Why biomes ruin Minecraft world generation

What you can’t have snow in a desert that would break my immersion can’t have sand in a forest that’s not supposed to be there there’s no way you could have a swamp on a mountain this is so unrealistic nah screw that all right I’m gonna try something different today and do something just

Off the cuff off the Dome today I wanted to talk about World Generation and why I think biomes themselves might actually be bad for the game uh to start I’d like to bring up a smaller issue uh biomes and their adjacent biomes at some point Mojang made it a thing that

Biomes will only generate next to similar biomes and I remember at the time there was some discussion as to whether this was a good idea um a lot of people said well you know a snowy biome should generate next to a snowy biome because anything else would be unrealistic and

It would break my immersion and my opinion has always been that no matter what you do in the world generation since it’s random and you’re not in control of it there’s always going to be weird stuff that’s not realistic and could break your immersion so I think that’s a futile Pursuit

I think having different biomes next to each other like a desert and a tundra can actually be fun and interesting and even though it’s not necessarily realistic uh I think it would be an interesting place to build a base and I think that matters more at the end of the day um

But it goes deeper than just uh biomes because I think biomes themselves might be an issue back when I started playing beta 1.7.3 which I’m not actually a veteran I use the launcher to go back to old versions um I started exploring the worlds and I found that it was really exciting and

Interesting to see what was around every corner I could keep walking and walking and walking and I was never bored and that was strange to me because there’s almost no biomes in beta so it’s like what was I even finding if I wasn’t finding all these different biomes well

I thought more about that and I realized that it’s not even the biomes that are interesting to find in Minecraft because once you’ve seen a tundra you’ve seen a savannah you’ve seen a Mesa biome now you’ve pretty much seen it all because each Tundra each Savannah each Mesa ends

Up looking the same as the next one you find one Mesa it looks cool you find the next Mesa it looks cool and it looks the same even though there’s different features and they’re placed in a different manner um ultimately you’re going to find all the same type of stuff

In the same biome what made it so interesting to walk around in beta 1.7.3 is there’s almost no biome so what you’re going to find in any given area is sort of a mystery until you actually find it you can see a big hill and think well there could be

Trees at the top or there could be no trees at the top I don’t know there could be a desert at the top like anything goes basically in beta there could be sand in the forest there can be cactuses on the beach you never know until you actually find the features

Themselves once you get to the border of a jungle biome in Minecraft you know exactly what you’re going to find you’re going to find the same type of bushes the same type of trees the same type of temples as you always find so happening upon a jungle is fun for like

One second because you’re like oh man a jungle that’s cool but you might as well not bother even walking into the jungle because you already know what’s there I do remember how exciting it was the first time I found a desert temple but now it’s not as exciting because if

I’m in a desert I’m kind of just expecting to find one imagine how excited I would be if I want to a big beach somewhere in the world and a desert temple was just buried in the beach that would be so crazy I’d be like oh my gosh there’s a desert temple

And sure I would still know like what’s going to be in the desert temple roughly it’s got the rooms it’s got the little trap um it’s all the same stuff but still I think that the right direction to go is not making things biome specific I think that while Mojang could spend a

Whole bunch of time thousands and thousands of hours trying to write in new biomes into the code of the game trying to come up with and design new like concept art for Birch Forest you know they really could be spending that time a lot more productively by not just

Making one or two biomes but making an infinite number of biomes because I think if biomes weren’t set to always have the same features as the next one if not every jungle had the same type of trees and the same type of bushes and the same type of temples if it could be

Random whether you’re going to see those or not it would be exciting not only to happen upon a jungle but to explore that jungle because you don’t know what you’re going to find inside the jungle I think it would make finding these certain features a lot more interesting

And exciting because you you would never know I mean I remember a long time ago one person talked about why strip mining is actually interesting in Minecraft which I always thought it was kind of the boring part of the game but they made a really good point which is that

You never know when you’re going to dig a block and there’s going to be a diamond behind it you just there’s nothing to predict it imagine if there was a diamond biome that you just mined into and you were like okay now every eight blocks there’s

Going to be a diamond that would be so boring I think part of the fun of Minecraft in general is that there’s no set locations in the game the entire world is randomly generated so like for things like finding the stronghold it’s not as simple as like I just have to go

To the stronghold it’s like I have to find this stronghold and I won’t know when I’m at the stronghold until I actually dig down and find it and there’s features like this in the game there’s Rivers there’s Hills and there’s strongholds even villages to some degree and I think these are exciting features

To find uh finding a village is interesting because you don’t know as soon as you walk into a planes you’re not like I know there will be a village here but then you do walk into a village and you’re like this is cool and you also

Don’t know exactly what’s going to be in the village they have different buildings that will generate and other structures and you also have different like professions you can find so it’s exciting not only to find the village and see that it’s there but also to go through the village and explore it and

See what’s you know what’s inside the chest what different buildings are there and I think that you could have the same level of excitement for finding a Mesa if there were different types of structures or different types of features that you would find within the biome instead of always the same features

However they would manage to do it however they would manage to make this a real feature well I guess what I’m saying is I don’t know I don’t know if this would be an easy thing to do in the game maybe it’s really Root Down to the core of how the world

