The router's noise caves are one kind of cave. The other kind -- the long
winding tunnels with rooms and side branches, and the ravines that cut down
through the terrain -- is walked, step by step, by a random source, and none of
it existed.
The shape of the work is unusual enough to state plainly. To carve one chunk,
vanilla replays every carver seeded in the 17x17 chunks around it and keeps only
what lands inside, so the same tunnel is walked up to 289 times across a world.
That redundancy is the point: it is what lets a chunk be carved without
generating its neighbours, which is the only way carving fits a generator that
produces one chunk at a time. A carve-once-write-into-neighbours design would be
cheaper and would not reproduce vanilla's mask and ordering.
Two primitives had to be right before any of it could be, and both are pinned
against values captured from the jar:
* setLargeFeatureSeed, which decides which chunks start a cave. It combines
its two products with XOR; setDecorationSeed, which it otherwise resembles,
uses addition and forces the low bit. Getting them the wrong way round moves
every tunnel in the world and nothing complains.
* Mth.sin and Mth.cos, which are a 65536-entry lookup table and not libm.
Mth.sin(-1.0) is -0.8414514 against Math.sin's -0.8414709848078965, and a
tunnel that walks by adding cos(yaw) a hundred times ends up somewhere else
entirely if that difference is smoothed away.
Carving lands between the surface pass and decoration, where vanilla puts it,
and both neighbours matter: the surface rules must already have placed grass for
a cave mouth to be retextured, and decoration must come after so nothing is
planted over a hole. The heights decoration plants against are recomputed
afterwards, which is why vanilla re-primes its heightmaps at the start of the
feature step.
The configs are extracted from the jar rather than transcribed, along with the
flattened #minecraft:overworld_carver_replaceables tag, so the probabilities and
Y ranges are data. Open volume below y=60 rises 28% over sixteen sampled chunks,
tunnels cut at or below y=-56 fill with lava rather than air (869 blocks, no
air), and the cost is inside the noise floor of the density pass.
The router has carried vein_toggle, vein_ridged and vein_gap since the whole of
it was parsed, and nothing read them. So the copper and iron mega-veins -- the
long branching sheets that run through the deepslate and the copper band, not
the small scattered ore blobs -- did not exist.
OreVeinifier is not a decoration feature. It is the second entry of the same
MaterialRuleList the aquifer heads: the aquifer answers first, and only where it
says the position is solid rock does the veinifier get a turn at what would
otherwise be plain stone. That is why a vein never opens into a cave, and it is
why this lands in the density pass rather than in decorate.
Three random draws per position, in a fixed order, from a factory hashed off
"minecraft:ore": solidness, then richness, then the rare raw-ore block.
Reordering them or hoisting the vein_gap compute above the second draw would
change every vein in the world, so the code follows the bytecode's order rather
than the one that reads better.
The Y windows are the sharp edge worth knowing about: a vein's type comes from
the sign of the veininess noise, but its window comes from the type, so
veininess <= 0 anywhere outside -60..-8 is simply not a vein. Over 49 sampled
chunks copper lands in 0..49 and iron in -57..-8, and raw ore comes out at 1.9%
of ore blocks against vanilla's 2%.
The bandlands rule cycled four terracotta colours off a per-column random draw.
Vanilla generates a 192-entry band table once per world, from a random source
named clay_bands, and reads it at the block's height shifted by the
clay_bands_offset noise. Brown, red and light grey terracotta were never placed
anywhere; the stripes were the wrong thickness and did not line up between
neighbouring columns. All seven colours now appear.
The temperature condition matched a hand-written list of eleven biome names.
Replacing it with the temperature field read out of the jar's 65 biome JSONs
fixes one of them: deep_frozen_ocean reads cold by name but its base
temperature is 0.5, so vanilla does not freeze it. taiga and the pine taigas
were the other way round -- excluded by name, and correctly so, but by
coincidence rather than by data.
Two parts of the vanilla calculation are left out and documented where they
belong: the height adjustment that cools peaks, and the "frozen" modifier that
warms scattered patches of frozen ocean. Both need PerlinSimplexNoise. Neither
is reachable from the overworld tree in a way that shows: the single condition
that consults temperature sits under a frozen_ocean biome check, below a water
check, and decides whether a hole in the ocean floor ices over. The snowy
mountain tops come from biome selection, not from here -- which is not what the
plan for this commit assumed.
The per-column *rand.Rand threaded through SurfaceContext goes away with the
old bandlands rule; nothing needs it now that vertical_gradient rolls
positionally.
