Every seed generates a real piece of the Earth, and the cliffs show it
Terrane is a concept with a finished design document and no code yet. The idea is to fix the fact that stone in Minecraft is just grey filler and ore is a loot table wearing a rock costume. Terrane would answer one question while the world generates: when the game says stone, which stone? Rock layers would tilt, fold, break along faults and get cut through by granite, so a ravine wall reads like a page and following a coal seam sideways actually works.
You would notice it before you understood it. You are digging a hole and the grey stone turns to a band of something else at a level that is not quite level, and thirty blocks away in the creek bed the same band shows up a little lower down. Then you find a cliff where that band stops dead, jumps six blocks, and carries on, and you are looking at a fault without anyone ever having used the word. Most of the rock stays hidden under a few blocks of soil, so the outcrops feel like something you found rather than wallpaper the game hung for you. If you happen to know geology, every canyon in the world is suddenly readable.
Would be server-side only, so friends could join with plain unmodded Minecraft
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
Every point in the world can be asked what rock it is, and the answer is worked out from its position and the world seed alone. Nothing is stored, nothing is simulated, and the same seed gives the same world forever, on any restart. This also means the game can answer questions about places that have never been generated.
Folds, faults, erosion surfaces and intrusions are applied one after another, youngest first. Because of that ordering, the rules of real geology come out on their own rather than being coded as special cases: a granite dike cuts through the layers it intruded, a fault cuts through the dike, and an old erosion surface truncates everything below it.
A fault is a plane through the world, and rock on one side of it is looked up as though it were somewhere else. The slip fades out towards the ends of the fault, and the crushed zone along the break itself fills in as gravel and cobble, sometimes with minerals in it.
Geology varies at a scale of a couple of kilometres through a province layer, described in the document as biomes for rocks: flat platform, tilted homocline, fold-and-thrust belt, rift with horsts and grabens, granite craton with dike swarms, and karst plateau. Each province picks its own regional direction, fold size and fault density. Province boundaries are often themselves major faults.
Two to six blocks of soil cover the bedrock nearly everywhere, with the thickness varying by province. Creek beds and steep faces are left bare. This is deliberate: a world with exposed strata everywhere would read as wallpaper, while scarce exposure reads as discovery.
In a later milestone vanilla ores would stop spawning as random blobs and follow the rock instead: coal as seams inside coal-bearing formations, iron in particular sedimentary bands, copper and gold and redstone in veins hanging off fault intersections and the shoulders of intrusions. The whole feature has an off switch for modpack compatibility.
Cave carving would be biased to run inside limestone units near the old water table, producing cave levels along the bedding rather than random tunnels. Sinkholes pock the surface where limestone lies close underneath, and springs appear where a cave level meets the modern water table.
The last and most ambitious milestone would let terrain shape respond to how tough each rock is: hard beds hold up ridges, weak beds open valleys, faults step the surface, and granite domes go bald. It is the only place Terrane would touch the shape of the land, it ships last, and it turns itself off if another terrain mod is present.
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
A terrane, in real geology, is a fragment of crust with its own separate history that got attached to a continent it did not start out on. Every seed in this mod would generate one of those: a piece of ground with a past that happened in a definite order. Sediment laid down, tilted, folded, broken, worn flat, intruded by molten rock, and worn flat again.
The design's first pillar is that every seed produces an internally consistent geologic history, and that cross-cutting relationships are always honest because they fall out of the maths rather than being drawn by hand. The player who has never heard the word syncline still notices that the world has grain.
No. Terrane is a production document and nothing else. Not one line of code has been written.
No. It was designed to use only vanilla blocks, rearranged. Sandstone, terracotta, calcite, basalt, granite, tuff and gravel would do all the work.
No. It was designed to be entirely server-side, so completely unmodded players could join a Terrane world.
It was designed to compose with biome mods, since it only answers the stone question. The two parts that could conflict, ore placement and terrain shape, both have off switches.
No. The design's stated goal is that someone who has never heard the word syncline still notices the world has grain, and someone who has reads every cliff like a page.
Status: A written design. There is nothing to download yet.
Terrane is a written design with no finished build. There is no file to install. It lives here because the idea is worth reading.
