Formations

Formations

The Formations mods add surface and Nether structures to Fear Nightfall: ruined houses, camps, towers, temples, arenas and hanging rock formations. The set is three mods that work together. The base library, formations, supplies the structure types, placement modes and block processors. Formations Overworld and Formations Nether use that library to place 30 structures in Overworld biomes and 21 structures in the Nether. Players meet these structures while exploring, and many of them hold chests, spawners or traps.

Overview

The three mods are:

• Formations (version 1.0.4): the structure framework. It adds two structure types, one pool element type, nine height-placement modes and eight block processors. It adds no blocks, items, mobs or biomes of its own.
• Formations Overworld (version 1.0.5c): 30 surface structures for vanilla Overworld biomes. It requires the base library.
• Formations Nether (version 1.0.5b): 21 structures for the Nether biomes. It also requires the base library.

Apart from the structures, the mods change nothing in the game. They add no recipes, enchantments, effects, advancements or commands in production, and they do not alter vanilla biomes, loot tables, tags or spawn rules. Their only effect on other content is the placement of extra structures.

Content

Formations adds no items, blocks or mobs, so this page has no item tables. The content is structures, and the loot and spawners inside them.

Overworld structures

Formations Overworld adds 30 structures in three placement sets. Most are in the common set of 27, which picks one structure for each location from those whose biomes match. The rare set holds the large temple and the witch tower, and the raft set places rafts on ocean water. The structures are described on three wiki pages:

• Formations: Overworld Natural Formations
• Formations: Overworld Huts and Camps
• Formations: Overworld Temples and Ruins

Notable structures include the bamboo hut, igloo, mushroom hut, campsite, hobbit hole, desert houses, Mesoamerican temple, ice castle, fountain (the only structure built from a jigsaw pool) and well.

The biome list for each structure is set by vanilla biome tags, so any biome carrying the same tag is eligible, including biomes from the pack's other mods. Ice castles only spawn in frozen rivers and oceans, and mushroom huts only spawn in mushroom fields. Rafts only spawn in ocean biomes.

Nether structures

Formations Nether adds 21 structures in three sets. The common set holds 18 structures, including basalt huts, blackstone remnants, large houses, large trees, obsidian and flaming pillars, nether wart fields, quartz spikes, rib cages, sphere cages, parkour challenges and several arena, shrine and pedestal builds. The rare set holds the blackstone castle and the checkerboard temple. The ore shards are hanging structures that spawn from the ceiling of the Nether.

The structures are placed in the Nether biomes. Six of them (blackstone castles, blackstone remnants, ore shards, respawn anchor altars, small lava arenas and sphere cages) can spawn in any Nether biome. The rest are limited to particular biomes:

• Nether Wastes only: flaming pillars, parkour challenges and small lava shrines.
• Nether Wastes and Soul Sand Valley: nether wart fields and quartz spikes.
• Nether Wastes, Soul Sand Valley and Basalt Deltas: checkerboard temples, large pedestals and small fire arenas.
• Nether Wastes, Soul Sand Valley, Crimson Forest and Warped Forest: obsidian pillars and rib cages.
• Basalt Deltas only: basalt huts.
• Crimson Forest and Warped Forest: campsites, large houses, large trees and small pedestals.

See The Nether for the dimension as a whole.

Loot and spawners

Structure chests use the vanilla chest mechanism with mod-specific loot tables. Overworld chests include iron, diamond and emerald gear, enchanted books, potions and music discs, depending on the structure. The rich chests in the temples and towers hold the best of this loot. Structure rooms are also filled by processors, so chiseled bookshelves hold enchanted books and brewing stands hold potions. See Loot and Chests, Enchantments and Potions and Brewing.

Many structures contain spawner blocks. In the Overworld, spawners use skeletons, zombies, spiders, cave spiders, witches, strays, vindicators and slimes, depending on the structure. In the Nether, spawners use piglin brutes, wither skeletons and endermites. Spawners follow the vanilla spawner rules, and the mods add no spawn rules of their own. See Spawner.

