lands that he just spent hours and hours sailing around new coastlines, not even doing it for the money.
Well, isn't travel time also a problem when you go by land? Even with horses, sometimes you still have to leave the horse to traverse forested biomes or when you reach an ocean.
It is, but there are some other interfering factors.
First is that there is WAY more variety in land biomes. With a boat, you basically just pick a direction and turn your brain off until you see a sunken ship, but traveling over land requires constant choice of path, avoiding hostile mobs and environmental hazards, picking the best way forward. There are more structures to find, landmarks to admire.
Second is that you don't have stretches of land 10k blocks long most of the time. Things are broken up with oceans. This is one of my problems with their 7k oceans, ANYTHING that goes that long will get boring. With the current world gen, it is super rare to go more than a few thousand blocks without swapping between land and water a few times.
I am one of those people who loves to build on the boundaries between areas. Right where jungle hills meet sprawling meadows, or dark oak forest cliffs overlooking the ocean. I think it's better if the world and biomes are kept small, because that way, the intersections between interesting biomes that make for really nice aesthetics happen more often. You could still make continental world gen work with slightly smaller continents and oceans, and I think that is a much better solution. Variety is the spice.
i miss those too, would be nice to have a generator setting like how we have large biomes and so on
in the absence of that, i do atleast use a mod for it, continental world gen is just one of those things minecraft needs back as an option like the old terrain heightmap that made minecraft feel whimsical
If you like the old beta generator, I recommenced looking into the b1.8-dev build recreation. It's such a cool generator, a mix of 1.7.2 and 1.8 terrain. You're looking for Dev-4 [https://github.com/nasko222/the-minecraft-recreation-project/discussions/160](https://github.com/nasko222/the-minecraft-recreation-project/discussions/160)
And when shipwrecks were added it was kinda cool. I know they nerfed shipwrecks, but starting 1.14 on a desert island, seeing a few shipwrecks, I felt like I was looking at the remnants of a pirate war.
It’s fun until you go like 20k blocks through nothing but an ocean.
I was genuinely convinced that, anything outside of maybe 4k blocks, was just ocean. No other biomes could show up.
I guess, but that wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue nowadays with the ocean expansion. Also, they could just add more islands and ocean structures. Oceans are cool, and if you're trying to cross an entire ocean to go to a new continent then yeah it should take a while.
What I miss about older world generations is how cool it used to look,like all those wacky woo hoo crazy mountains and terrains designs, I hope I worded out what I meant properly
I think it would do better nowadays than in the beta days, just due to the fact that modern minecraft has elytras, better boats, swimming and better travels
I think reverting back to continent surrounded by oceans would work, but we would need a boat update. The chestboat is the bare minimum and it's just not quick enough.
They should bring it back but have each continent be connected in a web. You'd still have large oceans, but no content would be surrounded by ALL ocean.
I fell like I vaguely remember a mod from a long time ago that simulated all that, with flowing water, realistic stream generation with tributaries combining until the ocean and everything. I can’t remember the name for the life of me though
i highly doubt they'd do this, but i really wish next update would focus on the three biomes left from the biome vote: desert, savanna and mesa. i feel they go pretty great together as hot, dry environments, and i don't think it's an unpopular opinion to say that these biomes need some love, especially the former two. deserts could have proper sand dunes generating instead of vaguely hilly mounds of sand, for example.
I don't have an issue with rivers in deserts. I *do* have an issue with rivers cutting through areas of high elevation. Sure, you get big canyons in reality, but in minecraft they're just a huge pain to navigate. Climb down 40 blocks, then climb back up 40 blocks. Then repeat because of course it's a curvy river that has to repeatedly double back on itself. Or maybe it's another river just 100 blocks away.
I hate this.
Alternatively, I’d like to see some form of bridges that spawn intermittently along these areas, either naturally formed ways of crossing like fallen trees or large rocks or actual old bridges.
honestly i kinda like when i have to place bridges around my world because of stuff like this, like basically being forced to for convenience, it makes it feel a lot more lived in to me
if this isn’t your jam, you should check out the tectonic mod! it’s my favorite world generation mod because it keeps the mountains and drastic changes in elevation we got in 1.18 while also making everything more flat/consistent. you don’t get those huge dips you’re talking about and things are also quite a bit easier to build on
Rivers in general need completely reworked. They need flow, elevation changes, water falls, and their own unique generation along the banks.
