As a West Virginian, I was thrilled when Mojang announced that Mountains had won the Minecon Live 2019 biome vote! When Jeb said that mountains would be "more majestic," I jumped with joy. The Extreme Hills biomes as they exist now have been unremarkable, uninspired and in serious need of improvement since they day they debuted with Beta 1.8. Extreme Hills and its variants, however, are not the only biomes that suffer from repetition and general flatness.

Like many other long-time Minecrafters, I often reminisce about the pre-Beta 1.8 terrain and its endless supply of surprises in the form of exciting, towering mountains in nearly any biome. Reading through discussions about the shortfalls of current default terrain generation, there seems to be much agreement that the current terrain is both unexciting and repetitive. You've seen one forest and you've seen them all, and most of the hills that generate in any biome are barely taller than a sizable house (and often not much wider than a house either). Despite having a height limit of 256, most terrain doesn't break 100, and it almost never breaks 128.

What Minecraft's terrain needs is more variety in elevation and more interesting hills in many of its biomes. This seems like it would be a huge deal to implement, right?

I was thinking about this and realized that the best solution lies in variables that already exist in Minecraft's generation engine, variables that Mojang once gave us access to, then, frustratingly, took away our access to in 1.13. Yes, I'm talking about Custom Terrain - and even though we no longer have access to them, those variables still control the terrain generation engine behind-the-scenes.

While custom terrain was still a feature, I was browsing the internet for settings that would enhance and enliven the terrain, and I found a few great presets. Unfortunately, I do not still have the links to the sites where I found presets, but I do still have one of the presets on my computer, so I decided to go into 1.12.2 and load up a new world with the preset. I very quickly realized that it is tons better than Minecraft's current default terrain.

The terrain that this preset generates has the kind of excitement that has been missing from default this whole time - hills are now actually hills, and mountains are actually mountains! Though the biomes retain their character, they now have an extra dimension that really brings them to life. The higher, more dramatic hills add variety to the biomes and make them more interesting to discover and explore.

Here is what Minecraft's default generation variables look like:



Here are the variables that I found (shoutout to the unknown person who originally came up with these):



Here are some previews of what the biomes look like with these variables. Some of them look fairly normal, others are drastically different, and others are lightly improved with more elevation changes and rolling hills.

Forest




Flower Forest




Birch Forest




Taiga




Mega Taiga




Extreme Hills




Dark Forest




Plains




Swamp



Savannah




Desert



Mesa



Ocean Island



Tundra



As you can see in the images, the hills and mountains are far more interesting in this preset than in the default generation.

If I were able to advise Mojang on how to improve their terrain for all biomes, not just extreme hills, I would advise that they modify the variables in the generator to match the variables in this preset. That's all. It would be a remarkably simple fix to make a remarkably huge improvement to the game.