Realistic Terrain Movement

Realistic Terrain Movement changes how movement works in Minecraft by making terrain, altitude, and environmental conditions affect both players and mobs. Roads become faster, mud and snow slow you down, mountain winds become a challenge and the open ocean is no longer a safe place for small boats.

The mod is designed to encourage players to use transport mods or other environmental mechanics.

All mechanics are fully configurable and can be enabled or disabled independently:
.../config/realisticterrainmovement-common.toml

Features

Different surfaces affect movement speed:

• Paths, wooden planks, bricks, stone and similar constructed surfaces provide a speed bonus.
• Sand, gravel, mud, snow, soul sand, powder snow and other rough terrain slow movement down.

Boots Reduce Terrain Penalties:

• Any boots equipped in the feet slot reduce terrain penalties (50%) by default. Walking through rough terrain becomes easier while preserving all positive bonuses from roads and pathways.

Mobs Are Affected Too:

• Terrain effects are applied not only to players but also to most creatures in the world.
• Aquatic mobs, flying entities, and certain legless creatures are excluded by default to maintain natural behavior.

High-Altitude Wind System:

Above Y=120, strong winds begin to affect movement. Wind strength scales up to Y=250

• Wind pushes player and mobs sideways.
• Walking against the wind reduces movement speed.
• Wind strength increases with altitude.
• Only works under open sky (caves/structures are sheltered).
• Normal climbing jumps remain unaffected.

Boats and Open Oceans:

Small boats are not suitable for deep ocean travel. The vanilla boat is essentially a small coastal vessel that would realistically be unable to withstand the rough conditions of the open ocean. This encourages players to build proper seafaring ships from other mods for exploring distant islands and continents.

• Newly placed boats inside ocean biomes immediately break and drop themselves as an item, encouraging players to seek alternative transportation methods.

Update (from 1.0.0 to 1.1.1):

• Added EASY, NORMAL, and HARDCORE terrain presets while keeping every block modifier configurable.
• Smoothed terrain transitions and improved jump protection; vegetation slowdown is disabled by default but can be re-enabled in blockSpeedModifiers.
• Expanded terrain support for Biomes O' Plenty, Regions Unexplored, Nature's Spirit, and Unearthed.
• Wind is always active in open air above windStartY; vanilla rain and thunderstorms increase its strength by 30%.
• Added an independent procedural wind sound: smooth fade during falls and 5%/30%/60%/100% volume at Y=90/120/180/250.
• Improved ocean boat detection: standard vanilla-style boats, including modded wood variants, now break correctly.
• Large ships and other non-standard water transport are protected from ocean breaking by default.
• Added oceanBoatWhitelist and oceanBoatBlacklist for custom Boat entities and entity-type tags; blacklist overrides whitelist.

Compatibility

The default configuration includes support for:

• Biomes O' Plenty
• Regions Unexplored
• Nature's Spirit
• Geophilic

May conflict with mods that modify the MOVEMENT_SPEED attribute, apply custom movement mechanics or alter vanilla boat behavior..

Recommendations

As this mod was created primarily to supplement other mods, I recommend the following ones to fully unlock 100% of its potential:

• Create Aeronautics
• Lithosphere
• Continents
• Serene Seasons
• Natural Temperature
• Project Atmosphere: Realistic Climate & Weather
• eZWeight
• AmbientSounds 6
• Deeper Oceans

Technical Notes:

• • All movement logic runs server-side only, via EntityTickEvent.Post.
  • Terrain + boots use a combined MOVEMENT_SPEED attribute modifier (ADD_MULTIPLIED_TOTAL). While airborne, the last grounded value is held (sticky) instead of resetting to neutral.
  • Wind tracks each entity's last on-ground Y position to detect "is this a normal jump" and skips pushing/slowing during jumps under the configured ascent threshold.
  • Biome-mod block entries use plain modid:block or #modid:tag syntax — if that mod isn't installed, the registry lookup simply finds nothing and the entry is a no-op.
  • Config lists are cached and only re-parsed when the config actually changes.