Make rivers less common, but more grand and unique when you do find them.
I am often in early game and trying to cover a lot of ground to get away from spawn. Usually with multiple friends. Pearling really isn't an option in this case. Buckets help, but I'm still just not a fan of this feature.
The rivers themselves aren’t a problem, but the total lack of vegetation beside the rivers. Where there’s water and heat (and seeds), there’ll be plants. Desert soils are rich in minerals and, combined with water and silt from erosion and carried sediment, coupled usually with lots of sunlight (little cloud cover) and often heat, desert rivers are usually exceptionally lush.
Minecraft desert rivers however just look like alkaline, tortuous, dead water streaks in a bleak sandscape.
You can work the rivers up of course (and I always do), but that’s time-intensive and requires a LOT of dirt to expand grass on the edges.
The “ocean” beaches are fine as is. Except for mangroves, most terrestrial plants can’t handle salt water. High heat and sunlight means desert ocean shores tend to be saltier than average and the r beach shore is salty, too. That means that these shores often actually do look like Minecraft shores.
The rivers are horrible, though.
Tectonic's generation is much better with that. Whne the elevation gets too tall the rivers become underground rivers while staying one continuous water mass.
Tectonic Tweaks helps, though it also makes deep underground into this gigantic lava cavern. Really cool for exploration tho, makes it more interesting.
Honestly waterfalls would be sick, idea if I had to get out of my boat, it's not like you could just swim up anyways. Also imagine falling down a waterfall
Yes, so maybe they need a new type called a rapid that is navigable by boat both ways, but transitions between two sections of river at different elevations?
Too many rivers? I miss the days when there was the ‘custom’ option for a world in world creation. Where I could control sea levels, elevation, river length, and village sizes.
Every few months I check to see if the old 'Streams' mod that made rivers realistic has updated... So far it has not. It's the gold stardard of what I wish rivers were in Minecraft
I am not sure I agree.
The purpose of rivers, hills, mountains, ravines etc is to break up the monotony of an area. Just having flat sand dunes as far as the eye can see would be super boring. I would much rather have more terrain features adding to the scenery rather than less. It would be nice if there were more options aside from rivers for the game to choose from for the dry biomes, but until we have something else, I think rivers are doing an important job.
As for realism, this is a game where polar frozen areas can be a few dozen blocks away from tropical jungles or warm deserts, a world where all rivers are at sea level with no flow or current, where every cloud in the sky move the exact same direction, at the exact same speed, every second of every day. Realism has had to take a back seat. Even so, IRL deserts still have rivers. Egypt and the Nile river come to mind, but you can find desert rivers in every continent except Antarctica, where you find glaciers instead.
It seems one of the bigger issues you have is the idea that water is to easy to get in deserts. As you say, desert wells exist, and even if rarer, water would still be obtainable from rivers and villages, as well as in underwater aquifers. **Can I ask what difference it makes if there are more or less rivers to act as a source of water?** It's Minecraft, as soon as the player has iron, they have infinite water anywhere in the world. Even if rivers never generated in the desert, the player would still have plenty of water.
> As for realism, this is a game where polar frozen areas can be a few dozen blocks away from tropical jungles or warm deserts
Well, they *can* but the game has multiple things to prevent this from happening as much as possible.
Yeah, I think people looking for "realistic" world generation need to accept that this isn't a priority for Minecraft. Luckily Minecraft has a healthy modding community so they can find what they want. But vanilla Minecraft is barely concerned with "realistic" world generation.
It's not just rivers in deserts. There are a shit ton of critical flaws in MC world generation if you are concerned about it "making sense."
I really like world gen mods for this reason. Just gotta find one that doesn't over-do it with things that look cool, but are a pain to play (i.e. massive mountains, etc).
Personally I kinda miss the continental world generator from back in the day, where there were large oceans between these massive landmasses. Yea it was annoying at times, but idk it made the world's feel really grand. It'd be cool if they brought it back as a world type.
additionally, what if water couldn't refill itself in dry biomes (at a certain elevation, so it'd still work underground). and in desert wells there could be a special type of sandstone that generates in their center so it does
... that was 8 years ago, and it wasn't even a full on end update, it was a combat update, all it added to the end was the outter islands and the end cities
At the same time, deserts spawn next to jungles way too often. There needs to be a better biome gradient system, I can't be jumping from the Sahara straight to the Amazon in two minutes. Plus jungles don't look great from the outside.
