Biomes

Biomes are the named regions of terrain that the world generator assigns to each location in Fear Nightfall. A biome sets the surface blocks, plants, weather, sounds, colours and the mobs that spawn there, so it decides what a player meets in any given area. The pack draws its biomes from several mods, most of them worldgen mods: Terralith (about 95 biomes), Regions Unexplored, Biomes O' Plenty and the vanilla set, with smaller additions from Hexerei, YUNG's Cave Biomes and Sleepy Hollows. Biomes matter at night because the pack's horror content and its most hostile terrain are concentrated in a group of biomes that the pack weights more heavily than the rest.

Fear Nightfall does not use each mod's own biome placement. A custom biome source decides which biome occupies each climate cell, so every mod's biomes share one table, and the same table is generated on every machine.

Where the biomes come from

Each mod contributes a different kind of biome:

• Vanilla biomes keep their names and cover about 15% of land.
• Terralith contributes the largest number of distinct biomes, from alpine peaks and canyons to the underground Infested Caves and Frostfire Caves. It covers about 31% of land.
• Regions Unexplored adds forests, taigas, fens and badlands, and it replaces several vanilla biome rules. It covers about 28% of land.
• Biomes O' Plenty adds 69 biomes, including bogs, bayous, dead forests and fungal jungles. It covers about 25% of land.
• Hexerei adds Willow Swamp, and the Sleepy Hollows mod adds Sleepy Hollows.
• YUNG's Cave Biomes adds the underground Frosted Caves and Lost Caves.

The surface shares above were measured on generated terrain. They are close to the targets the table was tuned to, which are set by each mod's share of the biome count.

Biome distribution

Without changes, Biomes O' Plenty covered more than half of the land, while Terralith covered about 5%, even though the two mods have similar numbers of biomes. The mods' own region weights, injectors and presets could not balance this through config files, so Fear Nightfall replaces the biome source with a custom one, the fnfbiomes table.

The table keeps the climate noise (temperature, humidity, continentalness, erosion, depth and weirdness) untouched, so the shape of the terrain and the layout of the climate zones match an unmodified world. In each climate cell, every biome whose original mod allows it there becomes eligible, and the eligible biomes share the cell by weight. Biomes of the same type are placed next to each other, so forests border forests and swamps border swamps. The table covers vanilla, Terralith, Biomes O' Plenty, Regions Unexplored (including its replacement rules), Hexerei, YUNG's caves and Sleepy Hollows. Oceans, rivers, beaches and caves use the same table.

Each point on the surface has one biome. The game picks among the biomes valid for that spot, so biomes from different mods do not overlap.

Horror biomes

The pack's theme is reflected in the biome weights. Horror biomes made up 4.5% of land before the changes and make up 11.9% now. Horror caves rose from 17–22% of the cave layer to about 30%, and lush caves fell from 12–15% to 4–5%, because lush caves no longer dominate the underground.

The following biomes have a 6× weight:

• Dead Forest
• Ominous Woods
• Spider Nest
• Blackwood Taiga
• Ashen Woodland
• Ashen Savanna
• Sleepy Hollows
• Willow Swamp
• Bayou
• Infested Caves and Frostfire Caves
• Dark Forest and Deep Dark, from vanilla (Dark Forest and Deep Dark)

Horror biomes concentrate in temperate-to-cool, humid forests, taigas and swamps, where about a quarter of the land is horror. Deserts, jungles and high peaks stay mostly normal.

Sleepy Hollows has its own hazard. The mod's sanity meter drains the player while they stay in the biome, as described on Sanity. For the horror structures that these biomes hold, see Horror and Spooky Content.

Structures and biomes

Many structures only spawn in biomes that match their structure set. In the pack, 515 structures that had been limited to vanilla biomes, which cover about 15% of land, can now also spawn in the matching modded biomes. The matching is by shared climate and biome type. The Nether and End use hand-picked matches. Only mushroom-island structures stay limited to vanilla biomes.

Several structure families are shared between mods, so the game chooses among them by biome. The village set includes vanilla, Overhauled Villages, Towns and Towers (see Towns and Towers Villages), Villages&Pillages and Terralith's fortified villages, each weighted equally. The witch hut set includes vanilla, the YUNG's witch huts, Hexerei Witch Hut, Terralith and the mangrove witch hut from Dungeons and Taverns. Pillager outposts use a similar shared set. The Structures page covers the full list.

The horror structure group, which includes Graveyards, Covens and the witch huts, is placed about 30% closer together than the default spacing, and where a structure shares a set with others it gets 6× weight.

Caves and underground biomes

The underground biome layer uses the same table. Infested Caves, Frostfire Caves and Spider Nest also spread into neighbouring cave areas. Lush caves were reduced to a third of their weight, so the other cave biomes can share their wide humid range. The underground biomes of YUNG's Cave Biomes (Frosted Caves and Lost Caves) follow the same rules.

Finding biomes

Biomes can be found with Nature's Compass, a biome finder whose recipe is changed in the pack to use diamonds in the corners instead of saplings. The /locate biome command can take a long time for rare biomes. On the server, the watchdog limit is disabled (max-tick-time=-1) because a search for a rare biome exceeded the 60-second limit and stopped the server. The same search now takes about 14 seconds. See Multiplayer and Server Setup for the setting. The Finding Structures and Biomes page covers the other ways to find places.

Hazards in biomes

Some biomes contain blocks that hurt or set fire to the player, and some of their plants have effects of their own. These are covered on Hazardous Blocks and Plants and on each biome's page, such as Biomes O' Plenty and Bog.

Full list