Better Terrain Addon v3.2.2 (BTW CE 2.0.2+)

[SterlingRed]

Hello, I've got Better Terrain and Better Biomes addon v3.2.0 installed, and encountered a bug where 4 red sand piles produce 4 red sand slabs when crafted.

Can confirm happens to me as well. Also not a bug but at the same time I noticed badlands blocks don’t fall like dirt making it easy to dig out a hole into a cliff in the early game. Maybe that’s intentional idk.

[Pot_Tx]

I found another bug, cherry logs cannot burn in a campfire. Sorry if it's intentional.

[dawnraider]

FYI, any issues with blocks and items are with deco, not BTA. The only blocks that BTA adds are the clay variations (sand, red sand, grass). Will still take a look though.

[dawnraider]

I propose that it would be well worth the effort add some kind of curated 'True to BTW' settings, or maybe even a set of them ranging from 'Purist' to 'Dirty Purist' mainly regarding the biomes.

One of the features I plan on adding at some point is having various config preset options, which should help with the wide variety of customization.

If you want to keep the experience as pure as possible to vanilla BTW, then I would just use Better Terrain without using Better Biomes, as Better Terrain on its own tries to replicate the vanilla world gen, just with feature improvements.

Cheers for the response, man! It helps. So, you can spend more time 'stuck' in a certain type of biome... so, that's a pretty significant change on FC's ethos, as I remember him saying that he carefully designed the size of biomes and whatnot.

Also, one thing that puts me well off the really big, tall trees is that you can't really harvest them unless you enjoy seeing your world littered with awkward looking floating trees... which is sort of a no-go for me. Ight, so now I'm coming off as picky and snobby. I did warn y'all that I'm a bit of a purist =P

FC did not actually change biome generation at all. He did balance things around the existing biome size, but he didn't tune the existing settings. Particularly noticeable through the absolutely enormous ice plains from vanilla that still exist in BTW.

As for tall trees, if you play with deco that removes the restriction on placing blocks while jumping (by default - can be configured). BTA can be played without deco, but imo is at its best when paired.

Mid to Late game BTA is still hard. My primary method of finding villages and temples in BTW was to sail coast lines looking for the biomes that spawn them, hop off and explore the biome and any connected ones that may have something, and hit the ocean again. It worked pretty well and was faster than the nether travel guess and check method. It's completely unrealistic in BTA. First the variety of biomes is so large its hard to identify them all and memorize which ones contain all the right stuff, and two the terrain height variation makes it nearly impossible to see more than a chunk or two into the biome from the height of the ocean...which makes ocean travel to find structures not any faster than traveling through all the biomes on foot since you have to do that anyway because you cant see anything for any amount of distance otherwise. I don't know this for a fact but I also believe, based on my difficulty finding villages compared to BTW, that the increased terrain variation makes a lot of locations that would normally contain villages invalid in the code...and the end result is you end up with fewer of them actually spawning. This is a theory...don't take my word for it.

One last note, lighting fires are brutal in BTA. They'll burn a lot down since often the trees are the tallest terrain features whereas in BTW vanilla gen its usually mountains. I like you lean a little more 'purist' when it comes to the game balance but the lighting tweak addon is one I've used simply because if you want to settle in a tall forest for your base, it won't be a tall forest by the time you've spent a few thunderstorms there, and the gold requirement to protecting it all is significant. In my current play through I do not have lighting disabled...I'm trying out what a scorched earth landscape might look like and see if I can accept it. Or I'll just establish a base away from trees...idk I'm only a few days into this one.

My own opinion of difficulty is definitely biased by the fact of obviously knowing every single biome very well. Doesn't help that the OP here isn't updated :/ I'll fix that soon. Definitely listen to SterlingRed over me on that (thank you for the writeup, btw!)

Terrain variation does not actually directly interfere with village generation, they'll happily generate anywhere, as long as it is in a biome they are allowed to generate. However, in order to try and prevent generation from getting too weird, as villages in 1.5 handle large hills very poorly, villages just aren't allowed to generate in mountainous biomes. They are also not allowed to extends into biomes they are not allowed to generate in, and will cancel outright if they try to (this is different to modern vanilla by the way, and is also why things like amidst will sometimes tell you a village is there, then there isn't). A couple subbiomes in BTA/BB prevent villages from generating in biomes they otherwise would (savanna plateau, desert hills), but this is the same as in vanilla so shouldn't affect rarity.

