Oceania

Oceania turns the Overworld into one endless ocean. There is no other world type. Every new world is a deep sea dotted with small tropical islands, and you spawn standing on a houseboat with no land in sight.

I built this because I wanted an ocean game, not an ocean biome. Build on the boat, sail it between islands, trade with the hut villages, dive for what the sea floor holds, and go deeper than vanilla ever let you.

Available for Minecraft 26.3, Fabric only. Fabric API is required. Worlds do not carry over between the two game versions.

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The world

Three kinds of island rise from the sea. Big jungle islands with wide sand beaches, and that is where the villages are. Basalt volcanoes, half of them with a lava lake in the crater. Small sandy atolls with the odd cactus. Jungle is the only tree that grows, farm animals live only on the jungle islands, and there is no snow or ice anywhere.

The sea floor is a landscape of its own: trenches, ridges, seamounts, abyssal plains, kelp forests and flooded blue holes. Hydrothermal vents push bubble columns toward the surface, and iron, copper, gold and the odd netherite block lie loose on the abyssal floor. The sea goes far deeper than vanilla. Water colour follows real depth, from turquoise over sand to navy over the abyss, and underwater the fog thickens as you go down until the sky fades out entirely.

Under the sea bed the caves are sealed and dry: dripstone, lush caves and the deep dark, with geodes, dungeons, fossils and ore veins. Ancient cities, trial chambers, strongholds and mineshafts are all down there, and the eye of ender still finds the stronghold.

Shipwrecks, ocean ruins and monuments still generate, and pillager outposts and trail ruins stand on small islands. I removed ruined portals, buried treasure and treasure maps, since none of them make sense here. Wreck and ruin chests hold diamonds instead.

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The houseboat

Craft a houseboat from five logs around any boat or chest boat. The boat's wood sets the deck, so there is one for every wood type. Use it on water and it places a helm on a three by three deck.

Then build on it with any block, up to 32 by 32 by 16. Chests, furnaces, crafting tables, doors, torches and beds all work, and furnaces keep smelting while you sail. Sleep on board and that bed is your respawn point wherever the boat goes.

Sit at the helm to drive. Top speed is the same whatever the size. The boat stops against anything solid and slides along a shore rather than turning into it. Drops land on the deck, and anything that goes overboard floats. Several players can ride at once, each at their own helm, and the boat stays put when its driver logs out.

The helm and the nine deck blocks under it are one piece. Mine the helm and the whole houseboat comes up as a single item, while every other block drops and containers spill. Using a houseboat item on an existing deck adds a spare helm.

The deck is a normal build surface. Place and break blocks on it while it moves, walk its edges, take the helm and the whole build goes with you.

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Villages and trade

Each large island carries a hut village with a dock and a boat shed, built from more than twenty hand-made hut designs. Nine professions have been rebuilt around island life: Fisher, Boatwright, Weaver, Pitkeeper, Seedkeeper, Wayfinder, Chant-keeper, Shaman and Shellworker. Many trades are rolled per villager, so two Seedkeepers do not sell the same saplings.

The islands grow only jungle, so the things they cannot give you are trades: saplings for every other tree, a spyglass, mushrooms, water breathing, a turtle shell. The Wayfinder sells a Wreck Chart and a Ruin Chart for a compass and emeralds, and a plain Chart of These Waters.

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Creatures

Sharks. Reef, bull, tiger and great white, by biome, hunting near the surface. They circle, wind up with a warning, then charge. Blocking during the wind-up works, leaving the water ends the hunt, and the deck of a houseboat is safe.

Blue whales. Life-size, in pods, far from land. They surface to blow and sing with real hydrophone recordings.

The giant squid. Lives in trenches and abyssal plains far below the surface, hunts players and whales, and will drop an unarmoured player in one hit.

Jellyfish, crabs and gulls. Moon jellies, sea nettles and crown jellies drift in neon colours, harmless and common in the deep. Coconut, reef and king crabs scuttle sideways and run from you. Seagulls never land and gather over islands, so follow the gulls to find land.

Drowned only gather around monuments, wrecks and ruins. Dolphins are back.

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The deep and the turtle set

Vanilla gives you the turtle shell. Oceania completes the set: a Turtle Chestplate, Leggings and Boots crafted from scutes, with iron-level protection. Each piece worn doubles your air underwater. With all four on, mining underwater is mining on land, with no penalty for being submerged or afloat.

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Night, weather and the surface

At night, players, boats, sharks and whales leave glowing bioluminescent trails on the surface. Rain and thunder follow their own schedule, and storms darken the water. The main menu shows an animated ocean instead of the vanilla panorama.

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Settings

The Configure button in Mod Menu, or config/oceania.json, switches natural spawning of sharks, whales, giant squid, jellyfish and crabs on and off. Spawn eggs and /summon still work. The host's settings apply to the world, and a dedicated server uses its own file.

Versions and requirements

• 26.3: Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or newer and Fabric API 0.162.0 or newer. All eleven woods, pale oak and poplar included, and villager trades are data, so data packs can override them.
• Mod Menu is optional on both.
• Oceania replaces the world type. It needs a new world, and once installed every new world is an ocean world.
• Required on both client and server. Played and tested with Sodium, Iris, Indium, Lithium and ModernFix.
• Screenshots were taken with the Packtrix resource pack and AstraLex shaders. The water colour, underwater fog and bioluminescence are the mod's own and show without shaders.

All rights reserved. Made by Meatylumberjack.