Tellus: Atlas & Wildlife

Tellus: Atlas & Wildlife (TAW) is a NeoForge 1.21.1 add-on for Tellus that connects Minecraft exploration, wildlife and settlements to real-world geography.

TAW uses the latitude and longitude provided by Tellus to make long-distance travel more meaningful. Wildlife is filtered or assisted according to approximate real-world distributions, geographic discoveries are recorded in an Exploration Journal, and Tellus cities can receive settlements or configurable inhabitants depending on the world-generation layers being used.

What TAW adds

Geographic wildlife

• Geographic spawning rules based on Tellus coordinates.
• Compatibility with vanilla animals and supported wildlife mods.
• Freshwater, terrestrial and amphibious spawn assistance where Minecraft biome restrictions do not represent the real location well.
• Geographic fishing filters.
• Local population limits designed to avoid excessive assisted spawning.
• /taw localfauna shows species associated with the current region.
• Wildlife discovery records, advancements and XP rewards.
• Approximate distribution maps for discovered species.

TAW does not replace the original spawning systems of Minecraft or supported mods. It adds geographic filtering and conservative spawn opportunities where needed.

Exploration and location

• Location HUD with locality, region and country information.
• Country discovery titles.
• Persistent geographic progression from localities to regions, countries and continents.
• Discoverable natural wonders.
• Exploration Journal containing visited places and discovered wildlife.
• Server administration commands for correcting or resetting exploration and wildlife progress.
• English and Spanish interfaces that follow the Minecraft language selected by the player.

Real-world Urban Centers

When Tellus Buildings are disabled, TAW can generate Minecraft settlement clusters near registered real-world urban centers.

Settlement size is based on an urban tier:

• Regional: 1 settlement
• Major: 2 settlements
• Metropolis: 3 settlements
• Megacity: 5 settlements
• Megalopolis: 7 settlements

The expanded catalog prioritizes Mexico, Latin America, Europe and Japan while providing worldwide coverage. Geographic indexes ensure that newly generated chunks only evaluate nearby cities.

These settlements are Minecraft interpretations placed near real locations. They are not exact recreations of the real city or its street layout.

Optional urban integrations include:

• Waystones: newly generated settlement Waystones can receive the real place name.
• Luki’s Grand Capitals: compatible capital structures may be used when available.
• Progressive tree clearance prevents houses and roads from being placed through existing trees.

Population for Tellus Buildings

When both Tellus Roads and Buildings are enabled, Urban Center settlements remain disabled so they do not overlap Tellus structures.

Instead, TAW can detect real beds in newly generated Tellus city chunks and create an initial population. This system does not depend on the Urban Centers catalog.

Server operators can configure:

• Villagers, zombies or no generated residents.
• Population density from 10% to 100% per bed.
• Resident limits per chunk.
• Iron Golem frequency and limits.
• A zombie-apocalypse mode where zombies replace villagers and Iron Golems are disabled.

Population is generated gradually and recorded persistently to prevent duplication after chunk reloads or server restarts.

Supported wildlife mods

All wildlife integrations are optional:

• Alex’s Mobs compatible 1.21.1 port
• Hybrid Aquatic
• Naturalist
• Aquaculture 2
• Critters and Companions

TAW also includes geographic support for selected vanilla animals.

Optional urban integrations:

• Waystones
• Luki’s Grand Capitals

Tellus itself is required. Make sure required and optional dependencies are also selected correctly in the Dependencies section of each Modrinth version.

Installation

TAW currently targets:

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.238 or newer
• Tellus 0.8.1 or newer

TAW contains server-authoritative world systems and client interfaces. Install it on both the server and client for the intended complete experience, including the HUD, Journal and configuration screens.

Do not keep multiple versions of TAW in the same mods folder.

Performance

TAW is designed to avoid constant full-world scans and forced chunk loading.

• Periodic systems are distributed across separate server ticks.
• Chunk and population queues use strict work budgets.
• Resident and Iron Golem placement attempts are bounded and use progressive cooldowns.
• Geographic city searches use spatial indexes.
• Optional fauna-wide counting is skipped when no compatible external fauna is installed.
• Urban catalog downloads and place-name requests run outside the Minecraft server thread.

Performance still depends on world-generation distance, entity counts and other installed mods, especially during intensive chunk generation.

Geographic accuracy

Wildlife ranges and urban classifications are curated approximations intended for Minecraft gameplay. They should not be treated as scientific distribution records, navigation data or exact demographic reconstructions.

Network and external data

TAW uses external geographic services for some features:

• The server uses OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to translate Tellus latitude and longitude into human-readable place names. These requests contain the geographic coordinates being resolved and necessarily expose the server’s IP address to the service. TAW does not include Minecraft usernames or UUIDs in these requests.
• The optional expanded Urban Centers catalog downloads the GeoNames cities1000 dataset once and creates a local cache. If the download fails, TAW continues with its bundled offline catalog.
• TAW does not send analytics or gameplay statistics to the mod author.

Place-name information is provided using data from OpenStreetMap contributors. The expanded urban catalog uses GeoNames data under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Languages

TAW currently includes:

• English
• Spanish — Spain
• Spanish — Mexico
• Spanish — Argentina
• Spanish — Chile
• Spanish — Ecuador
• Spanish — Uruguay
• Spanish — Venezuela

Development transparency

This is my first Minecraft mod. I am a digital artist rather than a professional programmer, but I enjoy Tellus, wildlife, geography and exploration.

I define the project’s goals, feature behavior, geographic priorities, visual direction, balancing and testing, and personally test and refine each release. Generative AI has also been used substantially as a development assistant for portions of the code and publication text. The corresponding Modrinth content disclosures are enabled.

My goal is to make travelling through Tellus feel more alive and meaningful while continuing to improve the project through practical testing and community feedback.

Screenshots