The 1.7 update coming to the PC version of Minecraft will radically alter the game’s terrain generation, according to developer Mojang in a blog post. According to the developer, there were three things wrong with Minecraft’s terrain generation: the oceans are too large, biome placement is too uneven and/or random, and there’s not enough variation.
The update will bring about the following changes:
* Tweaks to add more islands and checks to avoid huge oceans
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Biomes have been put into four main categories: snow-covered, cold, medium, and dry/warm. Biomes will avoid getting placed next to a biome that is too different to itself (sometimes this still happens, but it’s very rare now and not all over the place)
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We’ve added a whole bunch of new biomes…
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… and most biomes have uncommon/rare variations that you may run into
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We’ve also added a bunch of new terrain features, such as new flowers and trees
To give an idea of how different the land may look, Mojang compared two top-down looks at a 1.6 generated terrain and a 1.7 generated terrain, each the size of 16384×12288 blocks.
There’s no set release date for the 1.7 update, and it’s unknown as of now whether the patch will be included for the Xbox Live Arcade version.
