Minecraft world generation datapack demo 1.16

The basics of data packs something that has happened since 1.116 in java edition minecraft there are a lot of places in ways you can get data packs i’ve found i’ve had some luck looking around on youtube and seeing people review different data packs and one of the most common places that you

Can find any kind of minecraft resource is planet minecraft and you can go here and they actually have a datapack section and you’ll notice you know some sections of that it’s very important that you get updated data packs because they’ve been out for a few versions now and there are some that

Are even designed for 1.7 i’m sorry 1.17 and there’s going to be even more updates anytime they update the block models like 1.17 is going to change how they generate caves and the world height anytime that kind of update happens things like data packs will be updated

As well in old worlds you could probably load an old world into a new version but you probably can’t use an old data pack on a new world successfully one of the things that’s really cool about data packs is that they build into the directly into the minecraft engine

And the way that i’ve made use of data packs there are a lot of ways you can use them is to change the terrain generation so if you want to create alien or interesting worlds so one of the ones i’m going to show off today is this many more biomes which i

Found here i actually found it through a youtube video and then it didn’t work from the download there but i went to the the designers page here and you’ll notice they explain what it will work for and the versions it will update on compatibility a lot of authors are very dedicated to

Working on their data pack they do a good job and so you can contact them for help etc so i could download this here and i’ll show how to install in a minute but let’s first show what it looks like in game so i’ve just done this locally each individual single-player local map

Can use its own data pack one of the major things i discovered that is a problem is if you run a server the whole server will use the same data pack uh based on your root world so if you put the data pack in like the world file

Or whatever you call your your hub or spawning world i it will propagate to all the other worlds and then they will behave similarly so you can’t to my knowledge use multiple data packs on the same server even if you have multiple worlds through something like multiverse so

Kind of a downer there a reason you might want to use biomes aplenty or some other mod or solution to this anyway if i go to single player for the record i have the base minecraft textures on here i do it is fabric so i’ve got things

Like a mini map and i’m running shaders so the shaders make it look a little bit nicer but i can turn them on and off as a demo so this uh many more biomes is the one that i was just talking about i’m gonna go ahead and load up a world

It will give you this warning of course saying that you’re using experimental settings and i’m just gonna say i know what i’m doing because it doesn’t really matter if this world dies and you can see it right here i’ve already started in on top of a tree

And these are not a new block this is dark oak leaves you’ll notice if i select it it gives me the green but they look pink like peach blossoms and you can kind of see in my mini-map up here i can make that big this is an entire little biome sliver

Here that has been created by the data pack um and the way the biomes generate in this data pack have to do with the the um temperature and and humidity and some of the other properties so you’ll notice over here i can go to this sort of jungle coast

Let’s look and see what it says um this is tropical islands this is a tropical island biome and here we have like a river next to it and they probably call this like peach blossoms or something let’s see what this one is here we go it’s the cherry blossom grove

And then over here we have these really cool funky mountains these are one of my favorites uh it’s it’s got like the sort of purple alien like looking mountains uh and then look at these this is actually another biome that they’ve got in the overworld here

That has like mushrooms and i forgot the name of these things these glowing mushroom blocks here we are shroom light so just looking at what these are called here we go we have the lush mesa and over here the glowing forest so all of this was generated and if you look at

The map you can kind of see they blend pretty well so the the borders are you know semi-organic it will still be a definitive line but like if there’s a cliff in one and it goes into another so let’s see if i can sort of show that um it doesn’t just cut

Off there’s no chunk block edges like it just kind of blends into the other and so this is because it’s using the same seed and it’s using the minecraft generator engine so this is different than like if you were to generate this in world painter

And plop it in you would have like the edge of the world it would start using the other generator at that edge this is all the same generator so i could fly for miles in it and it would continue to generate uh different areas and sometimes they’re

Well related sometimes not so this is like a as if a volcano popped open here if i go here and like this is cool this is the caldera or whatever the volcano uh you know you can see at the top and all the trees that got burned from it um

And there’s you know some funky silly stuff like we have uh some zombie horses here you know it will generate in the biome i think is this what is this this is um what did i i have um obsidian of course right so it creates obsidian blocks

And i think i can go over here and we’ll get to a cold biome or here’s sort of a desert rock thing this is one of the alien surface biomes that i’ve been using for the server so pretty cool stuff this is called like dirt pit i think is what this one

