With this mod I intent to re-create some of my favourite biomes from one mod known as Biomes O' Plenty made for another non-Luanti based voxel game that shall remain unnamed, with my own ideas included as well. awuuwa's Biomes is primarily targeting Minetest Game, some of the biomes work in other games including Mineclonia and VoxeLibre as well as all games supported by xcompat. There are continuing efforts to reduce dependency on Minetest Game and make these biomes more portable to work with other games. This mod is designed with the intention of not conflicting with other mods. New biomes will be added in the future. Existing biomes will not be removed in future versions.
The biomes in this mod are of varying levels of very little or more fantastical. A goal with this project is that the biomes together are designed so that they can replace all of the biomes in Minetest Game, assuming the user modifies the base game such that no default biomes are generated. This is to say, that the goal is provide a full range of different biomes that provide for a good gameplay experience. This goal is not close to being achieved, but that's an idea, also it is possible however likely or unlikely this goal may not be met, it's just a goal.
The textures are to be considered placeholders. Many of them feature flat colors and plain rudumentary artwork. I am not much of a pixel artist, if someone wants to send me better textures I leave that as an open possibility. In any case that hasn't been the highest priority thus far.
This modpack follows a modular design philosophy where the user can enable or disable each individual biome independently of each other, as well as separating the mods so that add the mods which add resources (nodes) are separate from the mods that add worldgeneration features. This way multiple mods (including third party mods) can share a "resource" mod as a dependency without altering the world generation. The choise to enable or disable each biome separate is provided to the user, except for the one exception, the swamp biome, which is a mod by a third party that is used as a dependency in the Wetlands biome in awuuwa's Biomes. As a dependency, the swamp biome is outside of my control, me as the developer of this mod, so unfortunately my designs and choises don't apply to it, but alas the user has the option to not to use the Wetlands biome if per really dislikes the swamp biome it depends on. I recommend the swamp biome mod be developed such that the world generation is in a separate submod in a modpack in a similar way as I do here, so that I can depend on the mangrove trees and mud without the swamp biome itself being present in the world, for those users who don't want the swamp biome
List of biomes and a very brief description for each:
coniferous forest features spruce and pine trees as well as mossy rocks spread out across the forest floor
Desert pillars is a hot biome with lots of pillars made out of desert sandstone
Fungi forest features a tall forest full of large mushrooms and almost teal kind of colored foliage and leaves of trees
Lots of Snow has a a messy arrangement of tall snow, no vegetation on this biome
Marsh is a flat biome that has lots of water and also soil mixed in, with deep crevices of water in between parts with soil. The biome has lots of plantation on top of the soil
Meadow is a largely plain biome with grass and occasional bushes as well as spruce trees
Mixed desert features a mixture of desert sand as well as regular sand
Mixed forest contains spruce, aspen and pine trees, this forest has a grass floor
Outback is a kind of an orange looking biome with dry dirt, some dry-ish grass and a unique outback sand soil type. There are also occasional acacia bushes and some outback tallgrass
pasture features fields filled with wonderful golden pasture grass
prairie is a nice almost plain biome but filled with lots of unique prairie grass along with regular grass. Plus some occasional bushes.
In the coldest most driest regions of the world, unfit for human habitation, the machines come to life, in the form of the Sci-Fi Biome.
Shiled has lots of spruce trees and a bunch of bushes on a hill
The great forest is largely dominated by the oak tree, but also features aspen as well as maple trees. Maple trees come from a mod that is installed separately as a dependency.
The Tropical Rainforest appears in places that are really hot and moist, this biome features a really vibrant green in foliage and leaves of the trees.
Wetlands features tall slim trees with sparse leafs, on muddy soil and there are also bushes and slimy tall grass. This biome depends on the "swamp" mod for Minetest Game, that I awuuwa did not create.
Winter forest is a cold snowy forest with spruce and pine trees.
xeric shrubland is a warm biome with sand + nice vegetation
changelog 0.2 1 Began work integrating xcompat, many biomes now work with it but not all of them. Basically for those biomes that completely support xcompat and do not depend on default, such biomes now work with any game that xcompat supports. 2 fixed tropical trees not growing from saplings 3 fixed the fungi forest tree digging a hole around it when it grows which I forgot was a problem that still existed until this version 4 other compatibility improvements and support for Mineclonia / CloneCraft;Libre has been added for some biomes, not all. Those same biomes should work with VoxeLibre also but I haven't tested. 5 I added a dummy package to pull relevant dependencies as primarily The Great Forest biome is supposed to be used with the maple mod, but I moved maple mod to optional_depends instead of depends, because I want to provide the option of not using it. Also this dummy package should help with using the biomes in the different games that are now supported with the addition of xcompat support, as all of the xcompat related items are marked as optional_depends. 6 Added useful triggering error if required mods aren't present when mods are loaded, instead of failing with mysterious errors because dependencies weren't there, now there are proper error messages telling the user what mods they should install to fix the error. This also relates to the dummy package, without the dummy package these errors would be thrown by default if the user didn't manually set out to download all optional_depends packages themselves. 7 Included the Minetest Game's flowers mod in all of the relevant mod.conf files where it wasn't present when it was supposed to be 8 Internal change to schematics, introduced the concept of using "pointer" nodes that will be resolved on init using aliases to point to actual nodes.