Frustrated Player Improved Rivers in Minecraft
Minecraft is set to receive better mountains and caves in the second part of the Caves & Cliffs Update. However, an internet user decided to see if they could change the „somewhat frustrating” river generation system to a more reliable solution.
The first part of Minecraft's big update brought with it a lot of news, but the players are still waiting for the launch of the remaining promised changes from Caves & Cliffs Update. These will include modifications to the world generation, so that we get mountains and caves that feel much more alive. However, some people are hoping for Mojang to fix another element. It is about more "realistic" rivers, such as in the project of user Yelbuzz from Reddit for Minecraft 1.12. The user has made the creation available on GitHub.
Yelbuzz has reprogrammed the terrain generator to make water flow in a more believable way than in the current version of Minecraft. He also thought (and still thinks) about some additions, such as rapid erosion of mountains by rivers and the creation of lakes at their end by rising water levels. However, these are further and much more difficult challenges, and yet the very problem of the bizarre "rivers" (if you can call them that) is not at all that easy to solve.
Yelbuzz's method, although it has gained him the applause of other internet users (including almost 45 thousand likes), is rather not impressive in terms of speed, and we're talking about a very small piece of terrain. Besides, the current version of the program couldn't cope even with an area larger than 300x300 blocks without "killing" the processor. For comparison: on 7th generation consoles, a "small world" was considered to be one with dimensions of 64x64 chunks or 1024 blocks in width and length.
The problem lies in world generation by the aforementioned chunks (16x16 blocks), which makes it impossible to immediately generate a complete "route" of a river (let alone such a trivial issue as "can the river even be in this place"). The solution would be to completely change the system to partially generate all the terrain in advance and decide what the river would look like. Unfortunately, it's easy to guess how this would affect the game's performance.
Of course, it can't be ruled out that Mojang will manage (perhaps with the help of Internet users like Yelbuzz) to find a way around this seemingly impossible problem. For now, we still have to see how other changes to world generation will turn out for Minecraft's world generation. The effects of the creators' work will be known along with the launch of the second part of the Caves & Cliffs update at the end of the year.