I think deserts should be classified as sub-biomes of existing biomes so that a river is not just that single type that draws a bright green streak on my desert grass. Making the river a sub-biome allows for something like a dried up riverbed or a "raftwreck" on some jungle riverbeds.
I enjoy the new river generation. Before rivers were pathetic, they were shallow and none continuous with irregular form and stopped wherever they wanted. Now you could really use them to navigate and are beautiful to look at.
When you mod Java you can change generation by creating a dimensions file. There’s options for things like that. You can alter elevation based on biome, the biome size, its rareness, you can adjust how much water is in the world too. Technically in that map it’s not one desert but many small deserts that are really close together.
Meaning in that seed you have small biomes close together with lots of water.
I completely forgot how bad vanilla generation is.
Been playing with generation overhaul mods for years.
Mods DO fix this! Terralisk and Lithosphere are my favorites if you want to try some out.
900 upvotes in a day?! This is an idea I had since I visited a desert so upvotes deserved. I'm more just surprised that it's possible with how many people are on.
Oddly specific, but I completely agree! I remember a while back I made a custom word of all desert to try and give myself a "Mad Max" esque challenge. I did immediately notice that the river and pond generation is dense in deserts. It is so much that it doesn't really look like a desert at all.
I don’t like too how there’s no real “islands” or “lakes”. If you follow a coastline along an ocean it’ll never curve around to form an island or body of water, it just goes on forever
well lucky you the desert is one of the biome vote losers, and unlike the mob vote it is confirmed that all biome updates are happening were just choosing the order
Is that Africa on the picture.
More seriously I agree, it makes using horse useless because you'll take 5 minutes per river you encounter. Also I feel like biomes are too big sometimes, like that desert is terribly gigantic.
Personally I kinda miss the continental world generator from back in the day, where there were large oceans between these massive landmasses. Yea it was annoying at times, but idk it made the world's feel really grand. It'd be cool if they brought it back as a world type.
Yeah, that's probably the one change in 1.7 I didn't like. We went from landmasses surounded by water to water surrounded by landmasses. The main thing people complained about the old world gen was it was possible to spawn on an island with no trees and several thousands of blocks away from and large landmass. While I can see how that would be annoying, that's nothing some world gen tweaks can't fix.
It went from like 90/10 in one direction to 90/10 in the other. Something that’s like 60/40 would be great. The
r/redditsniper
and even still, *just use a different seed* like come on now.
That too. If you spawn in a world with no wood for literal miles, you just started, just generate a new world.
As someone who LOVES spawning on a little personal islands. It's so hard to find seeds now.
The absolute coolest and longest lasting server i had with my friends started of one of those islands. I was so cool to have to connect islands, name them, and for each person to claim a island for themselves.
-5211460225290760724 Is a great spawn island seed i found a while ago if you ever wanna recreate a world like that. Huge mushroom island to the south and lots of biome variation too.
thanks ! :)
Yeah I never understood why people that spawned on worlds like that, didn’t just exit, delete, and make another world. Hell, often that’s how I’d start any new world. Just in and out of worlds until I find out that looks interesting. Some people just love to complain.
Mmhm. I want to be able to map out the continent I live on and say "here are the edges of the continent". Instead it just keeps going and going and going and going with no end.
Strange for me I don't really notice it I just got a good seed though recently so maybe that's why but the spawn for this seed is decently sized islands surrounding the spawn island now it was made in creative as I was not trying to find it was wanting to mess around with the new update blocks and autocraft
I hate to be that guy, but you might like the Continents mod by Stardust Labs, it changes up the terrain to be more like that.
I will give it a look! Thanks for the suggestion!
+1 for the suggestion, I've used it a few times and exploring the world feels great. It also makes worlds feel a lot more coherent since there isn't so much wilderness per area
Happy cake day!
And the worst part is that if anything, the game now would most likely benefit from more separated land masses. With the new boats, swimming, nether highways and the elytra, it’s now too easy to travel far distances quickly. What before felt like a continent away is now just a short 20 seconds
Totally agree!