The tree was parsed once, globally, and shared by every world -- so every
condition that needs the seed simply did not work. Compiling it per RandomState
fixes four of them at once.
noise_threshold sampled a per-column random draw and pretended it was
"minecraft:surface"; the other six noises it names were unsupported and returned
false. Each condition now holds its own seeded noise, sampled once per column
into a small cache the way vanilla's LazyXZCondition does. Powder snow, packed
ice and ice appear in the dump for the first time; calcite, swamp water windows
and gravel patches have their conditions back too.
vertical_gradient tapered through a per-column RNG shared with the other rules.
Vanilla rolls a positional random at the exact block, from a factory named by
the rule. More importantly the anchor decoder read only above_bottom and
discarded which kind of anchor it was, so the deepslate rule's absolute 0..8
collapsed onto y=-64 and **no deepslate existed anywhere in the world**. Anchors
now carry their kind and resolve against the real height bounds -- which also
retires a hardcoded 384 in y_above.
Two more stubs land with them: hole is surfaceDepth <= 0 rather than a constant
false, and steep reads the neighbouring column heights. steep needs the whole
chunk's heightmap, so the column pass is now two passes -- terrain and fluids
for all 256 columns, then surface rules -- which is the order vanilla uses
anyway (doFill, then buildSurface).
Deepslate was also missing from the block-ID table, and an unknown name resolved
to 0, which the caller read as "no block" and skipped. So even a correct rule
would have placed nothing. Unknown names are now a parse error, deepslate and
mud are in the table, and a rule that resolves to air genuinely places air --
the frozen-ocean surface asks for exactly that.
Below y=0 is now entirely deepslate, y=1..7 a scatter, above y=8 none.
Every land column was one block of grass sitting straight on stone. No dirt
under grass, no sandstone under sand, nothing. Two stubs did it together:
above_preliminary_surface compared blockY against the column's actual top block,
so of every position in the column exactly one passed -- and the entire
biome-specific half of the surface rule tree hangs under that condition.
Vanilla compares against a minimum surface level: the preliminary surface level
sampled at the four corners of the 16-block cell, bilinearly interpolated, plus
the surface depth less 8. That is about twenty blocks of reach on ordinary
terrain, which is what the biome subtree is written against.
Surface depth was hardcoded to 0. Vanilla is surfaceNoise*2.75 + 3 with a
per-column jitter, so it comes out around three; it sets how thick the band is
and feeds every add_surface_depth term in the tree. Zero collapsed them all.
Also samples surface_secondary, so stone_depth's secondary_depth_range widens
its band instead of being parsed and dropped.
Grass columns now read grass, two to four dirt, stone -- the histogram over 256
columns is {2: 223, 3: 33}, against vanilla's 2..4. gendump prints it and fails
if the band collapses again; TestGrassColumnsHaveDirt guards it in the suite.
The water condition asked "is this block at or above sea level", which is only
the same question as vanilla's in an ocean. Vanilla asks how far the block sits
below the water directly above it, and there is now water that is nowhere near
y=63: the aquifer puts pools at their own levels, deep underground and up in the
hills. Against sea level every one of those read as dry stone, and the stone
above them read as lakebed.
waterHeight is already tracked down the column, so the condition becomes the
vanilla one: pass when there is no water above at all, otherwise when
blockY (+ stoneDepthAbove where the rule asks for it) clears
waterHeight + offset + surfaceDepth * multiplier. add_stone_depth was parsed and
then ignored; three rules in the overworld tree set it.
NoWaterAbove replaces a bare math.MinInt so a hand-built context cannot default
to "water at y=0" by leaving the field unset.
Every air block below y=63 was turned into water. That is one line of code and
it cost the entire underground: no dry caves, no lava lakes, no air pockets, a
solid block of water from the sea floor to bedrock.
Vanilla decides fluid per position instead. Aquifer centres sit on a jittered
16x12x16 grid; each gets a fluid level and type from the floodedness and spread
noises, with centres near open sky inheriting the sea and buried ones getting a
much lower randomised level or nothing at all. A position takes its nearest
centre's fluid unless the barrier noise raises enough pressure between the two
or three nearest centres to seal it back to stone. Deep centres turn to lava.
