Skyseed

Skyseed

Grow your skyblock instead of bridging it out.

You craft a seed, throw it into open air, and a couple of seconds later it sprouts a floating island. Each one is generated fresh and stocked with whatever that seed grows: trees, ore, a pond, a biome, a village, a dungeon.

You start on a small island with one tree. After that, exploring and crafting feed each other. Every island you grow gives you what you need to craft the next.

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Where Skyseed came from

Most skyblocks follow a similar pattern. Grow trees, compost dirt, and build all your real estate out of wood and stone. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I wanted something different. What if you could combine your skyblock with some exploration? What if you could just take an island-shaped bit of the overworld generation?

This is where Skyseed came from. I soon realized I couldn't use the overworld generation itself, but I could use the overworld biomes. So the next best plan was to pick up whichever biome is on the overworld where your seed lands, and build a custom island to reflect it. Hopefully it combines the coziness of a skyblock with the exploration options of a normal world.

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How it works

1. Craft a Skyseed. Each recipe makes a different seed: planks and dirt for your first Wild island, stone and cobble for a Rocky, snow and ice for a Frozen. They're separate items, so JEI and REI list them one by one.
2. Throw it. Hold right-click to wind up, release to launch.
3. Watch it grow. It germinates after a moment, then builds itself in over a few seconds.
4. Harvest, then craft the next. Keep going and your archipelago spreads across the sky.

No two islands of the same theme come out the same.

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Two ways to throw

Press V to switch. It remembers which you picked.

• Precise is the default. The island lands where you're aiming, as far away as you charge it. Handy for laying out a base.
• Classic is a charged toss. A tap drops it nearby; a full charge sends it a long way out.

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Ten terrain islands

Every Skyseed grows its own kind of island. Most have a few different looks and the odd hidden surprise, and each has a larger, pricier Large version with its own twist.

• Forest. The classic green island. Grass, flowers, and trees that suit wherever it lands. The Large one is a sprawling old-growth wood, biggest of the green islands.
• Rocky. The mining island, and the one where height counts for the most. Low gives you deepslate, diamond and redstone; the middle, iron and copper; high, coal and iron, with snow on the very top. Dig around and you might hit lava — likelier the lower you throw, a long shot up high and about one in five below Y 0. Most come up as ordinary stone, but every so often the whole island is diorite, granite, andesite or tuff instead. Large Rocky is a tall mountain with emeralds in it.
• Desert. Sand and sandstone, cacti and dead bushes, clay and fossils underneath. Drop it over a badlands and you get red dunes. Large: an oasis.
• Mushroom. Mycelium under giant red and brown mushrooms. Nothing hostile spawns on it, so it's a safe place to build. The Large isle comes with mooshrooms grazing.
• Frozen. Snow and ice, packed ice, the occasional blue ice, and a few powder-snow pockets to mind your step around. Large: a frozen lake.
• Meadow. Flowers, mostly. Every dye flower, tall sunflowers, cherry blossom, bee nests tucked in among them. Large is a wide field of sunflowers, tulip rows and cherry.
• Badlands. A mesa in the sky, cliffs banded orange, yellow, white, red and brown, with plenty of gold. Large: a towering one.
• Ancient. A piece of the deep underground floating out in the open: deepslate and tuff, amethyst geodes, dripstone, and a rare deep-dark version covered in sculk. About one in five hides a lava lake, with stray lava pockets in the stone. Large is a deeper shard veined with budding amethyst.
• Lush. A cave garden up in the sky. Moss, azalea trees, dripleaves, glow-berry vines trailing off the underside. Large: a deep pool with glow squid.
• Aquatic. Half land, half lake: kelp and lily pads, warm-water coral, mangroves, clay and gravel banks. Throw it below Y 0 and it comes up bare stone and deepslate around a lava lake instead. Large: a deep, open lake.

That's twenty islands before you even reach the villages, farms and structures below, since every Large variant is its own seed.

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Two seeds that read the biome

Not every seed is tied to one terrain. The Wild seed — your cheapest, and the one you start with — grows whatever island suits the biome you throw it over: a desert over desert, a mountain over peaks, a forest over woodland. The Explore seed does the same but always lands a structure on the island, so it's the one to throw when you're hunting loot. Both come in Large and Huge sizes too.

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Grow a village

Build a trading town up one seed at a time. Each tier uses the same jigsaw system as vanilla villages, so no two assemble alike.

• Hamlet. A little green with a cottage or two and their villagers. Enough to get you going.
• Trade Post. A small street village: a central square with lanes running off it, shops and fields and gardens along them, a landmark or two (a blacksmith's forge, a meeting hall), and short piers reaching out over the void. Each shop's villager works its own trade.
• Village Center. The same village scaled up across a cluster of islands, with a deeper street network, four to six shops, an iron golem on guard, and an anvil at its heart. Raids are off on Skyseed worlds, so your villagers stay put.

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Start an animal farm

Each one grows a fenced enclosure with a pack of animals already inside.