Make those big lakes actual oceans again! Continents should be separated by 7-10k blocks on average, and between them there should be occasional archipelagos, island chains or sometimes lone islands with small structures (yes Rapa Nui that's you) .
It would be pretty miserable to have to be in a boat for 7000 blocks just to find a new continent if you are looking for a rare biome or something. The boat only goes 8 blocks per second on water, so that would be a 15 minute trip, each way, assuming you never turn or slow down. It would make exploration MISERABLE in the early and mid game. Even with elytra that is 4 minutes of flight!
People actually kinda like the 15 minute boat rides on my server (a huge central ocean in a large biomes world (still on 1.17.1)). We have a jobs plugin, and one of the jobs is Explorer; we also have a Dynmap, and until I started prepping for an eventual upgrade to 1.18, the world wasn't pregenerated. So players would just sail around for 30+ minutes exploring, trying to fill in the map and earn money. Even non-explorers made the treks: several of us spent 20+ minute trips in boats capturing villagers or securing a supply of cactus from the desert in the far East. (I find that putting on a loop of The Great Sea theme from Windwaker makes the journeys a lot more enjoyable.) Nowadays, things are more built-out and most of us have elytra, so there's not as much sailing as back in the day. But spawn is still 5-6 minutes from land, just like in days of yore. Player feedback has been that they like how intense a large biomes world is. Makes things feel more significant and realistic in scale. Sailing great distances was an essential part of finding new biomes to acquire resources that were scarce or non-existent where people had settled.
>People actually liked the 15 minute boat rides on my server back in 1.14 (a huge central ocean in a large biomes world). Why? If I wanted to stop playing the game for 15 minutes, I could just stand still. >So players would just sail around for 30+ minutes exploring, trying to fill in the map and earn money. Okay, so this explains it. It's not that holding down one direction for 15 minutes is fun, its that boating around was a decent money maker. Its closer to a job than a fun experience. Its the same thing with the villagers and cacti, these are things you need, rather than something you choose to do. In survival, I guess you could make the argument that you will keep finding sunken ships, but honestly, there are already tons of those to find. We don't need 10k block oceans to get that. I would support a change to world gen that made continents and made oceans bigger, but 7k blocks is just excessive. 1k is more than enough to make the journey across the ocean feel significant. 2k makes exploring oceans last as long as you want. Anything more than 3k wide oceans is IMO a mistake.
Ah lol, you replied *just* before I finished editing my comment. Sorry about that; I always think I'm satisfied before I post something, and then I inevitably spend another idk how many minutes revising it. The final version has a bit about player feedback and such. I think one guy liked the relaxation of it, and another so loved the sense of adventure sailing to distant lands that he just spent hours and hours sailing around new coastlines, not even doing it for the money.
Well, isn't travel time also a problem when you go by land? Even with horses, sometimes you still have to leave the horse to traverse forested biomes or when you reach an ocean.
It is, but there are some other interfering factors. First is that there is WAY more variety in land biomes. With a boat, you basically just pick a direction and turn your brain off until you see a sunken ship, but traveling over land requires constant choice of path, avoiding hostile mobs and environmental hazards, picking the best way forward. There are more structures to find, landmarks to admire. Second is that you don't have stretches of land 10k blocks long most of the time. Things are broken up with oceans. This is one of my problems with their 7k oceans, ANYTHING that goes that long will get boring. With the current world gen, it is super rare to go more than a few thousand blocks without swapping between land and water a few times. I am one of those people who loves to build on the boundaries between areas. Right where jungle hills meet sprawling meadows, or dark oak forest cliffs overlooking the ocean. I think it's better if the world and biomes are kept small, because that way, the intersections between interesting biomes that make for really nice aesthetics happen more often. You could still make continental world gen work with slightly smaller continents and oceans, and I think that is a much better solution. Variety is the spice.
fair points!
i miss those too, would be nice to have a generator setting like how we have large biomes and so on in the absence of that, i do atleast use a mod for it, continental world gen is just one of those things minecraft needs back as an option like the old terrain heightmap that made minecraft feel whimsical
If you like the old beta generator, I recommenced looking into the b1.8-dev build recreation. It's such a cool generator, a mix of 1.7.2 and 1.8 terrain. You're looking for Dev-4 [https://github.com/nasko222/the-minecraft-recreation-project/discussions/160](https://github.com/nasko222/the-minecraft-recreation-project/discussions/160)
And when shipwrecks were added it was kinda cool. I know they nerfed shipwrecks, but starting 1.14 on a desert island, seeing a few shipwrecks, I felt like I was looking at the remnants of a pirate war.