Porting it means fixing the order of generation, not just adding a file. Vanilla
resolves stone/water/lava/air during the density pass and only then runs the
surface rules over a finished column; we did it the other way round, which is
what forced the unconditional flood in the first place. fillVanillaColumn now
asks the aquifer per position, and applySurfaceRule walks the finished column
carrying the bookkeeping SurfaceSystem carries: air resets the counters, a fluid
records its water height, and stone gets a depth from the top of its run plus
one from the bottom, found by looking ahead to the next non-stone block below.
That last one fixes stone_depth's ceiling form, which had no bottom-up depth to
work with and was testing the top-down one instead -- fourteen rules in the
overworld tree use it to dress cave roofs. The floor form is unchanged: vanilla
counts from 1 and compares against 1 + offset, we counted from 0 and compared
against offset.
The aquifer grid is built eagerly per chunk rather than lazily, because our
columns fill concurrently; every cell is a pure function of its grid coordinate
and every cell in the computed range gets consulted anyway. Cost is ~0.5% of
chunk generation, most of it absorbed by the shared preliminary-surface cache.
Inland caves go from 100% water to 3.8%, and lava exists for the first time.
cmd/gendump grows a census that would have failed loudly before, and
TestCavesAreDry guards it in the suite.
bedrockAt had two bugs that cancelled into a deterministic, wrong-looking floor.
It took its chunkRand by value, so next() mutated a copy and all four layers
drew the same 32-bit number. The layers were then decided by successive bits of
that one draw, nesting them into a prefix condition instead of scattering them
independently.
Its ramp also ran backwards. The comment claimed d=1 -> 50% decaying upward, but
`keep := 5 - d` requires more bits set the *lower* the layer, giving 1/16 at the
floor and 1/2 four blocks up — bedrock was likelier further from the bottom.
Vanilla ramps probability linearly from 1 at y=-64 to 0 at y=-59 and tests
nextFloat() < probability, which is what it does now.
Only fillLegacySurface reaches this; the normal path lets the surface rule tree
place the floor from the same datapack vertical_gradient rule. Both should agree.
cmd/gendump is new here: a client-free diagnostic that reports biome
distribution, top surface blocks, subsurface banding, deep-layer composition and
an ASCII cross-section, so generator defects can be seen without launching a
client. Its bedrock-band check prints per-layer counts and fails on any air or
water in the floor. On chunk (0,0) at seed 12345 it now reports y=-64 fully
bedrock, 207/154/106/66 thinning above it, and zero air or water.
The same output also shows the missing subsurface banding — grass sits directly
on stone — which is a separate defect in above_preliminary_surface, not fixed
here.
Replaces the biome-blind fillVanillaColumn heuristics with a full
interpreter for the overworld surface_rule tree (already embedded in
overworld.json): block/sequence/condition/bandlands rules plus all 11
condition tests (biome, steep, hole, water, temperature, y_above,
stone_depth, noise_threshold, not, vertical_gradient,
above_preliminary_surface).
- worldgen/blockids.go: name(+Properties)→network-ID table for surface
blocks (grass/sand/terracotta/mycelium/podzol/coarse_dirt/sandstone/
calcite/snow/ice/...), with snowy property variants.
- worldgen/surface.go: rule-tree parser + interpreter + SurfaceContext;
LoadOverworldSurfaceRule caches the seed-independent tree.
- loader.go: OverworldDensity.SurfaceRule() exposes the parsed tree.
- biome_lookup.go: BiomeNameAt returns the biome name for biome tests.
- vanilla.go: samples the 2D climate + biome before column fill, threads
the rule tree and biome name into fillVanillaColumn, and applies it
top-down with stone as the default for non-matching (deeper) blocks.
The above_preliminary_surface gate uses an inclusive bound so the top
solid block reaches the biome dispatch.
- Performance: one per-column RNG and a reused SurfaceContext keep the
overhead to ~+13ms/chunk (71ms vs 58ms baseline), within the gate.
- Chunk stores per-section biome arrays (64 cells/section); flat generators
keep the uniform single-valued fallback.
- New writeBiomePalette uses min 1 bpe and direct at registry width (65 biomes).
- Climate sampler splits 2D axes (sampled once per column) from 3D depth
(per cell), keeping per-cell cost to a single density-function compute.
- Full biome parameter table (surface + underground twins + lush/dripstone/
deep_dark caves) with depth as a true range, not a binary layer.
- fillBiomes3D fills the 1536 cells/chunk in parallel; <0.3ms overhead vs
baseline chunk gen (benchmark-verified).
- Tests: cave-biome resolution, per-cell variation, flat-world regression,
registry-range validity, plus chunk-gen and per-cell benchmarks.