Mechanics

Placement

Each structure picks a random position in its chunk and a random rotation, then the placement mode finds a height for it. The main modes are:

• Surface: the structure sits on the top of the terrain. It needs solid ground at its corners and centre.
• On water and on lava: the structure sits on a water or lava surface, which is how the rafts are placed.
• Ceiling: the structure hangs from solid blocks, as the Nether ore shards do.
• Underground (five variants): the structure is placed inside solid stone, on a surface, from a ceiling, buried, or on lava.

If a chunk has no suitable height, the structure simply does not spawn there. There is no fallback position. Placement is random for each world seed, so the same structure type may appear in different places in different worlds.

A formations:pieced structure places a start piece, then uses vanilla jigsaw generation to add connected pieces around it. In Formations Overworld, only the fountain uses this type. The jigsaw rules come from the structure's own pool data.

Block processors

Formations applies processors to each block of a structure as it is placed. The processors are:

• Waterlogging: decides whether waterloggable blocks in the structure are dry, wet, or taken from the world or the structure. The default takes the structure's setting. It also turns off vanilla liquid handling for that structure piece.
• Biome replacements: swaps wood, stone, soil and plant blocks for the type that matches the biome at the structure's origin. In a desert, flowers and grass are removed. Biomes that are not in the mod's table keep the structure's original materials.
• Chiseled bookshelf filling: each empty slot has a 40% chance of receiving an enchanted book.
• Brewing stand filling: each of the three potion slots has a 50% chance of receiving a random potion.
• Block aging: stone brick, cobblestone and sandstone blocks become stairs, slabs, mossy blocks or cracked blocks, and some blocks are removed from the structure. The defaults are 30% mossy, 15% degraded and 5% removed.
• Random plant growth: crops, stems and nether wart are set to a random age.
• Respawn anchor charges: respawn anchors get a random charge count, which is covered under In Fear Nightfall below.
• Random bed colour: each bed gets a random dye colour, based on its position, so the colour is the same each time the structure is generated.

Traps and hazards

Several structures contain traps built from vanilla blocks. These include TNT, lava, tripwire, pressure plates, cobwebs, trapped chests and sticky pistons. See Hazardous Blocks and Plants. The Overworld witch tower's lava trap was removed in version 1.0.5. Some lava cauldrons remain in its decoration.

Changes to vanilla

Formations changes vanilla in only two places.

• A mixin into vanilla structure placement applies only to structures that use a Formations processor. When the processor list has a waterlogging processor, vanilla liquid handling is turned off for that structure piece. Errors from any processor are logged per block, so a failing processor leaves that block unchanged instead of stopping the structure.
• No vanilla recipe, loot table, tag, biome, spawn rule or structure is changed. Vanilla structures keep their own spawns and chests.

Formations Overworld and Formations Nether add only structures. They do not alter biomes or existing vanilla structures.

In Fear Nightfall

The Formations structures are placed by their own structure sets, so their frequency depends on the pack's World Generation settings. The pack's Sparse Structures setup adjusts structure spacing, so the spacing values in the mods' own data are not the values a player sees in game. The pack's structure overlap guard can also skip a smaller Formations structure if it would overlap a larger structure from another set. See Structures and Finding Structures and Biomes.

Their spawners and traps make many of the structures dangerous, especially the Nether arenas and the Overworld temples and towers, so players should expect hostile mobs and TNT or lava traps inside them. See Horror and Spooky Content for the pack's other dangerous content.

Two pack-specific notes apply:

• Respawn anchor charges. The respawn anchor processor has a bug. Its upper bound is excluded, so the charge count never reaches the configured maximum. With the default range the Nether structures get 0 to 3 charges, never 4. A range where the minimum and maximum are equal fails for that block, which is then left unchanged. The Nether structures that use anchors are the respawn anchor altars, small lava arenas and large houses. See Respawn Anchor.
• Bed colour patch. The bed colour processor used one random generator across all chunk threads. Running it with the C2ME chunk optimizer produced exceptions and wrong colours, so the pack changed it to use a fresh random per call with the same seed. The colours are unchanged. See Changes to Vanilla.

Because several structures match vanilla biome tags, the pack's biome table can change where they appear. Modded biomes that carry the same tags are eligible too. See Biomes.