Personally I haven't had much issue finding villages, but 1) I tend to use nether portals at intervals and check to see if there are any valid biomes and explore around them, and 2) because I have such intimate knowledge of the biomes I know exactly which ones are worth my time. The decreased ocean size by default would definitely make it harder to use your method.

Definitely second the lightning tweaker addon as well. I may actually add a config option for that in BTA since I do find it core enough to the experience. Lightning can be a lot more destructive to a BTA world than a vanilla world, and also leaves it pretty ugly, defeating the purpose of the addon in the first place.

[Soupy Delicious]

-snip-

Definitely second the lightning tweaker addon as well. I may actually add a config option for that in BTA since I do find it core enough to the experience. Lightning can be a lot more destructive to a BTA world than a vanilla world, and also leaves it pretty ugly, defeating the purpose of the addon in the first place.

Cheers for the reply, Dawn.

I'd like to use some biomes, but I suppose not too many. Ah well, guess I gotta test around a lil. And yeah, the presets are a good idea

Regarding treeeees - how hard would it be to impliment some kind of 'tree decay'. Blocks of wood which were not placed by the player will 'decay' after several days and either become affected by gravity or just disappear... Either way, it'd sort out more than just the lightning issue - it'd let me chop down jungle trees without having to worry about leaving ugly floating trees around. Something like that? Maybe it'd be too resource-intensive, I dunno.

[PlasmaFox]

I tried creating a world with BTA and it freezes without any logged information. I wanted to know what BTA changes in terms of world gen. Is it simply ocean size and river size or some specific decorator features?

[dawnraider]

BTA uses it's own pipeline for world gen. Some of it is copied from vanilla but it's got a lot of customizations in basically every part of world gen. I can explain how it works in more depth if you'd like, but the short answer is that it changes everything to some extent.

As for the freeze, it's a known issue but even in a debugger I haven't been able to figure out much information. Trying again with a different seed fixes it, it only happens occasionally.

[Soupy Delicious]

So I managed to patch to the latest, so the game's workin.

https://imgur.com/a/rdcUFUA

But alas, trying to play with Beta terrain seems to be causing an issue

edit: Regarding larger rivers - I like it, but does it still allow for smaller rivers too, or are they all large now?

[dawnraider]

Still trying to track down the issue with beta generation, it's a known issue just nontrivial.

As for rivers, it just purely scales up all rivers, although allowing for small rivers on top of that is not a bad idea, I can look into it to see how easy that would be to do.

[Soupy Delicious]

Still trying to track down the issue with beta generation, it's a known issue just nontrivial.

As for rivers, it just purely scales up all rivers, although allowing for small rivers on top of that is not a bad idea, I can look into it to see how easy that would be to do.

Ah, known issue, my bad. But what also isn't working appears to be simply running the game with all better biomes disabled, but with Deco and Terrain. https://imgur.com/a/ZFj18oO , https://pastebin.com/tVc789PE

I'm guessing it has something to do with Deco's biomes not being activated while it is? I dunno.

Either way, would love yall to compile a list of biomes that are 'vanilla BTW friendly' as there are too many for me to simply tinker around with and find out for myself without committing playthroughs. Thanks for all your hard work, Dawn.

[Soupy Delicious]

Alright - alls I can say is that I highly suggest, when you get some time, to go through and try as many different customized starts as you can. Because there are many I'm doing which are resulting in a world being unable to be generated. I'm assuming this all broke recently with some of the bigger changes (a la fabric/updates). Not sure, and probably not a big deal since most of yall probably play with everything turned on.

edit: Managed to recreate one of these crashes. Deco: off, Rivers: large, Better Terrain, Better Shores & Gravel: on, all (non-deco obviously) biomes: on.

https://pastebin.com/CLmfbW2P

Entered into creative, I'm teleporting around the map, going 200 blocks at a time since flying is so slow, and twice now the game has crashed, and save corrupted, when I enter close to a biome. The log mentions trees/leaves?

edit2: https://pastebin.com/GY1Mwt9J Another. I created the world while Deco was still installed but disabled. Perhaps that allowed it to stills try and reference deco blocks somewhere? Roaming around the world for a while, it crashes as I'm walking towards new lands. Interestings.

https://pastebin.com/2v2iKT6b

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/oxd53p ... /New+World

[dawnraider]

Yep known issue with mahogany trees trying to reference deco. Already have a fix in the next release.

Will definitely take a look at those crashes, having concrete info will be a good start. Although I don't get those too often, it's unfortunate you've been hitting them that often.

