Water Erosion Continued for Minecraft Java Edition

Water Erosion makes the world evolve with streams and waterfalls.

Find Forest brooks and Mountain creeks during your explorations. Dirt and sand wash away to deepen the stream bed and cut banks into the environment. The landscapes become more diverse and unique. Pass through a dry Desert valley one day and find it flooded the next. A stream may even change direction to dry up the original flow.

Water Erosion Continued is a fork and continuation of the original Water Erosion mod by Brad Erickson (13rac1). The original project stopped receiving updates after Minecraft 1.20.6. This fork carries the mod forward to current Minecraft versions, starting with 1.21.1 for Forge, NeoForge, and Fabric. All credit for the original design and implementation goes to the upstream author; this repository continues the work under the same GPLv3 license.

Goal

Implement Erosion as though it were a regular Minecraft feature making the world more dynamic. It should not break existing gameplay or enable cheating.

Features

• Water flowing over edges erode blocks below.
• Water flowing into a block wall will dissolve the wall.
• Water flow ends (level 7) dissolve the block below them to dig holes deeper and potentially continue the flow.
• Water Sources dissolve blocks to the sides in the direction of air spaces.
• Erodable blocks include sand, gravel, clay, farmland, dirt, grass, mud, mud bricks, and, rarely, cobblestone and stone bricks.
• Erodable blocks have differing resistances to erosion depending on their density, but all erode over time.
• Blocks decay during erosion to weaker blocks before disappearing.
• Blocks decay upstream in stream beds.
• Cobblestone and Stone Bricks grow moss near water.

Decay hierarchy:

• Cobblestone -> Mossy Cobblestone -> Gravel
• Stone Bricks -> Mossy Stone Bricks -> Gravel
• Grass Path -> Grass -> Dirt -> Coarse Dirt -> Mud -> Gravel
• Gravel -> Sand -> Clay(rarely) -> Air/Water

Media

• Screenshots
• Real Time Waterfall Erosion - High Speed Video
• Taiga Forest Creeks - High Speed Erosion
• Three Savanna Waterfalls - Erosion Complete

Seed 4465334863609190468

Tested on Minecraft 1.20.1

• -388 73 258 - A massive waterfall covers the side of a mountain peak in a swamp
• -538 85 1133 - A waterfall fills the floor of a narrow forest crevice
• -638 72 1459 - A stream finds multiple routes through the trees in a forest

Inspiration

• Reality
• Aquarela - Russian documentary about water

Technical Notes

This "core mod" adds code to the Water block randomTick() functions using the Mixin framework. The code and functionality is structured to reduce system CPU use, but a CPU increase may still be noticed.

The Minecraft in-game UI shows the opposite water level value than the true block metadata. Data level==1 is displayed as Targeted Fluid level:7. Data level==7 is displayed as Targeted Fluid level:1.

randomTick() is only called by the Minecraft runtime for a 128 block radius around the player, so the odds of erosion occuring are set fairly high. The odds should be reduced if random tick distance or speed is increased.

Source water blocks at or below the world sea level are ignored to reduce CPU use.

License

Copyright 2020+ by Brad Erickson (13rac1), continued by the contributors of this fork. Licensed GPLv3, see LICENSE.txt.