Create: Transcontinental

Create: Transcontinental

Create: Transcontinental generates a continent-scale railway network for Create during chunk generation.

Building a full railway network can be a long process, especially on smp servers when players build their base far away from each other. This mod aims to provide a basic network, far from perfect but sufficiant to be a solid base for player to improve it to build their network.

Contrary to some other existing tracks generation mods, this mod main goal is to have the lowest possible impact on world generation performance, especially in the case of a multplayer server.

At the same time, it tries to stay realistic, the tracks snake through the landscape to avoid steep slopes, water and other obstacles instead of building over everything.

Also, the generation is fully deterministic. Like vanilla it looks random, but it is not, so if you regenerate chunks the tracks will come back at the exact same place, the other advantage of this is that the order in which the chunks are generated doesn't matter at all.

Configuration & Compatibility

• Worldgen compatibility: tested with vanilla terrain generation, Terralith and Tectonic (alone and together).
• Settings: they are in config/createtranscontinental-server.toml, mainly the distance between two nodes of the network (bondLength, 512 by default), this lenght defines the density of your network, the lower you go, the denser the network will be. Some extreme values are allowed but not always well tested, 512-2048 is a reasonable range for most worlds. Higher values increase the compute cost for each chunk as they have to reach for farther away nodes to compute their tracks.

⚠️ Caution
Only change the settings on a new world. Chunks generated before and after the change will not have the same tracks and they will not connect.

Customization

Along the track structures can be customized through datapacks. I will release documentation on the format you have to use in order to achieve this as soon as possible.

Performance

All tests are performed on client/server setting. Vanilla tests are performed on my local machine, Large modpack tests are performed with server side on a dedicated server. These numbers are worst case scenarios as they are performed with admins flying in spec mode at max speed along tracks on a new map during the full lenght of the test.

"Vanilla"

Only Create and Xaero installed, 24 thread CPU, nodes 512 blocks apart

chunks generated during test	32,340
vanilla generation per chunk, average	34.8 ms
mod cost per chunk, average	0.20 ms
added to world generation	+0.6 %
mod cost per chunk: median / 99th / 99.9th percentile / worst	0.14 / 0.94 / 6.3 / 79.5 ms

Large modpack

Modpack with ~300 mods, including Terralith, Tectonic, C2ME and various custom structure mods. 16 thread CPU, nodes 1024 blocks apart.

chunks generated during test	37,954
vanilla generation per chunk, average	51.6 ms
mod cost per chunk, average	0.64 ms
added to world generation	+1.2 %
mod cost per chunk: median / 99th / 99.9th percentile / worst	0.20 / 1.3 / 155.9 / 682.8 ms

These data will be updated when relevant

Supported versions & compatibility

Supports Create 6 on Fabric for Minecraft 1.20.1 and on Neoforge for Minecraft 1.21.1. No compatibility planned with older version. Future version should recieve updates.

Updating from one patch to another (e.g. from v1.0.0 to v1.0.1) should not break the paths across chunks generated before and after the update (alpha and beta versions can break it in any case, do not use it in production please).

Updating from one major or minor version to another (e.g. from v1.0.0 to v1.1.0 or v1.0.0 to v2.0.0) will break the paths across chunks! Be careful when you update!

Known issues

Here is a list of known issues currently being worked on.

• Some viaducts are absurdely large
• Terrain sampling still need a precision increase without degrading performance
• Structure avoidance may sometime not work correctly

If you encounter any issues, use /ctc report and copy paste the full report to a new issue on github. Explain the issue you have with as many details as possible. Join screenshots if needed.

Roadmap

I've been working on this for a few months, once the first release is ready, I want to take time to write a public blog article on the different techniques used in order to achieve this work. After that, I have a few features I want to add :

• Ability to customize Bridges and tunnels via datapacks
• Write documentation about how to customize generation
• Allow more config
• Improve terrain sampling
• Improve path finding
• Performance optimizations
• Improve structure avoidance
• Add more trackside decorations
• Improve trackside decoration placement

License

For now the mod is All Rights Reserved.

Please do not repost the mod on CurseForge.

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My other mods

Project	Description
	Create: Transcontinental Generates a performant, deterministic Create railway network during world generation, connecting regions across continents with terrain-adaptive tracks.
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Streams and other creations

I stream on Twitch, in French. You can find my other creations on GitHub and my personal website.