[Soupy Delicious]

Yep known issue with mahogany trees trying to reference deco. Already have a fix in the next release.

Will definitely take a look at those crashes, having concrete info will be a good start. Although I don't get those too often, it's unfortunate you've been hitting them that often.

Well I'd assume that's because you (and most people) play with Deco on. There was no issues when I had all the settings on ^^

Do let me know if you want any specific type of info, and I'd be happy to spend some time on it =D

edit: As an aside, I present to you the scariest fookin thing I've ever seen https://imgur.com/a/BzVZ982

[Blacklands]

I've played with BTA and Better Biomes on a server for a while now, with two other people.
No Deco, all biomes enabled (except for "Great Old Woodland", because it crashes the game right now, I haven't gotten around to making an issue on the GitHub repo yet, but the quick version is that apparently the tree generation runs into a NullPointerException), Wide Rivers enabled, Climate Zones enabled.

Here's some general experience report:

Sadly, we're probably going to restart without Better Biomes.
We're all BTW noobs (never made it further than the first windmill, I made it further in the distant past but that was before the new early game), and we found that it's just kind of too hardcore for us.

First off, enabling Climate Zones turned out to be a mistake for us. We might just have gotten unlucky with the seed, but on multiple spawns we all just could not find any "swampy" biome with sugarcane, even after walking around in multiple directions for literal ingame weeks, which was incredibly frustrating. Not a single plant in sight, so no storage. Instead often it was just desert and more desert and dry biomes and more dry biomes. Or endless forests comprised of forests bordering other forests bordering other forests.
It felt like playing with "large biomes" enabled. Often we were looking for a specific climate of biome (like "swampy" biomes for sugarcane), so grouping biomes of the same climate together means now you're just essentially playing with gigantic biomes.
You also (usually) don't get the nice experience on living on biome borders where multiple beneficial biomes are next to each other, so you can benefit from all of them. At least this felt much more rare to us than what I remember from Vanilla.
Often, we had maybe a good forest, but no water to fish in. Or some dry biomes with no rain, but again also no water, and/or not a lot of wood.
The transition between biomes and climate zones is definitely nice for how the world "comes together", aesthetically, but in terms of how the gameplay currently functions, having them distributed chaotically just feels much better.

Then a bunch of the biomes themselves were also making things quite a bit more difficult for us in the early game.

A lot of the forests are so dense, navigation is very difficult (I especially am just bad at navigation, if I can't place and see markers or clear landmarks, I get terribly lost and never find my way back even if I'm placing slabs all the time).

Many of the trees are so huge, you can't cut them down. Everything is full of big floating treetops for skeletons to hide under, plus it's ugly. Once we had torches we usually just got some wood from the bottom part of a tree and then tried to burn the rest of it down, which sometimes worked and sometimes it just made things worse, with unreachable treetops floating 10+ blocks high in the sky.

We kept hitting that biome with the mangrove trees in the water, which were impassable for us due to the water and especially the jungle spiders. Maybe this was made worse by the Climate Zones, but these always seemed to be huge, requiring long detours around them (in a safe distance). There might be sugarcane there (I never found out), but the single time I tried to actually sneak into one to check I got almost murdered by two jungle spiders dropping down on me. After that I was too afraid to try again.
In general if you actually hit a "wet" climate zone, you can at least get sugarcane, but they're also too dangerous to live in (either jungle spiders or slimes, both deadly creatures). There's also big areas of water that drain more hunger to cross them, so even moving through them is quite draining.

Then everything is a LOT more vertical. So many hills and mountains. Travelling really felt like a chore, instead of being fun, often. You have the choice between jumping and burning through your food, or spending half of your travel time on just getting more slabs that you then immediately use up again just to cross two hills.
Again, this also makes navigation more difficult, since you can't see far.

The wide rivers are really nice, and feel like how things should always have been. They're actual rivers, that you could travel along with a boat, and that are an actual natural barrier you need to cross. They're also big and deep enough to fish in. Plus, they're helpful for navigation. I wouldn't want to go back to Vanilla rivers, ever, honestly.

All in all, we often found ourselves just wishing we were playing with the Vanilla biomes instead. The latest sugarcane search was so frustrating, we now decided to start over and go back to Vanilla.

Right now I'm considering Better Biomes basically "hardcore mode", especially if Climate Zones are also enabled.
The biomes are very varied and look nice. I also like how many different kinds of trees there are, and how mixed forests are the norm, instead of the often bland Vanilla forests.
I really enjoyed playing with Better Biomes aesthetically, but we were just not up to the additional challenges. I'm sure for an experienced BTW player, all of these things are welcome added difficulty.
I'm kind of sad about it. I liked to look at the biomes and explore them, but I don't want to actually play the game in them.