Generation works that they have biomes and obviously I wouldn’t just want random features all over the place with no consistency at all like just four different types of trees and four different types of terrain just all in the same exact spot would be interesting but

You could end up in a case where you just have like a the entire world is just a weird amalgamation of random features and there’s no different areas at the same time though I think that they do need to find a way of allowing features to generate independent of

Biomes because otherwise there will always be this issue of sure they added a new Mangrove swamp that’s exciting the first time you explore it and then every other time you’re like okay yeah I’ve seen a mangrove swamp I remember how excited I was when jungles came out I think me and everyone

Else and their mother all went to a jungle by them and built like a base up in one of the jungle trees and it was the coolest thing ever and then like a few months passed and nobody cared anymore because jungles they’re just it was just a tree type at

The time and now you have all kinds of other stuff they’ve added the bamboo jungles they’ve added the areas with podzol and the temples and stuff like that and temples might have been in the first version I don’t remember anyway we actually have we have three variants of jungles now we have the

Regular jungle we have the bamboo jungle and we have the sparse jungle and that’s cool because you can be walking through a jungle and find these three different variants but what if there were infinite variants because what if what if there was something in the game that was not

Just going to select between one of three possibilities so either regular bamboo or sparse but was sort of deciding something like well how how far apart are the trees in this jungle how much vegetation is there on the floor how much bamboo is there on the jungle floor and by doing that

Now each and every different jungle you explore would be a different slightly different biome I think that this could be done hopefully I think that this could be done and not totally destroy the uh ability of the world generation to work on our limited computers

Uh because I think it would just be it would just be little things like how frequent are trees and will there be will there be temples here or no temples here will there be lakes here or no lakes here stuff like that I think would be so interesting because when you did

Happen upon it it would be unknown even though you’ve walked into a desert you don’t know you’ll find a temple which is sort of true of the regular game but they’re so common that you probably will find a temple in a big enough desert if there was a random like

50 chance that this is a no Temple desert you can just explore the entire desert and no temples that would make it even more exciting when you did find it a temple in a desert because you’re like this is a temple desert I can go and find all

Kinds of temples here maybe something like that I just think like it really works in beta because even though I’m like okay I’m walking into some trees I don’t really know if this is going to be like a forest biome or is this is this going to be more of a

Mountainous biome or is this going to be more of a beach biome you don’t actually know until you find the thing itself like I mentioned so I would really hope that one day Minecraft generation can change to be more like that to be more like finding the individual features instead

Of just finding one flat biome that’s like always the same thing as the last biome you found because I think that despite the unlimited number of Worlds you can create in Minecraft and the UN like the nearly unlimited distance you can travel it kind of sucks that that world and all

Those worlds are filled with the same exact biomes it’s almost it’s very rare that you find something that’s truly like new and unique in a Minecraft world like I think one of the you know I’ve seen one seed ever with a mushroom Island that was connected by land to uh like a

Forest that’s like one that’s happened one time ever but imagine if that could just happen randomly often but maybe maybe the biome doesn’t generate with mushrooms in it or maybe you can have a dark oak forest with no mushrooms or you could have a regular forest with mushrooms if all these

Features could be independent of biomes you could find so many new things and generating a new world wouldn’t be as simple as like okay what did I get I got a Mesa spawn okay oh what did I get I got a swamp spawn okay it’d be like I’m

In a completely new place and I don’t really know I don’t really know what’s here until I explore it so let’s have fun and let’s explore that’s that’s the kind of game I want to play and that’s what I like about beta 1.7.3 generation is that it

Feels like that you might spawn in a snowy area but you don’t really know whether you’re going to be in a flat area or a hilly area or a heavily forested area you just don’t know and it’s exciting because you have a task now go and explore this and figure out

What’s here even if you’ve played the game a lot there’s still no way of knowing in beta whereas in in modern Minecraft if you’re not like seeing a biome for the first time then you already know what’s in it I really think that people are so like mad when they’re like

No they’re not gonna they’re not gonna do the Birch biome they’re not gonna change the burst biome what the heck we’re so mad and I’m like you guys are looking at you guys are too zoomed in you need to zoom out your camera here and look at the bigger picture which is like

Are these biomes really exciting if they just make an update to Birch biomes like oh now there’s logs on the ground like great so now I can go into a birch biome and find the same logs on the ground in every Birch biome this is so exciting

For like five minutes and then never again I think if it was the kind of thing that you know maybe any Forest could have some logs lay on the ground that are that wood type but not always that would be interesting it would be like it would give a different feeling to a

Different one Oak Forest or what do they call them I guess one Oak Forest would feel different from another Oak Forest I don’t know if they’re ever going to go this Direction with the game but I’m hoping that at least one day some mod Creator sort of gets this idea too

Because I’m surprised how many mods will actually cause a generation to be more strict instead of less strict I guess people just are into the idea of realism anyway I think that one day there could be at least some kind of mod that’s going to allow different biomes different

Uh iterations of the same biome to have different features and I think this would make for a much more varied and interesting world to explore I think it would be really cool if the biomes weren’t so strict on exactly what features you’re going to see and it

Would be a lot more fun to explore if you didn’t know what you’re going to find so that’s basically why I think that as they are biomes are bad and I think it would be great if they change