Sasha

The current terrain generation in TerraFirmaCraft feels very noisy, jagged and unrealistic. I think the 6 - 10 meter high hills seen absolutely everywhere throughout TFC worlds firstly makes the terrain ugly to look at, but more importantly, doesn't provide a good basis for building on. TFC demands more and more expansive structures to be built by the player just to progress, whereas vanilla minecraft only requires a house with a few specialised rooms. This means players need to find more areas suitable to their building needs. Typically, this is dependant on what natural resources there are. For example, bloomeries, forges and fire pits are more likely to be built close to mines, and mines are more often going to be built near low-tier metals (this is the result of progression. you need low-tier metals to proceed, so naturally, these mines are dug and used first) Once agriculture comes into effect, players will be looking for vast open plains suitable for farming, rather than having to level acres worth of those ugly hills before they can even begin considering irrigation. Another thing that irks me is the haphazardness of biome appearance. We can still see deserts joined directly to snow biomes and swamps connected to plains. What I'd like to see is biome generation based on 1) What biomes are nearby, and 2) the latitude of the biome. This way, oceans could be more likely to generate near oceans, deserts and snow could be separated by kilometres at least and jungles/marshes could occur in the minecraft equivalent of tropics. Finally: ever since the introduction of the nether, I've yet to see someone use it's 1/8th distance conversion effectively. This is possibly because all the resources a player could need are within overworld walking/rail/boat distances. To make players consider developing the nether, biome size could be increased to span hundreds or thousands of metres. This would mean more exploration is required by the player to find the resources they need, but it would also mean that: travel through the nether becomes a reasonable choice, finding decent-sized flatlands for building would be easier and the world would look more realistic. I've also noticed that as a result of the extreme hillyness of the terrain, everywhere is permeated by 1 - 2 meter deep tiny pools/lakes. This adds another degree of ugliness to the world, as the player sees more land that needs to be levelled in order to build decent-sized structures. Though this is nothing compared to the ugliest feature in minecraft since Notch first touched a keyboard: "Notch Ponds" the little sunken pools of water that appear randomly at any altitude in any biome. Please, for the sake of decent-looking worlds, remove these abominations! To sum up this post: 1) smoother terrain 2) latitude and local biomes determine biome generation 3) larger biomes 4) notch ponds >.<