We might try again with Better Biomes without Climate Zones this time, at least for a bit. That might resolve most of these issues; or maybe not. Otherwise we'll only use the Better Terrain Addon, probably.

Also, we encountered a number of additional crashes. Again, I neglected to record these so far, unfortunately. One seems to happen only during world generation, where the game apparently can't find the "starting biome", or something like that. (I'll get back with a log at some point.)
The rest might just have been the "expecting Deco but it's not there" ones that were already reported here.
(The main reason we didn't use Deco was just that we couldn't find a 32x texture pack that includes the Deco trees and so on. We wanted to have a bit higher-res textures than what is offered by default.)

[dawnraider]

Sugarcane can actually spawn in any climate, just for that reason. It's most common in tropical climates, but at least one biome in every climate can spawn sugarcane.
Temperate:
Dark Forest, Mangrove Forest, Mystic Valley, Temperate Forest

Arid:
Plains

Tropical:
Jungle, Rainforest, Swamp, Tropics, Volcanic Jungle, Wetlands

Cold:
Fungal Forest, Patagonia

Snowy:
Frozen Springs, Ice Marsh

Also, regarding biome size, you can always set biomes to 0.5x size. Still looking into things like why the mangrove swamps tend to be enormous because yeah I'm not a huge fan of that either.

Overall, if you would like to play with vanilla generation I would suggest playing with BTA but not Better Biomes, as BTA alone is meant to mimic vanilla generation, but with the features and improvements that come with BTA.

[Soupy Delicious]

Yes... I do share similar opinions with Blacklands, but there are only a few biomes with really tall trees, and all the other ones I find to be too beautiful to turn off (at least at this stage). Also, your BB plains biomes are absolutely awesome. Love 'em. I

Different kind of crash:

Spoiler

Show

Concerningly, turning off all biomes, or leaving just 1, won't even generate a world when using Better Terrain for me (see error dump below).

Even more concerningly, it doesn't seem like it's set up to replace 'missing' biomes in the quota (ie if no jungle-esque biome is selected, none will spawn) with vanilla ones. So while the obvious solution is to just select all the basic ones AT LEAST (woodland, jungle, desert etc), it might help to put something in the GUI stating that at least 1 in each category is required lest some newbie starts playing a customised BTA experience and doesnt have any jungles <3

https://pastebin.com/UxakF22q

Three suggestions:

Spoiler

Show

What I'd like to see most with BB Addon would be some kind of quota that has to be filled for every given large group of biomes, to mimic vanilla BTW's distribution. A la, every given group of biomes will contain x% of 'danger zone' (Impassable jungle); each given group of biomes will contain x% of 'desolate zone' (place with little to no trees and less animals) solely to maintain that BTW feel of interesting boundaries and obstacles to survival.

A small suggestion regarding Lush Desert - it's an awesome biome, but I find that the density of the trees makes it look less unique (and offers just more of the dense forest experience that BB already offers [secondarily, since there's so much grass and grenery (maybe just cause of Oasis, dont know how common those are), perhaps it's little too much of a hybrid to adequately replace what purpose/obstacle a full desert offers in the BTW experience]), and the colour of the grass doesn't quite suit it in my eyes. Perhaps a little less bright green I'm thinking.

screenshot:

Spoiler

Show

The flower biomes, while a really nice idea in theory, feels very 'moddy' due to the unusual abundance of a (albeit useless) resource that doesnt usually spawn so often (flowers) (ignoring the fact that without texture packs it doesn't look quite so good). I believe a very easy solution to this would be quite easy to actuate, and make it fit into the game a bit more naturally: using CTM, designate the Tallgrass for 'Flowery' biomes to have 'wildflowers' intermingled with regular tallgrass textures.

example:

Spoiler

Show

That way you can reduce the amount of real flowers by ~80% and still have it cosmetically looking flowery (which is the whole idea of the mod, right?)

Simpler potential solution: reduce the density of flowers by 50%

Willow biome also a cool idea, but feels very moddy due to all the base 'stumps' often spawning, extending out over an edge.

Overall I feel the mod would benifit from an overall 15-20% reduction in tree density too (for most biomes, barring the ones which are supposed to be very dense)

[Blacklands]

I've experienced the same kind of crash (same message about the spawn biome) that Soupy Delicious has posted.
I had all biomes enabled though, apart from the Deco ones (due to missing Deco) and "Great Old Woodland" (due to the tree grower NullPointer crash associated with that biome).

