Farlands Reforged

Farlands Reforged

Remember the Far Lands? Walk about 12.5 million blocks from spawn in an old Beta world and the terrain just fell apart. Stone walls as tall as the world, huge floating sheets stacked on top of each other, dark tunnels that went on forever. Beta 1.8 fixed it, and they've been gone ever since.

This mod puts them back. It isn't a "glitchy terrain" imitation. It uses the same overflowing noise Beta used, at the same coordinates, with the same grassy ledges and flooded caves.

There are no new blocks and you don't need a resource pack. The rest of your world generates like normal, and you won't notice anything until you get really, really far out.

What's in it

• The Edge Far Lands along X and Z, and the Corner Far Lands where they meet, starting at ±12,550,821. Keep going to ±25,101,648 and everything breaks a second time.
• Grass and trees on top, grass and dirt on every ledge, and water filling everything up to sea level, just like Beta.
• Mountains and caves stay normal until you reach the right distance. Nothing starts glitching early.
• Modern noodle caves don't cut through the Far Lands, so the walls stay solid. Regular caves are still there.
• Arriving doesn't freeze your server. All that water doesn't turn into a flood of block updates.
• Don't want to travel 12.5 million blocks? Bring the Far Lands closer. farlandsStartX and farlandsStartZ in the config (or /farlands set x|z <distance>) move where they start on each axis, and the real terrain moves with them: the same wall, the same sheets, the same flooded tunnels.
• /farlands tells you where the Far Lands start and how far away you are. Operators also get /farlands set <distance>, /farlands set x|z <distance> and /farlands reset.
• A hidden advancement, "…where am I?", for making it out there.
• FarMan, if you dare (off by default). The pitch-black figure from the old Far Lands creepypastas haunts anyone who stays out there too long: "FarMan joined the game", cave noises, footsteps behind you, whispers in chat, redstone torches on the ledges… then him, watching from far away. Then behind you. He never hurts you. Turn him on with /farlands farman on or enableFarMan = true. Still server-side only: he's made of vanilla parts.
• Config options to turn off the terrain or the advancement.

Getting there

You could walk. It's only 12.5 million blocks. Or make a new world and run:

/tp @s 12550821 120 0

Then try the other axis, the negative side, and a corner:

/tp @s 0 120 12550821
/tp @s -12550821 120 0
/tp @s 12550821 120 12550821

Only chunks that haven't been generated yet turn into Far Lands. Places you've already explored won't change.

How it works

In Beta, the terrain noise multiplied your block coordinate by 171.103. Somewhere past 12.5 million blocks that number got too big for an integer, the math broke, and out came the Far Lands. Modern Minecraft still has that exact noise. It just wraps the coordinates so they never get that big.

Removing the wrap sounds like it should be enough, but it isn't. On its own, modern world generation treats the broken values as "deep underground", and you get a solid block of stone from bedrock to the build limit. So the mod also changes how terrain density is handled, how grass and dirt get placed, and how water fills in, and it keeps noodle caves out of the Far Lands. That's what makes it look like Beta again.

Versions

* Forge never shipped a 1.21.2 build, so there is no 1.21.2 Forge jar. On Minecraft 1.21, the Forge jar needs Forge 51.0.23 or newer — older 51.x builds ship a Mixin too old to read this mod's config and stop the server at startup. The jar says so, so Forge tells you instead of crashing. Forge never shipped a 1.20.5 build either, and NeoForge does not exist before 1.20.1.

** NeoForge for 1.20.1 runs the Forge 1.20.1 jar. There is no separate NeoForge jar for it.

*** NeoForge 26.3 is still in beta, so that jar is built against its betas (26.3.0.0-beta or newer).

Minecraft 1.18 and 1.18.1 aren't supported: their world generator predates the code this mod hooks.

The 26.x builds need Java 25; the 1.21, 1.20.5 and 1.20.6 builds need Java 21; 1.18.2 to 1.20.4 need Java 17. On Fabric, Fabric Loader is all you need. No Fabric API.

Take the jar that names your exact Minecraft version — these are not interchangeable. A jar built against 1.21.8 will not behave correctly on 1.21.5.

Config

• Fabric and Forge: config/farlandsreforged.properties
• NeoForge: config/farlandsreforged-common.toml

enableFarlandsTerrain = true
enableWhereAmIAdvancement = true
farlandsStartX = 12550821
farlandsStartZ = 12550821
enableFarMan = false

farlandsStartX and farlandsStartZ move where the Far Lands start, anywhere from 1 up to the classic 12,550,821. They can only come closer, not go further out. The start snaps to the nearest multiple of 4 blocks from the classic line (at most 3 blocks further out) so the wall lands exactly on it. Chunks you've already explored keep their terrain; only new ones change. The advancement, /farlands and FarMan all follow the new start.

MIT licensed. Made by Shigeo. The source is on GitHub.