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After multiple weeks of behind-the-scenes work resulting mostly in ugly brown hills, we're finally starting to render more interesting worlds! Every place in the world is assigned a temperature and a level of rainfall. With this information, the appropriate biome is selected. This ensure a realistic distribution of biomes, and a gradual transition.

We needed more shades of grass to make this gradual transition possible. We've got a system for giving blocks different colors without adding new textures, but we couldn't get it to work with grass in the past. Yesterday, we succeeded in doing that! So today we've been experimenting with many shades of grass.


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Zun has also created a way for me and modders to easily generate new trees. The old world generator required hand-crafted trees that were saved as 'structures'. With the new system, a tree is defined by it's height and the shape of its leaves. This makes it a lot easier to generate a wide variety of trees, and to ensure a smooth transition between them.


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Here is a summary of the work that still needs to be done on the new world generator:

• More diverse trees and shrubbery
  
• Random flowers
  
• Rocky outcrops and cliffs
  
• Clear consequences for going north/south/west/east, continents and oceans
  
• Appropriate ores in each biome