Is so how does it make all this how does this work let’s uh oh actually before we do that i have one other one i want to show because it does something else that’s pretty neat this one’s called better biomes and this is making more use of

Not just using the generation of the biome but also generating the objects within the biome so you can generate a forest but you can also say here’s how i want the trees to look in that forest and it’s not just using like a single schematic file for every

Tree like we would have done in previous versions it’s actually algorithmically you can see it where it’s a successfully filled blocks it’s actually building these trees on the fly as as i get over there so it’s sort of lagging for me to jump yeah so this one is very intense with

The shaders on see how this the sky is starting to populate yeah that’s that’s my view distance that’s the computer taking the hit so this is not good for like like you know crappy chromebooks this is you gotta have an adult computer to do this kind of biome but it actually

Generates these enormous trees and they all look different they’re all just designed uh based on uh code which i will show where that is so this is pretty freaking neat this is what we’ve wanted for ages and it’s now baked into the game and the default you i’m running like all kinds

Of plugins and stuff but you could be running basically vanilla and this stuff would happen which is awesome um increase your ram that is an important thing okay uh so let’s get out of that so how is this looking on the computer side so if i were to download this thing

Here we go i can open that up and you can see it contains this data this uh pack.mc meta is important you see this in texture packs as well this pack format is the version so this six is actually corresponds to one point one six if it were a seven it

Would be one point one seven if it were a five you get the idea um so that has to do with the uh version it will work for it how the system will recognize it and here we have just our thumbnail file but then if we dig down into this we can

See all the different data the minecraft folder is the default minecraft performative data of how it generates dimensions and i’m not sure what tags are and then mmb which is where it has the different dimensions world generation structures all the stuff the loot tables heck i guess if you kill

A zombie horse you might get different loot all that stuff is in here so uh rather than look in the the one that i just downloaded i’m going to show you where it shows up in the system and how you were going to install it so you would download that data pack and

Like most of the time you would go i did sorry start and run so windows button r is your hacksaw way of doing it and you type percent app data percent and that’s going to bring you to the secret super hidden minecraft folder talk about bad usability

And in here we have saves and you can actually see more some of the times i’ve unpacked things but here we go we have better biomes and more many more biomes and if we go into that we can look and see data packs so every world has a data packs folder

And that’s where we would stick this so we would stick this many more biomes that’s what’s in the zip file we can go in there and dig down into it and we can look at the different components and so if i dig down far enough if i go down to world gen

Let’s go to biomes and we can see the cherry blossom grove so that when we started off on it’s a json file so this is actually not very complicated code um i don’t know the best way to can i zoom yes i can zoom haha hopefully you can see this on the video

All right so um it has some things like the effects like it makes an ambient cave effect sound when you’re there um the features that can generate there some of these like the minecraft live lava lake that’s a standard minecraft generator engine piece so that will generate on its own

This mmb lake water uncommon that’s it’s that’s through the data pack so these are examples of mixtures of things like it’s going to generate some of the standard minecraft stuff mixed in with some of the cool data pack stuff we have spawners and you can kind of go down

There’s actually not that much in this this is just what happens in the cherry blossom biome but this gives me some hints to some of the other things that are going to happen in there of let’s see i’m looking for some of these yeah so this mmb

Colon cherry grove trees so those are the specific generation of the trees so how do you get those trees that look a given way so it’s doing a couple of things one it’s generating like the wood in a pattern and then two it’s laying down the leaves and telling them to look a

Certain color minecraft actually already had that ability like if you look at water in a swamp biome it looks kind of green and you look at water in like the ocean biome and it looks different shades of blue and so that’s actually already always been built into minecraft since like 1.13

They’re just allowing you to change it and mess with it here so i don’t believe that’s under world gen biome we’ve got to look under i think it’s configured feature it might be structure feature or feature i’m not sure which let’s see cherry bloss cherry grove here

We go so flowers and trees so let’s see how it generates the trees so here we go now look at how many levels in we’re going this is kind of not human readable or human editable without like if you’re just adjusting the numbers that’s not a

Big deal like we want to make the upper size two instead of one you know that’s easy enough to do so hecky modding is easy if you want to design this from the ground up not so easy so i’m going to show you a slightly better way to

Do design ground up but it’s still very um there’s no visual editor for it so it’s very like change it generate it see what happens who knows it might do what you want might not i don’t know documentation will vary by these so you know it’s kind of like many things