• Pasture. A breeding pair of cows, sheep or pigs.
• Poultry. A coop of chickens.
• Wool Farm. A flock of sheep in mixed colours.
• Stable. Horses and donkeys, plus a chest that might hold a saddle.
• Aquarium. A glass tank of turtles, axolotls, fish and a squid.

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Raid a structure

Loot-and-encounter islands borrowed from the overworld's dungeons and ruins.

• Dungeon. A mossy cobblestone room with a spawner and two chests (the Cat and 13 discs show up in the loot), sunk underground at the foot of a ruined stairwell, with broken stonework strewn across the island.
• Ruined Portal. A broken Nether-portal frame and a chest of gold, your only crying obsidian up here, with a little lava pooled at the base.
• Desert Temple. A sealed chamber, four treasure chests, and TNT buried underneath.
• Jungle Temple. A tiered cobblestone-and-moss ziggurat under vines, with a trapped room inside: two chests and a tripwire dispenser.
• Witch Hut. A swamp hut, a witch, and a cat to deal with.
• Pillager Outpost. A wide cobblestone-and-dark-oak watchtower in a camp of tents, a target, a campfire, a banner. Get past the caged iron golem, climb the ladder to the pillager room and its chest at the top, then free the golem and turn it loose on the camp.
• Ocean Monument. A prismarine temple on a sand island, best thrown over a deep ocean. Guardians patrol the flooded halls and an elder guardian holds the core, so come ready for the mining-fatigue glare. Strip it for prismarine, clear the wet-sponge room, and dig up a buried Heart of the Sea for a conduit. The shards it drops are what finally unlock the Aquarium.
• Trial Chamber. A copper-and-tuff complex sunk deep into a larger rocky island, reached by one ladder shaft. Inside is a lantern-lit warren with a breeze at its heart and spawner-and-vault rooms running off it through corridors, laid out differently each time. Clear the spawners for trial keys and spend them on the vaults. Bring an ominous bottle to turn the place ominous and roll for the heavy core — then a mace.
• Woodland Mansion. A two-storey dark-oak manor on a big grassy island: a red-carpet hall, loot rooms, a library, a gabled roof, and side wings (a storeroom, another library, a hidden checkerboard room) that shuffle each time. An evoker and a pack of vindicators hold it. Kill the evoker for a Totem of Undying, and grow another mansion whenever you want more. It's the most reliable totem source in the game right now.

Not everything turns up with its own seed, either. Throw enough islands and you'll start finding things you never crafted: a Frozen island sealed inside an igloo, a Hamlet gone cobwebbed and abandoned, a ruin buried just under the surface that you only spot by digging onto it. There are more salted through the ordinary islands, and the rest you can find for yourself.

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Go huge

Once you're deep into the late game, the Huge seeds grow islands well past the Large ones: a single enormous landmass, or a small cluster of them, shot through with cave systems to mine out. Most hide a structure deep inside, whether a multi-room dungeon, an abandoned mineshaft with rails and minecart chests, an ancient city, or a big ocean monument. There's a dedicated big-dungeon seed too, if that's all you're after. They cost an ender pearl and blaze powder, so they sit right at the end of the tech tree.

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The world reacts to where you throw

Islands take after the biome under them. A Forest seed over a savanna grows acacia; over a jungle, jungle trees; over an ocean, a small lake island. A Desert over a badlands turns red. The sky below you is a full biome map, so each island picks up the character of wherever it lands.

On the mining islands, height stands in for depth. Throw low for the best ore, high for coal and iron, and the deeper you go the better your odds of striking lava.

Just about every block you'd dig up in a normal world is here somewhere, so whatever you're building, some island grows the material for it.

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Into the Nether

Build a portal, step through, and the Nether works the same way: an empty sky over a lava sea, grown out one seed at a time.

• Your overworld seeds still work. Throw a Rocky seed down here and it adapts into a small netherrack mining island. Desert turns into a soul-sand valley, Aquatic a lava lagoon, Forest a crimson or warped fungal patch. They're meant to be small, a foothold rather than a base. Seeds with no Nether form (Meadow, Frozen) just fizzle.
• The native seeds are where it pays off. Craft a dedicated Nether seed from your overworld one plus a signature Nether block and you get the full island: a netherrack mountain rich in ancient debris, a broad lava lagoon with striders, a towering fungal forest, a soul-sand valley full of fossils, or a nasty basalt deltas of jagged columns. Each has a Large version. Throw one back in the overworld for a laugh and you get a tiny matching island — except the Nether Lava seed, which actually grows a full lava island up there. There's a Nether Wild seed too, the adaptive starter for the Nether: it reads the biome you throw it over and grows the matching native island.
• Lava is the new depth. There's no bedrock to dig toward, so lava proximity does the gating instead. Throw a mining island low, near the sea, for the best ancient debris and gold.
• It has its own structures. A Nether Fortress seed grows an arched nether-brick bridge off a keep, with a caged blaze spawner inside, so you get blaze rods without hunting a fortress down. A Bastion Remnant is a ruined blackstone hold (one of three layouts, courtyards sprawling off it) full of piglins and a brute. A Piglin Trading Post is the Nether's version of a village, a hall of bartering piglins running a gold economy. And a Wither Arena gives you a blast-proof obsidian room to fight the Wither in safely, for the Nether Star and a first Beacon. The Large Nether islands sometimes carry a blaze spawner room of their own.
• Ruined portals link up. Throw a Ruined Portal and a matching frame appears in the other dimension at the linked coordinate. Repair and light both and they connect into a working pair, no setup needed.

