Beginners tutorial

Welcome, new user!

After you have succesfully installed Terrain Control, you can start creating your own worlds. Create a world on creative with TerrainControl as the generator and 12 as the seed. We re using this seed so that your world will be identical to the tutorial world. If you don't need any help creating a Terrain Control world with a specified seed, just skip this list.

• If you are on singleplayer, click Create New World, select Creative as the game mode and fill in a name for your world. Click on More World Options, and fill in 12 as the seed and choose TerrainControl as the world type. Make sure that Allow Cheats is on, you will need it for the /tp command.

• If you are on Bukkit and have Multiverse you can use /mv create world_name NORMAL -s 12 -g TerrainControl to create the world and /mv tp world_name to teleport to it.

• If you are on Bukkit and have another multiworld-management plugin, look up the documentation of that plugin on how to create a new world. Use 12 as the seed and TerrainControl as the generator name.

• If you are on Bukkit and you don't have a multiworld-management plugin, go to your bukkit.yml file and add the following:

    worlds:
      your_world_name:
        generator: TerrainControl
  

  Replace your_world_name with the name of your world, which is usually just world. Also, don't use tabs in this file, use spaces! Go to the server.properties file and set the level-seed setting to 12. Delete the whole world folder to get a fresh level.dat with the correct seed.

• If you are on a Forge server, go to the server.properties and set the level-type setting to TerrainControl and the level-seed setting to 12. Delete the whole world folder to get a fresh level.dat with the correct generator and seed.

Now log in once on your world to let Terrain Control generate it's configuration files. Run the command /seed to verify that the seed is indeed 12. You will notice that the world looks just like a default Minecraft world: you haven't yet changed the settings! Close down the game/the server again.

Locate your Terrain Control settings folder. See the installation instructions to find out how. You should see something like this:

Let's open the WorldConfig.ini. Using Notepad is fine. However, don't use an editor which uses text styles, so don't use Word.

All lines starting with a # are comments. They give a brief description of each variable. On the WorldConfig page on the wiki, you can usually find a more detailed description.

To verify that everything works, we are going to change a variable. GenerationDepth is a nice one to change. If you set it to 9, all biomes get halved in size, in both the x and z directions. If you set it to 11, all biomes get doubled in size, again in both the x and z directions. If you set it to 12 the biomes are as large as in the Large Biomes world type. Let's try that. Change the number to 12 and save the file.

If you would (re)start the game/the server now, you still won't see any changes. You have to explore new areas to see the new terrain, just like for any other generator update in Minecraft. Because this is quite annoying, it is a better idea to delete the region folder inside the world folder. This deletes the terrain, but keeps the player positions and the map seed. Never do this while the game/the server is running!

After you have deleted the region folder, start the game/the server and test your changes. You should now see a world with large biomes.

It's now time to explore the WorldBiomes folder. Again, don't forget to close the game/the server. You see a lot of .bc files, whichs stands for BiomeConfig. Some biomes look very obscure (what is Sky.bc?), others are not a biome at all (Since when is a beach a biome? What about river?), and others use strange names (Mesa Plateau F M?). These names were chosen by Mojang.

For now you could ignore those strange biomes. Just open up the Desert.bc file. If you scroll down, you will see the BiomeHeight and BiomeVolatility (just below Terrain Generator Variables). Let's add some hills to the desert! Set BiomeHeight to 0.2 (makes the terrain higher, but not more hilly) and BiomeVolatility to 0.4 (makes the terrain more hilly). Now save the result, delete the region folder, and find a desert biome. If you indeed used the seed 12, you can easily teleport to one using the command /tp -19 80 -306.

Maybe the stone in the cliff annoys you, wouldn't sandstone look better? Close the game/the server, open the Desert.bc and set StoneBlock (in the Blocks section) to SANDSTONE. This replaces all stone with sandstone. Stop the game/server, delete the region folder and start the game/server again.

Now you have seen a tiny bit of the power of Terrain Control. It's time for the next step! If you just want to know what each setting does, you can take a look at the other settings in WorldConfig and the BiomeConfigs. If you want to start creating custom biomes, you should read this tutorial, which starts at the point where this tutorial ends. On the home page you could also find a lot of other (external) tutorials. The examples page might also be useful.