It’s like when you find code on the internet lots open source people just assume you somehow magically know what they were thinking they don’t tell you um in fact i don’t know if it’s even possible to comment in these json files okay so uh right anyway let’s see if we

Can look at one of these what are these doing so uh this is for the ocean floor world generator so this is like making the ocean floor that biome uh i was gonna try to find the tree oh this is the trees i guess it’s telling us

Height map oh sorry that’s how it’s determining the height so actually it’s it’s where the tree is building relative so it has nothing to do with the ocean but you can see some of the things in here trunk providers state we’re going up on the y-axis uh we’re using dark oak logs

You can kind of start to make sense of how it’s building it and this is basically the the script that builds that tree and so you can modify it if you understood how it all works now i don’t i don’t i’ll be first in saying i don’t necessarily understand exactly it’s

Going to do like one log on top of each other but at some point it’s going to figure out how to put them out to the sides and build the leaves on top of that relative size so this is actually one of the easier ones so if you could figure

This one out you could definitely figure out like those big redwoods we were seeing generate on the fly okay uh so how would you do this a smarter way or an easier way than just doing json editing in the text editor that’s where we have this thing so

Up on github we have this wonderful editor that they’ve built here where if you want to modify any of those subdirectories for how the world works of like the dimension that you’re in that that um you actually wouldn’t do very often that’s just overworld underworld uh like like the nether the end um

I think there’s the debug world i think is its own dimension and then the overworld that that will adjust things like where your lighting comes from or like in the nether there’s like kind of that smogginess like that red haze that’s there all the time like you could

Generate that if you wanted on your entire world if you wanted to which is kind of crazy super potentially useful for whimsy because if you want to have an atmosphere that you can’t see through because it’s all smoggy you know in red we can do that if we go

To world gen we can start seeing some of these things i was looking at so like structure feature i can click on this and it knows some of these things that exist so i can search through some of the presets you’ll notice it’s generating the code over there

It helps me like instead of me having to write the code and worry about if i missed a space or a semicolon i’m generating it based off of these elements here so um bastion relevant remnants i should be able to change this so if i do type

I can do yeah so now it’s got my what what i i can still call intellisense it’s just smart suggestions based on the root of the word you’re typing most ides do this now uh so you type minecraft colon it’s like here’s all the possible things you could

Put in this field they could do an igloo we could do a shipwreck you can see these are the kinds of structures we could have then that would generate in there oh now i screwed it up I think i can reset it but if i let’s do mansion is that going to do config oh presets mansion reset okay that’s what the dots do um i i couldn’t remember what was under config so uh start pool uh i don’t actually know what that does um but size probably

Gives you a sense of like how big this thing is going to be so there’s different variables underneath it and you could look at all these different pieces i think you can look all these up individually to find out what they all do but it is at least alleviates some of

The load of modifying those json files and that you can know one what variables could go within a section and then two you can edit them without screwing up your config file so as i found with like editing our citizens config like if you put one wrong comma the

Whole thing breaks there is no parsing detection at all on these things you could dump it in an external generator like this is doing but you have to then like kind of go like line by line to find your problem which is a really stupid way to do

Editing and debugging so this is a way to help prevent some of that um and also presumably presumably you could look at like i believe you can dump it on the code side so you can take somebody else’s code dump it in and see what it generates on the left side

And and uh compare so these are the tools i found to do it uh i haven’t spent the time to figure out like how do i generate my own tree but this is something that could potentially be done to create new worlds in an automated fashion because they’re json files

Which means you could have some external program generating them so i’m waiting for some young rich enterprising programmer to come out and create the gui version of this where you’re like i’m gonna you know dragon i’m gonna paint a tree and then it’s gonna figure out how to

Generate trees like that and you could give the painted trees some variables you say i want my leaves are gonna vary between one and four blocks and it would know how to generate that in the json code and it would just kind of spit the code

Out from you drawing it in like a paint equivalent editor that could be doable because of this open format that they’ve used so pretty exciting results in these pretty cool biome examples uh these worlds that do all kinds of stuff and that even i i think it you know you

Can kind of do adventure map-ish stuff like you notice the drop tables are modified like a lot of the behaviors of the ai can be tweaked in ways to create some pretty unique experiences so there you go that is the data pack demo