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How to make a biome

New biomes are one of the best ways to add life to a Minecraft mod.

Surface Layer Generation​

In ModFoundry there are different ways to generate the surface layer of a biome. This determines which block(s) make up the top layer of the biome (think Grass in a vanilla plains biome). You can choose the surface type and block(s) that suits your biome the best.

All One Block​

The most basic surface type is "All One Block". As the name implies, this means one block will be used to cover the whole surface layer of a biome. For a desert biome this could be something like sand, for a forest it could be grass.

Tight Noise​

Tight noise can be used to create a noisy surface layer. An example of this is the swamp biome in Vanilla Minecraft, which uses a swamp noise parameter to decide whether to generate water or grass for a particular block on the surface.

Surface layer with tight noise

The example biome above is using tight noise for the surface layer.

Banded Noise​

Banded noise can be used to create a surface layer with more spread out/larger scale noise than tight noise.

Surface layer with banded noise

Compared to tight noise, you can see how much more spread out banded noise is.

Weighted Noise Distribution​

As an alternative to the other noise, a weighted distribution can be used to give each generated block a percent chance to spawn. This allows you to customize which blocks appear more frequently, and it's more randomized per-block than the noise distributions.

Surface layer with weighted noise

Weights can be used in the following manner in the UI. In this example grass will spawn five times more than podzol, and ten times more than dirt on the surface layer.

Weighted UI

Entity Spawning​

Vanilla Entities​

It's simple to configure entity spawning in custom biomes using ModFoundry. For vanilla entities, you can use the "Vanilla Entities" section of the Biome form:

Biome entities

The weight determines how likely an entity is to spawn. The Min Count is the minimum number that will spawn, and the max count is the maximum number that will spawn in one area.

Custom Entities​

To spawn custom entities in your biome, you can select the custom biome on the Entity form.

Feature Generation​

You can configure which vanilla features will spawn in your custom biome. For example, selecting the following will spawn desert shrubs and cacti in your biome (assuming the surface layer is sand):

Desert Vegetation

Tree Generation​

You can add custom trees in the biome. First you'll need to add one or more custom tree mod elements. Then you can select how many times (on average) you want each tree to spawn in your custom biome:

Trees

Colors​

You can modify the color of the fog, water fog, foliage, sky, and water in your biome using the Colors section. The grass color will be determined based on what biome category is chosen.

Colors

How to locate your custom biome​

After adding a custom biome, you'll want to find it in the world to see what it looks like. You can use the command /locatebiome projectname:biomename to find the coordinates of the nearest biome.

locate biome