From the Silverwood I continue west. I pass into a Meadow biome with a lot of cotton plants (Highlands) which I harvest for string. The biome also has several nodes with lots of Aer.

Soon I reach the coast with a small Plains biome - but still no village. South of me is a Tall Pines biome which isn't going to have a village, so I board my boat and head south.

The coast turns here and head east south-east. The Tall Pines biome doesn't go far. Next is a vanilla Forest biome. I come ashore to sleep and spot two nodes in the process.



South of that is a Glacier biome. I change my exploration tactic here - rather than boating, I walk on the ice, taking advantage of my Haste 3 boots. I don't go quite as fast, but I don't have to land at night and I can mark nodes.



Past the Glacier I have to take to my boat again. I soon reach an Estuary. This looks like it might connect to the east coast and home but I choose to stay on the west coast.

The coast turns west again and I pass a small Redwood Forest, a Tundra, and an Autumn Woods.



In the Tundra coast I get attacked by a skeleton when I wake up in the morning. However, he jumps in the water so I'd have a hard time getting drops and I just avoid him.



Next to the Autumn Woods I spot a Stone Beach. In vanilla they happen only next to Extreme Hills but Climate Control will also place them next to very hilly biomes to reduce the ugly steep sand beaches. But Autumn Woods isn't one of those, so I come ashore to investigate whether something's wrong in my beach assignment. The cause turns out to be a very narrow strip of Extreme Hills that ended up right between the Autumn Woods and the ocean. Well, that's fine.

I cross to the next map south. Continuing south I pass some Badlands and then a vanilla Forest. About half way down the map, I'm getting tired of exploration and starting to get a little lazy after exploring something like 10,000 blocks of coastline plus some inland regions. So I decide to end the exploration and head for home. I land and head west, towards home.



I soon come to a Badlands biome. These look really good with the Underground Biomes stone.

The continent is fairly narrow and in less than a thousand blocks I'm on the east side. I have to dig down a bit to get down the side of a cliff. On the coast is another Estuary.



North of that is a small Flying Mountains. Flying Mountains is an extreme fantasy biome. It's even more rugged than Extreme Hills, but it has riverlike areas, lots of waterfalls, and saturated vegetation colors creating a "mountain gorge paradise effect". Like Woodland Mountains, very impractical for hardcore survival, but an unmatched backdrop.



One of the great features of Underground Biomes is that biomes with lots of exposed stone look very different depending on which stones comprise the local underground. Here you can see a shift from the rich yellow Komantite to a light gray stone (I didn't check which one). So instead of *one* type of Flying Mountains biome, I have effectively more like a dozen. Likewise for Extreme Hills and a number of Highlands biomes like Rock Mountains, Badlands, and Poplar HIlls.

Continuing north, towards home, I pass some more snowy zones, and eventually I come to an Estuary again. This looks like it connects to the Estuary on the west coast, and a little exploration confirms it does indeed cross the continent. So in a sense I am going to circumnavigate my home continent because the Estuary effectively splits it into two continents. However, I haven't found any villages, anywhere, so I only got one of my goals. I've circumnavigated an entire continent, searched several Plains and a large desert and - no villages. Where are they?

I'm near the Tropics I explored a while back and on the way home take the opportunity to fill it in. I'm going to disallow rivers in Tropics as this one just came out so messy. However, changing how individual biomes are defined creates what I call "lesser chunk walls": mostly the junction is fine but every now and then you get a wall in a limited area. Climate Control doesn't protect from this kind of chunk wall so I need to finish exploring the biome or I'll get (in this case) rivers terminating in flat walls.



The Tropics creates a great atmosphere. It can get really dark under the canopy, though, and I drop quite a few torches. For some reason I don't have to deal with any spawns, though.



One of the nice aspects of a substantive build is that it makes it easier to find my base. On several occasions I've gotten disoriented approaching my base but not anymore, at least from the sea.

Once home I decide to make a map wall on the second floor of the tower. While taking the maps out, I accidentally leave my last blank map in the Atlas along with another map, and the Atlas wastes my blank map making another. Gotta remember to take the blank maps out first.



And here's the result. I'm experimenting with this world by completely eliminating the largest continents. My last world I started on a massive continent I never completely circumnavigated and in flyaround  test worlds I frequently come across continents sprawling over dozens of maxed maps. Here it seems better.

Next episode: brewing Essentia and smacking some zombies.