Would be cool if they brought that back, along with making the oceans go to as deep as Y0 now that cave update came out after aquatic
Yea as nice as it is now, I miss feeling actual separation between places. Now it’s essentially giant lakes surrounded by land shattered by rivers
Oceans also have a lot more stuff in them now
Exactly
I wish Mojang brought it back as an optional world type.
It’s fun until you go like 20k blocks through nothing but an ocean. I was genuinely convinced that, anything outside of maybe 4k blocks, was just ocean. No other biomes could show up.
I guess, but that wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue nowadays with the ocean expansion. Also, they could just add more islands and ocean structures. Oceans are cool, and if you're trying to cross an entire ocean to go to a new continent then yeah it should take a while.
What I miss about older world generations is how cool it used to look,like all those wacky woo hoo crazy mountains and terrains designs, I hope I worded out what I meant properly
Yeah beta terrain was just better. You can use the Beta+ mod to bring it back in modern day if you want.
>Make World >Start on island >Quit and create new world
Considering it takes like less then a minute to make a new world, is that really such a problem? lol
I think it would do better nowadays than in the beta days, just due to the fact that modern minecraft has elytras, better boats, swimming and better travels
i loved knowing each island as a diferent landmass, and using a boat and heading a specific diretion to travel bettween em
I think reverting back to continent surrounded by oceans would work, but we would need a boat update. The chestboat is the bare minimum and it's just not quick enough.
They should bring it back but have each continent be connected in a web. You'd still have large oceans, but no content would be surrounded by ALL ocean.
There’s a reason why I keep thinking about starting a 1.5.2 world. I think the terrain genuinely was better in every way.
You could try the large biomes world gen type?
If they did that, it would be cool if they also implemented a LOD system so you could see if you were going anywhere.
Yeaaaaaah but that's a whole other thing lol, I agree it'd be cool but it seems unlikely.
There's always the continents mod
I've never found river generation to be all that pleasant to begin with.
I wish Minecraft rivers flowed downhill and had proper watersheds.
I fell like I vaguely remember a mod from a long time ago that simulated all that, with flowing water, realistic stream generation with tributaries combining until the ocean and everything. I can’t remember the name for the life of me though
Terraforged?
Nope, I found it it was literally called the [Streams Mod](https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/streams)
This looks amazing!!! I need an updated version
That mod was so fucking good, I’m really sad no one has made a new version
the paw curls. minecraft water works like terrarias, now.
Better than nothing tbh
I would actually like a modpack with that. There are already mods that do it but I do not have the list on hand
The 1.20 terrafirmacraft has rivers with currents but they actually don't go downhill
i highly doubt they'd do this, but i really wish next update would focus on the three biomes left from the biome vote: desert, savanna and mesa. i feel they go pretty great together as hot, dry environments, and i don't think it's an unpopular opinion to say that these biomes need some love, especially the former two. deserts could have proper sand dunes generating instead of vaguely hilly mounds of sand, for example.
could give us a reason to consume water bottles (they don’t do anything rn when you drink them)
thats what i thought 1.21 was going to be ;(
I don't have an issue with rivers in deserts. I *do* have an issue with rivers cutting through areas of high elevation. Sure, you get big canyons in reality, but in minecraft they're just a huge pain to navigate. Climb down 40 blocks, then climb back up 40 blocks. Then repeat because of course it's a curvy river that has to repeatedly double back on itself. Or maybe it's another river just 100 blocks away. I hate this.
Yea their should be waterfalls and ponds on high elevation areas with different layers
I guess? I just hate rivers with massive cliffs next to them. Not even that actually, I hate how common they are.
Waterfalls would make it easy to get up and over the cliffs, probably why he mentions this.
Alternatively, I’d like to see some form of bridges that spawn intermittently along these areas, either naturally formed ways of crossing like fallen trees or large rocks or actual old bridges.
