Voronoi Biomes Patch

Place biomes to match their Voronoi diagram

This is a patch for minetest that allows creating worlds with biomes arranged in the standard Voronoi pattern. Heat (or temperature) on the x-axis and humidity on the z-axis.

Default Voronoi world.

Ethereal Voronoi world (elev. approx. 15)

NEW: Now includes option to tile voronoi patterns indefinitely.

This is a proof of concept that is intended for people who are experienced compiling minetest themselves.

Cautions

• Once this patch is applied, there is no way to set it back to normal functionality without reverting the patch and recompiling.
• Therefore, make this change to a separate copy of minetest, and use the RUN_IN_PLACE option to keep this version's files completely separate from your regular minetest version.

Compile minetest with this patch

• Download minetest source code to new directory and compile regularly. I used commit dde0628976… from Oct 5, 2019.
• Patch src/mapgen/mg_biome.cpp with included patch file, and recompile. In Linux you can use something like:

  patch mg_biome.cpp /path/to/voronoi_biomes.patch

Source code options

• By default the patch creates Voronoi maps with sides of 500 nodes.
• It maps x=-250 to heat=0 and x=+250 to heat=100. The corresponding values for humidity are mapped from z=-250 to z=+250.
• NEW: I've added an option to repeatedly tile the voronoi pattern.
• UPDATED: This can be changed by updating the following value in the patched version of mg_biome.cpp before recompiling:

 // Until this can be read in from config file, has to be set manually.
 //  0 = default biome distribution--not voronoi.
 // +n = single voronoi pattern centered at (0,0) with sides of 'n'
 // -n = tiled voronoi pattern centered at (0,0) with sides of '+n'

 int voronoi_biomes = 500;

Further customizations can be done in minetest.conf:

• Biomes are still blended, but this can be disabled or reduced by changing the values of mg_biome_np_heat_blend and mg_biome_np_humidity_blend.
• To get a small world like shown in the screenshot above, I set mapgen_limit = 300.

It's more difficult when the biomes change with elevation.

• Multiple runs can be done with different base levels—carpathian and flat mapgens have easy options to do this.
• Otherwise, use different mapgens and seeds to find what works. I've used amidst-minetest, but keep in mind that the biomes that program shows will be completely overridden.
• NEW: Tiled voronoi option has been added, which might help this case—it gives multiple versions of each biome per world.

License of source code: LGPL-2.1

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

License of media (images): CC-BY-SA-4.0

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