Simply Improved Terrain

Simply Improved Terrain rewrites some of the terrain generation components in Minecraft to improve their visual results, while preserving the overall Vanilla impression. Specifically, it focuses on increasing directional variety, grid independence, and overall shape variation. This mod is designed as a drop-in with intent for it to be compatible with many modpacks and datapacks.

Changes Applied (1.19-1.21.x)

• Sharpens Terrain Curvature: Reduces square-shaped distortions in the terrain by separating 3D noise into independent interpolation channels and eliminating interpolation from 2D noise.
• Reduces Angular Bias: Mitigates the 45° and 90° directional tendencies in larger-scale terrain features by rotating the noise sampling domain.
• Curbs Global Seed Consequences: Standardizes sampler offsets to maximize per-area variation and eliminate global disparities, while localizing shelf height variation in windswept/shattered terrain.
• Minimizes Ice and Surface Artifacts: Softens the 45° bias in ice and surface patterns by expanding the underlying gradient vector table.
• Cleans Up Blocky Biome Borders: Improves biome transitions by correcting the sample loop range, switching to aggregated falloff blending, and bypassing subsampling.
• Polishes Terrain Features: Enhances the natural shapes of terrain features, such as lava lakes and clay deposits, by rounding out spread formulas and introducing falloff noise.
• Refines End Island Generation: Sharpens transitions and reduces grid artifacting in the large End island generator by switching to full-resolution metaballs, while small islands receive falloff noise for shape variation.

Changes Applied (1.16.x)

• Sharpens Terrain Curvature: Eliminates square-shaped distortions in the terrain by replacing trilinear interpolation with dynamic noise layer skipping.
• Reduces Angular Bias: Mitigates the 45° and 90° directional tendencies in larger-scale terrain features by rotating the noise sampling domain.
• Curbs Global Seed Consequences: Standardizes sampler offsets to maximize per-area variation and eliminate global disparities, while localizing shelf height variation in windswept/shattered terrain.
• Minimizes Ice and Surface Artifacts: Softens the 45° bias in ice and surface patterns by expanding the underlying gradient vector table.
• Cleans Up Blocky Biome Borders: Improves biome transitions by switching to sparse aggregated falloff blending. Also increases river width to avoid constrictions.
• Polishes Terrain Features: Enhances the natural shapes of surface deposit disks and ruined portal falloffs.
• Refines End Island Generation: Sharpens transitions and reduces grid artifacting in the large End island generator by switching to full-resolution metaballs.

Simply Improved Terrain

Simply Improved Terrain rewrites some of the terrain generation components in Minecraft to improve their visual results, while preserving the overall Vanilla impression. Its goal is to express the Vanilla terrain generation formula in its most true and refined form, by revisiting some of the early implementation decisions. The mod reworks a number of features in this spirit. Specifically, it focuses on increasing directional alignment variety, grid independence, and overall feature variation. This mod is designed as a drop-in with intent for it to be compatible with many modpacks and datapacks. It is also intended to serve as a suggestion to Mojang regarding the technical direction they should take world generation.

Supports both Fabric and Forge mod loaders!

This page provides the Fabric version. For the Forge version, head over to the Forge page!

Note: The Fabric 1.17 port is out! However, it does not support the optional noise caves yet. Implementing these will take careful consideration on my end, as it's basically a more complicated formula that I need to adapt in the same way I adapted the surface formula. But if you don't need the noise caves, then you need not wait longer. All the 1.16 features have been ported to it.

Technical Changes:

• Replaces trilinear interpolation with conditional noise layer evaluation, to make full-resolution noise practical. Also removes problematic high-frequency layers. This eliminates the majority of the grid patterns from the terrain.
• Replaces unmitigated Perlin noise with domain-rotated noise, to remove Perlin's characteristic 45-90-degree bias from the horizontal worldplane. This solves the direction variety problem without requiring as much re-tuning as the canonical solution of using Simplex-type noise.
• Re-implements terrain noise "shelves" in a way that localizes height, accounts for domain rotation, and doesn't require interpolation for smoothing.
• Injects domain-rotation into existing unmitigated Perlin noise, so that other features can also take advantage.
• Replaces the gradient vectors in 2D Simplex noise (used for surface block patterns) with a lattice-symmetric 24-sized set which reduces 45-degree artifacts.
• Replaces End Island generator with full-resolution jittered metaballs, to remove grid patterns and allow intersecting islands to merge more nicely.
• Introduces radius variation to the disk-shaped sand/gravel/clay/ice deposits, to make them more convincing. Also removes the sharp points. Idea credit: Origin Realms.
• Replaces Overworld biome transition smoothing with scattered sampling, to conceal the underlying 4x4-interval grid. Also makes rivers wider to avoid constrictions.
• Removes directional bias from the netherrack patterns below ruined portal structures, by replacing the |Δx|+|Δz| falloff with a Euclidean-based falloff.

Planned future changes:

• Rewrite Overworld biome map generation to remove or reduce large-scale directional bias, while following the same layer-based ruleset.
• Replace octahedral-shaped block deposits (particularly in the Nether) with less directionally-biased alternatives.
• Replace Nether and End biome grid magnifiers with full-resolution samplers.
• Improve the shapes of the isolated lake and lava pool features.

Images