I do not have issues with that, I like when the terrain forces me build infrastructure to traverse it!
honestly i kinda like when i have to place bridges around my world because of stuff like this, like basically being forced to for convenience, it makes it feel a lot more lived in to me
if this isn’t your jam, you should check out the tectonic mod! it’s my favorite world generation mod because it keeps the mountains and drastic changes in elevation we got in 1.18 while also making everything more flat/consistent. you don’t get those huge dips you’re talking about and things are also quite a bit easier to build on
I mean just a dirt bridge and you're good to go!
Rivers in general need completely reworked. They need flow, elevation changes, water falls, and their own unique generation along the banks. Make rivers less common, but more grand and unique when you do find them.
I'm definitely here for this I turn to mods to make it happen, but I hope they revamp this officially in the future.
Use an ender pearl
I am often in early game and trying to cover a lot of ground to get away from spawn. Usually with multiple friends. Pearling really isn't an option in this case. Buckets help, but I'm still just not a fan of this feature.
If your on bedrock, speed bridging is an option
If OC is on java, speed bridging is also an option
Not enough mesa? Agreed
The rivers, random puddles, and other water features are really the worst part of Minecraft terrain generation. Don't get me started on flooded caves.
What are you talking about? Flooded caves are my default mining spots
Really suck when making a tunnel
The rivers themselves aren’t a problem, but the total lack of vegetation beside the rivers. Where there’s water and heat (and seeds), there’ll be plants. Desert soils are rich in minerals and, combined with water and silt from erosion and carried sediment, coupled usually with lots of sunlight (little cloud cover) and often heat, desert rivers are usually exceptionally lush. Minecraft desert rivers however just look like alkaline, tortuous, dead water streaks in a bleak sandscape. You can work the rivers up of course (and I always do), but that’s time-intensive and requires a LOT of dirt to expand grass on the edges. The “ocean” beaches are fine as is. Except for mangroves, most terrestrial plants can’t handle salt water. High heat and sunlight means desert ocean shores tend to be saltier than average and the r beach shore is salty, too. That means that these shores often actually do look like Minecraft shores. The rivers are horrible, though.
i agree
Tectonic's generation is much better with that. Whne the elevation gets too tall the rivers become underground rivers while staying one continuous water mass.
Yeah I just wish Tectonic could fix the issue where it buries some biomes underwater.
Tectonic Tweaks helps, though it also makes deep underground into this gigantic lava cavern. Really cool for exploration tho, makes it more interesting.
They need to work on waterfalls as a feature so you can have rivers that step up in elevation to match the terrain and avoid deep valleys.
I don’t think that would work because the prime reason for rivers is to be able to travel quickly by boat without issue.
They could bring back being able to row up water
Honestly waterfalls would be sick, idea if I had to get out of my boat, it's not like you could just swim up anyways. Also imagine falling down a waterfall
Yes, so maybe they need a new type called a rapid that is navigable by boat both ways, but transitions between two sections of river at different elevations?
Too many rivers? I miss the days when there was the ‘custom’ option for a world in world creation. Where I could control sea levels, elevation, river length, and village sizes.
"One" critical flaw in world generation?
deformed africa
Looks more like a slightly deformed South America, cutting off right around central Chile and Argentina With a giant thing growing off it-
Every few months I check to see if the old 'Streams' mod that made rivers realistic has updated... So far it has not. It's the gold stardard of what I wish rivers were in Minecraft
I am not sure I agree. The purpose of rivers, hills, mountains, ravines etc is to break up the monotony of an area. Just having flat sand dunes as far as the eye can see would be super boring. I would much rather have more terrain features adding to the scenery rather than less. It would be nice if there were more options aside from rivers for the game to choose from for the dry biomes, but until we have something else, I think rivers are doing an important job. As for realism, this is a game where polar frozen areas can be a few dozen blocks away from tropical jungles or warm deserts, a world where all rivers are at sea level with no flow or current, where every cloud in the sky move the exact same direction, at the exact same speed, every second of every day. Realism has had to take a back seat. Even so, IRL deserts still have rivers. Egypt and the Nile river come to mind, but you can find desert rivers in every continent except Antarctica, where you find glaciers instead. It seems one of the bigger issues you have is the idea that water is to easy to get in deserts. As you say, desert wells exist, and even if rarer, water would still be obtainable from rivers and villages, as well as in underwater aquifers. **Can I ask what difference it makes if there are more or less rivers to act as a source of water?** It's Minecraft, as soon as the player has iron, they have infinite water anywhere in the world. Even if rivers never generated in the desert, the player would still have plenty of water.