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Into the End

Farm up enough blaze rods and ender pearls for Eyes of Ender and you can grow into the End as well. Same deal as the Nether: an empty void you build out a seed at a time.

• Getting there. There's no stronghold to find. You craft your way to a working End portal instead: gather portal-frame shards and a set of structure relics from across your islands, assemble the frame, fill it with Eyes of Ender, and step through. A Return Portal seed gets you home.
• End-native seeds. A Chorus Forest grows a chorus-and-purpur island with endermen wandering it, good for renewable chorus fruit, purpur and pearls. The End City is the showpiece: a stepped, overhanging purpur tower that branches into spires and throws end-stone-brick bridges out to floating wings, with a flying End ship moored at its tower and a guaranteed elytra in its hold.
• The dragon, and after. A new world's Ender Dragon fight is restored at the centre, and once it's dead you can grow a Dragon Trophy seed to mark it. Your overworld seeds work out here too; thrown into the End they come up as bare end-stone platforms to build from.

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Plays well with mods

Skyseed ships ready-made island support for a few favourites — all of it dormant until the mod is actually installed:

• Oh The Biomes We've Gone. The sky's biome map fills with BWG's biomes, and your seeds respond: throw one over an exotic biome and it grows that biome's island — nearly every BWG wood is growable this way, the flower fields feed Create milling, and village seeds thrown over the right biomes grow BWG's six village styles in their own block palettes. Growing your first exotic wood even unlocks a new Almanac entry.
• Mystical Agriculture. Inferium and Prosperity ore grow on the Lush and Ancient islands (plus soulium in the Nether), so the essence loop bootstraps without any worldgen.
• Create. Zinc ore turns up on the mining islands, so brass is a matter of growing the right island.
• Immersive Engineering. Its metal ores — aluminium, lead, nickel, silver, uranium — surface on the mining islands, so the whole multiblock tech chain has raw material to grow from.
• Applied Energistics 2. Certus quartz turns up on the mining islands to get a network started, and a dedicated Meteorite seed grows a cratered island with a sky-stone globe at its heart — the one place up here to mine sky stone and the inscriber presses AE2 otherwise buries in meteorites.
• Quark. Its stone types — limestone, jasper, shale — and the odd corundum geode surface on the mining islands, and its coloured blossom trees grow on the leafy ones.
• Farmer's Delight. Wild crops grow on your biome islands — onions, carrots, cabbages and tomatoes, plus rice in the ponds — so its whole cooking loop bootstraps from what you grow. Its add-ons come along too: chorus succulents on a Chorus Forest, powdery cane in the Nether.

And thanks to a custom void generator, any biome or structure mod is safe to add — biomes flow into island theming, and nothing ever generates uninvited in the void.

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The guidebook

Every world hands you the Skyfarer's Almanac. It has the recipe for each seed, and once you've crafted one it unlocks that island's field notes to read as you go. Lose the book and you can craft any Skyseed back into it at a table.

With Modonomicon (or Patchouli) installed you get the full illustrated version. Without either, the Almanac falls back to a plain written book that still covers the basics.

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What's next

The three chapters, overworld, Nether and End, are all built out, so what's left is smaller stuff:

• A few more structures to fill gaps: a Stronghold, shipwrecks.
• More creatures, island variants, and hidden surprises.
• Balance tuning as people play it.

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Getting started

• Chop your first tree and dig the island for dirt and planks.
• Craft a Wild Skyseed — planks and dirt — and throw it into open air for island number two.
• Open the Skyfarer's Almanac for the recipes, and go build a sky.

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Play it in a pack

If you'd rather not assemble a mod list yourself, there are two official Skyseed packs on CurseForge:

• Skyseed — the mod plus a hand-picked set of quality-of-life mods (maps, recipe lookup, vein mining, performance) and nothing that changes what you grow. The pure experience with the rough edges smoothed off.
• Coming soon: Skyseed: Grow Your Own World — a full progression pack built around the mod: Create, Immersive Engineering, Applied Energistics, Mystical Agriculture, Farmer's Delight, Iron's Spells and more, with a guided quest book tying it all back to the islands you grow.

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Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1 or 26.1.2
• NeoForge
• Modonomicon or Patchouli (optional), for the illustrated guidebook. Runs fine without either.

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Bug reports and feedback welcome, these can be reported on the issues page of the github (https://github.com/Gemberkoekje/Skyseed/issues). For add-on makers: every seed is a normal item in the #skyseed:skyseeds tag and the islands are plain datapack JSON, so adding new seeds is straightforward.