Biome Squisher

An innovative new approach to adding biomes to the vanilla Minecraft biome map, Biome Squisher is designed with the goal of being non-destructive, meaning that vanilla biome placement, boundaries, and relative rarities are preserved. Additionally, a secondary goal of Biome Squisher is to work well with multiple biome mods; gone are the days of each worldgen mod present having it's own regions of the world, with only rare borders between them.

A new solution to biome injection

Unlike other solutions to the problem of adding new biomes, Biome Squisher "squishes" the vanilla biomes (or, in fact, previously added modded biomes) out of the way to open a "hole" in the biome space which a biome can be generated within. This is done in a way that multiple biome injections can be deterministically layered on top of each other - ensuring that even if multiple mods inject biomes in the same location, they are all properly "squished" and no biomes get disproportionately shrunken or expanded.

Some things to note with this approach:

• borders between biomes are maintained
• biomes are squished in such a way that the relative area of biomes should not change - meaning that biomes uniformly become less common
• multiple mods can inject biomes at the same target location, and they will co-exist fine

It turns out that the process is not nearly that simple, and there's some pitfalls deal with. Biome Squisher accounts for these edge cases and does the math necessary for such "squishing" for you, providing a nice datapack-based API to inject extra biomes into the biome map.

So how do I use this?

Biome Squisher is controlled entirely by datapack. First, a mod defines a series which Biome Squisher will execute on the biome space of the relevant dimension, at data/[namespace]/biomesquisher/series/[path].json. They have the following structure:

• "levels": a list of identifiers of any levels to apply the contained squishers to. Can contain any levels Biome Squisher can apply to - so, any using a noise biome source
• "squishers": a list of identifiers of squishers to apply

Each squisher referenced by a series should be placed at data/[namespace]/biomesquisher/squisher/[path].json. They have the following structure:

• "biome": the identifier of the biome to inject
• "injection": defines where and how the biome will be injected. Has the following structure:
  • "radius": how large the injection should be, with 0 being "nothing" and 1 being "the entire biome space"
  • "temperature", "humidify", "continentalness", "erosion", "depth", and "humidity": define the injection's behaviour on different axes. Each has a "type" field and takes one of the following forms:
    • "type": "range": defines a set range to inject the biome in; in other words, the biome does not squish on this axis. "weirdness", "erosion", "continentalness" and "depth" must define a range
      • "min" and "max": define the endpoints of the range
    • "type": "squish": the biome should squish other biomes out of the way in this dimension. "temperature" and "humidity" must have squishing behaviour
      • "position": the posiiton in this axis to inject the biome at, and squish other biomes away from
      • "degree": (optional, defaults to 1) allows for non-square injections. Make this value larger or smaller than 1 to make the "hole" opened up by the squishing larger or smaller on this axis, shrinking accordingly on other axes
• "snap": (optional; defaults to true) whether the biome injection should "snap" to a corner/edge between biomes within its radius, if one is present
• "relative": (optional; defaults to the start of temperature) when two biomes attempt to inject at the same location, their relative values are queried. Has the following structure:
  • "temperature", "humidity": one of "start", "center", or "end". When resolving which side of an opened hole to move a biome injection to, Biome Squisher will use this; at least one value must be non-"center"

Biome Squisher applies registered series in alphabetical order, so that biome injection is platform-independent and deterministic.

The mod provides several commands useful for debugging the biome space in general:

• /biomesquisher dump: exports an image of a 2D slice through the biome space. Takes 10 arguments
  • the first two arguments are the names of the dimensions to use for the x and y axes of the image
  • the next four arguments are the values in the remaining dimensions to slice at
  • the final four arguments are the minimum and maximum values of the x axis, followed by the minimum and maximum values of the y axis
• /biomesquisher serve: manage a web server that allows browsing through the biome map
  • start: start the server at the provided port
  • stop: stop any started server