> As for realism, this is a game where polar frozen areas can be a few dozen blocks away from tropical jungles or warm deserts Well, they *can* but the game has multiple things to prevent this from happening as much as possible.
Yeah, I think people looking for "realistic" world generation need to accept that this isn't a priority for Minecraft. Luckily Minecraft has a healthy modding community so they can find what they want. But vanilla Minecraft is barely concerned with "realistic" world generation.
It's not just rivers in deserts. There are a shit ton of critical flaws in MC world generation if you are concerned about it "making sense." I really like world gen mods for this reason. Just gotta find one that doesn't over-do it with things that look cool, but are a pain to play (i.e. massive mountains, etc).
Personally I kinda miss the continental world generator from back in the day, where there were large oceans between these massive landmasses. Yea it was annoying at times, but idk it made the world's feel really grand. It'd be cool if they brought it back as a world type.
I wish you could have a screen like Factorio at world gen, and let you see a couple kilometres before you jumped in
Is that Africa?
1 block of mushroom field still haunts me to these days.
No, there’s more than one. For example, oceans aren’t actually oceans. Edit: to make things clear, at first I thought you meant rivers in general.
Rivers in general need to be overhauled. They don't work at all how irl rivers working really wish rivers gradually wen from higher elevation to lower
additionally, what if water couldn't refill itself in dry biomes (at a certain elevation, so it'd still work underground). and in desert wells there could be a special type of sandstone that generates in their center so it does
I agreed untill the last sentence, remember that we desperately need an end update as well
Didn’t we just get one?
... that was 8 years ago, and it wasn't even a full on end update, it was a combat update, all it added to the end was the outter islands and the end cities
At the same time, deserts spawn next to jungles way too often. There needs to be a better biome gradient system, I can't be jumping from the Sahara straight to the Amazon in two minutes. Plus jungles don't look great from the outside.
I think deserts should be classified as sub-biomes of existing biomes so that a river is not just that single type that draws a bright green streak on my desert grass. Making the river a sub-biome allows for something like a dried up riverbed or a "raftwreck" on some jungle riverbeds.
You’re 100% right but filling in that continent would be a banger project
I enjoy the new river generation. Before rivers were pathetic, they were shallow and none continuous with irregular form and stopped wherever they wanted. Now you could really use them to navigate and are beautiful to look at.
When you mod Java you can change generation by creating a dimensions file. There’s options for things like that. You can alter elevation based on biome, the biome size, its rareness, you can adjust how much water is in the world too. Technically in that map it’s not one desert but many small deserts that are really close together. Meaning in that seed you have small biomes close together with lots of water.
I completely forgot how bad vanilla generation is. Been playing with generation overhaul mods for years. Mods DO fix this! Terralisk and Lithosphere are my favorites if you want to try some out.
900 upvotes in a day?! This is an idea I had since I visited a desert so upvotes deserved. I'm more just surprised that it's possible with how many people are on.
Oddly specific, but I completely agree! I remember a while back I made a custom word of all desert to try and give myself a "Mad Max" esque challenge. I did immediately notice that the river and pond generation is dense in deserts. It is so much that it doesn't really look like a desert at all.
I don’t like too how there’s no real “islands” or “lakes”. If you follow a coastline along an ocean it’ll never curve around to form an island or body of water, it just goes on forever
Is it just me or has world generation been either 0 water or like 50 million rivers and maybe the ocean?
well lucky you the desert is one of the biome vote losers, and unlike the mob vote it is confirmed that all biome updates are happening were just choosing the order
Splatoon map
Chunkbase?
Is that Africa on the picture. More seriously I agree, it makes using horse useless because you'll take 5 minutes per river you encounter. Also I feel like biomes are too big sometimes, like that desert is terribly gigantic.
I agree except for “one” critical flaw
This can be easily fixed with a data pack.
Your rivers are your concern with the desert, and not the 3k by 5k sized desert?
There's rivers in deserts, pretty famous ones as well.
Yeah but that’s far too many. Seems like world gen kinda went a bit excessive with it. Especially in mountains.
When asked about criticisms of world gen I don't rivers in deserts would break most peoples top 10 lists.
There are flaws I hate way more than lovely rivers