We must have just gotten extremely unlucky about the sugarcane. I really couldn't find a single piece, even with sugarcane being very easy to spot because the texture pack I was using didn't have a texture for the new roots block and it was much brighter than everything else and stuck out out the environment visually because of that.

I suppose a contributing factor is that even in the "compatible" biomes, it only spawns next to sources of water, right?
I went across multiple plains but they didn't have any water. In the forests, it might be possible there were some water pools there (which might have had sugarcane) but I never saw them because of all the trees.
Apart from that, I never saw any frozen biome.
Also, I would not count any biome that spawns jungle spiders in the list, just personally... getting sugarcane doesn't help me when I get killed in the process. :D
I saw two fungal forests, but there weren't a lot of water pools there either, and the existing ones didn't have sugarcane.

Anyway, we'll probably try again with Better Biomes but without Climate Zones enabled. Then it will probably be fine.
Oh, and even if we decide to forego Better Biomes, we'll definitely keep using Better Terrain Addon. I couldn't go back to the boring Vanilla terrain now honestly. :)
I didn't even think about reducing the individual biome size. Good call. We could also try that.
For that matter, would it be possible to make the amount of biomes that the climate zones will make up when they get generated customizable? That could be another way to change how large each "super biome" that they create is, maybe. I don't know if the amount is currently fixed (e.g. each climate zone will contain 4 biomes), or if there's a random factor.

[dawnraider]

Climates are just generated as another second biome map at a larger scaler that is then layered on top of the standard biome map. When the biome map randomly chooses biomes for the list to generate, it looks at the overlapping climate map to determine which list to pull from. The generation of the two maps is entirely independent though.

[Soupy Delicious]

Hey Dawn. What are the blockIDs for the BTA blocks (namely the new clays overlays) for the purpose of CTM?

[dawnraider]

The new clay blocks use metadata, they're the same id as regular clay. I believe the values are:
0 - dirt
1 - sand
2 - red sand
3 - grass

[Soupy Delicious]

The new clay blocks use metadata, they're the same id as regular clay. I believe the values are:
0 - dirt
1 - sand
2 - red sand
3 - grass

Ooh. So you're saying the name of the ctm would be the same as clay, then in 'metadata=' I'd put those corresponding numbers? I'll give it a try, thank you

[dawnraider]

Version 3.2.1 has been released!
Download BTA here
Download Better Biomes here

BTA:
- Changed grassy clay to behave like regular grass blocks. It can spread grass, grass can spread to dirt clay blocks, and animals can eat grassy clay.
- Changed how grassy clay renders to only render clay in the dirt instead of in the grass as well.
- Removed the grassy clay overlay texture as it is no longer used.
- Fixed an issue where mahogany trees try to generate with mahogany wood instead of jungle wood without deco installed, crashing the game.

Better Biomes:
- Fixed an issue where dark oak trees tried to generate in old growth woodland when deco was not installed, crashing the game.

[Soupy Delicious]

Hello Dawn. Mighta missed this in your testing, but when the blocks aren't connected to normal grass they show the greyscale, biome-unaffected version of the texture. - https://streamable.com/6o7c62

You read my mind with the grassy clay change, and I love that it's now a hybrid block (grass + clay, instead of just clay made to look like grass <3). I had a slightly different approach in editing the texture so that the clay looked 'buried beneath the topgrass', and I reckon it's worth keeping around - so humbly request you bring the overlays back if it's possible to do it right.

Would it be possible to make the top of the grassy clay use the overlay, and the sides use something else? (that way you could just make the topgrassyclay overlay transparent if you didn't want anything showing through, and for us who want to get funky with texture packs, we'd be all sorted as well.

https://streamable.com/kxesxx

[dawnraider]

Huh. That is a bizarre issue. Might be related to the snow? I just doubled checked it in natural generation and also manually placing a few down and didn't see any issues there (it not rendering right in inventory is a known issue). I'll see if I can figure out what on earth is happening there.

EDIT: And to address the other stuff, I can look into that.

[Pot_Tx]

Hello. Today I encountered some trees without stumps while playing with BTA and BB. I think it's reasonable that some smaller trees don't have stumps, but I suppose this one is big enough.

This doesn't only happen to spruce trees, as I found some fir trees of the same size without stumps too. Sorry if it's intended.