Biomes

BIOMES

The Biomes mod makes the game world feel more realistic and alive by sorting flora and fauna into their native real-world biomes. Different regions will have their own flavour and travel will feel more meaningful.

If an animal or tree is not whitelisted or given a biome, it will not spawn. Story mobs are whitelisted. Trees can still grow outside their native habitat if planted from seed by a player.

Requires a new world to be generated.

FAQ

Q: What does this actually do?

It divides a world into large sections within which plants and animals allowed to spawn within those sections are the only thing that can spawn. It's less akin to minecraft style biomes of discrete varied climates/regions/etc, and more like an overlay of limited spawns to increase world variety. The regions are very large and are based on the global position in the world, so you may want to generate a smaller world with a centered equator to be able to reasonably travel to multiple biomes. Spawn conditions such as temperature, moisture, etc all also still apply, you can think of the spawn limitation as more of a narrowing of possible candidates within the biome.

Q: That sounds like that lowers world variety by having less spawns overall, should I use this by itself?

Generally you shouldn't use Biomes by itself. The base game doesn't really have enough global plant and entity variety to make up for that each biome has a limited spawn pool. It's highly recommended to at a minimum use Biomes with FOSTA, Floral Zones, and Wilderlands Ethology to get closer to the intended experience. See the compatibility list below for a further reference of what mods are strongly recommended to use with it. However, the more the merrier. Because each Biome is a limited pool, adding many mods that add plants, entities, world gen features, etc. serves much less to clutter up world generation.

Q: Do I need to generate a new world for this mod to work?

Yes. While technically new chunks will follow biome generation, you may experience all kinds of weird behaviors if the world wasn't generated with Biomes already installed.

Q: Is this compatible with this other world gen mod?

Generally speaking, yes. This only affects what can spawn with in an area in regards to flora and fauna, and does nothing to touch frequency, how it's spawned, etc. It also doesn't affect terrain generation at all as a result, so terrain-affecting mods such as a Terra Pretty, Continents, Conquest, are de facto compatible.

Q: I'm not seeing this specific plant or animal anywhere near me, what gives?

As mentioned higher up, the biomes are quite large. They by default take up a full 6th of their given hemisphere! You may not be traveling far enough for the size of your world.

Q: Do I need to do anything to update my world to Biomes 2.0?

If I did everything right, you shouldn't. There were many internal changes but worlds and config should auto-migrate.

Credits

Created with a huge amount of effort contributed by Hieronymous, TenthArchitect, Sheepon, Ledyanaya Sonya, Honk Cluwne, Gryfang, Hydromancerx, RaptorMother, ComitatensSaxoni, Crumps, n_azurik, ShaeTsu, Clint, H3B, and helpful suggestions from Zelifor. Pull requests gratefully accepted.

Good hunting to the butterfly enthusiasts!